Along this SEO journey you might find the need to outsource certain tasks or even hire a virtual assistant. After personally outsourcing a range of SEO related work over the years I’m going to share my process so you can do likewise. Before we get started though, you need to do a through analysis of the tasks that need to be outsourced and have a clear idea of exactly what you need before moving forward.
You might have some tasks that you need help with but aren’t quite ready to outsource yet. Let’s figure it out by asking these two questions:
The Crucial Outsourcing Questions
Are you certain there is no way to automate the job?
Challenge your mind, damn near anything can be automated. Before you jump to the outsourcing route be 100% sure that you can’t automate this task using something like ubot studio or winautomation. If you’re not advanced enough to create something like that then maybe you should be focused on outsourcing the creation of a bot, not hiring someone. This could be the most valuable takeaway from this entire guide.
Is the job easily replicable and ongoing?
You might have a bunch of SEO work going on right now but do you have a replicable process that will require maintaining an employee? It might sound like business 101 but you need a clear plan for what this assistant is going to execute and actually fill up 20+ hours per week.
Still good? Alright well let’s continue then, there are a few big freelancing networks to choose from which I’ve used:
- Elance
- Odesk
I’ve used Elance for the most part, seemed to run into more spam on odesk. Easy enough to use, only takes a few minutes to get in there and setup a profile.
The Job Listing
Now let’s make our first job listing, simple enough but there are some crucial components to include.
For one, since we’re SEOs let’s make sure we give it a good title that will help the visibility within Elance search for our potential candidates searching for a job.
Bad: Looking for VA to Help Me Spam Links
Good: Hiring Virtual Assistant for WordPress and SEO Work
Get the picture? Make a good title so people will find it, same with the actual job description.
Now the actual job, the key is to do a small test job first. So your job listing is for hiring a virtual assistant but you can make the amount of hours fixed as a trial period of sorts and tell them that in the description.
Then to increase your odds of landing a keeper hire more than one applicant and throw the same job at each of them. This is what I’ve done every single time to find someone good, I hire 2 to 3 people and start working with them, the strongest performer will be revealed very quickly.
My next tip will help you further filter out the shitty job applicants, include something at then end of your description that says:
In your application please explain why you’re a good fit for this specific job, we won’t accept cookie cutter applications.
This way you can avoid most of the assholes who just mass apply for jobs with some cookie cutter bullshit and don’t actually read your description.
Now that you have a good job listing put together the final element is choosing a good geographic area to target. Now this depends on the specific job you’re trying to accomplish but generally for SEO related stuff the Philippines is great. Surely you’ve heard SEOs says this before but why?
Well there are several reasons, the first is the wage is incredibly low there compared to what we make in the U.S. It’s crazy, like doctors make a couple hundred bucks a month, seriously no bullshit. They also have a very high English literacy rate which is also a big plus.
Now depending on what your job is, you’re going to want to do your research to find which areas are the best fit. For dirt cheap SEO work, it doesn’t get much better than the Philippines. You’ve got India but my experience has never been good there with virtual assistants. I’ve still outsourced plenty of tasks there, for example I recently hired an Indian shop that helps me edit a bunch of WordPress themes and they did an awesome job.
What about content writing?
Not something I outsource like this, finding good writers is a pain in the ass and managing them is just as bad. Writers get lazy, content quality slides, and you’re wondering why you ever hassled with it in the first place. If you’re scaling unique content then I’d work with one of those mills or services, quality will be about the same without the management nightmare. Don’t be thinking you’re going to find the next Hemingway in the Philippines for $100 a week, let’s be realistic here.
To Recap:
-Use a small test job
-Make them reference something from the job description content
-Target the right geographic area
Training, Management, and Productivity
After you select some candidates the work doesn’t stop there of course, now you’re going to need to get them going on the test job. There are a couple tools that will help you create some training materials. The first clutch mention goes to Jing the screen capture tool. This is huge for taking on the spot screenshots with arrows and boxes, you can’t be busting out paint 20 times a day folks. For longer videos I use Camtasia which gets the job done and is fairly easy to use. Those tools for video then I use Microsoft word to create PDFs.
The beauty of the training you’re creating is you’ll just dump it on each candidate and see how they handle it. This will reveal damn near everything and you’ll know who’s your winner. Be sure you have all this training ready beforehand especially the actual training for the job. I know you want to dive in and start hiring people today but get your ducks in a row first.
Communication is HUGE!
Now the glue that is going to hold all this together is good communication. If your VA doesn’t ask questions then they are going to screw things up which could have easily been avoided.
Some ways to foster good communication:
-Stress the importance of communication and how you’ll always be available to them for questions.
-Don’t be a dick, seriously. Especially in the Philippines you can’t be too aggressive with people, it’s a different culture so act accordingly.
-Create a daily communication requirement recapping work either through Evernote or email.
Dropbox is also huge for running something like this, you can have instructions ready for your VA at a specific time and have them return the completed work in the same folder. This has always been one of my primary tools, the key again is communication so they know how everything should be organized and what will be ready at what times.
You’ll be making lots of corrections in the beginning so you need to have patience to get the results you’re after. Many times I’ve gotten to the point of frustration with training someone where I wanted to punch the screen and tell them to fuck off, seriously. But I pushed through and wound up getting the gem of a VA I needed.
Primary Tools:
- Jing
- Camtasia
- Evernote
- Dropbox
- Trello
- Skype
Surely I’m leaving some things out but these are my golden nuggets for hiring a beast. My biggest piece of advice for someone reading this is to make sure you work through those crucial outsourcing questions before moving forward. Hiring a virtual assistant is no magic solution and can open an entire new can of worms and headaches under the wrong circumstances. But they can also enable you to massively scale at a low cost if you’re utilizing them correctly. Analyze every aspect of what you’re doing, isolate the bottlenecks, automate first, outsource second.
Now that I’ve gone through my process I’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment with your experience working with VAs and outsourcing SEO tasks. Have a horror story? A life saving tip? I want to hear about it.
Its always pain to find good VA. Here are some of my points.
— You can get things done two way. Either hourly or through per task basis. If you need to get it done hourly, ask them to track time with some time tracker apps. If you work outside odesk, there are some decent time tracker apps such as TalkWalker.
— I never liked working with freelancer.com. Lots of spam and noise.
— 100% agree with the point that “If they don’t ask questions, you’re going to screw you” If they ask questions, they’re trying to understand and adapt, which is good sign but not always true.
— Some of them are looking for long term clients. Once you keep sending work, they’re more likely to listen you carefully and pay attention to details.
— There are dozens of ways to filter them. Through location, through various test results. (For instance if you’re looking for a program, look if programmer has passed any relevant examples with good results.)
— Avoid agencies for some tasks. Especially for content writing. They sucks.
Thanks for the tips Manish!
How very timely, just posted on odesk to find a virtual assitend to write blog comments for me. Spot on Broth Jacob
As a Filipino, I approve this! :D
But seriously though, you pretty hit the mark.
Constant communication is the key in maintaining a healthy relationship with your VA.
(coming from a former VA)
One thing I could add is that, please believe your VA when they are telling you that they are having internet problems. (We have one of the slowest internet speeds in the world.)
And most of the times, our connection is not stable (don’t ask me why)
Anyway, thanks for this awesome article Jacob! Cheers!
Great point, and that’s not to mention your weather! I totally agree, you need to be understanding with occasinal internet outages when working with VAs in the Philippines always. Thanks for the comment Ray, much appreciated.
Speaking of weather, and as of this writing, there is a typhoon headed towards the Philippines (Sure hope it weakens) so expect internet outages for your VA’s.
Out of curiosity, how many VA’s do you manage Jacob?
Currently I don’t have a dedicated assistant. I’ve nearly automated everything I once was using them for, but everyone’s needs are different. And I could have a project popup that I needed their help again.
You’re the man, bro.
Haha, thanks dude, that’s how you get a link approved right there. Watch and learn lol.
Hilarious. You are really the man though.
Agreed re automation, as you save more in the long run.
I recommend a guy over at BHW called ZennoBlaster, his profile is here:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/739782-zennoblaster.html
Tip: it’s easier if you purchase the Zennoposter software, and he’ll knock up a template (another name for bot), that will run effortlessly
Once again Jacob you wrote an excellent guide that is not just for blackhats. :)
I have outsourced a number of jobs and was surprised at some of the great quality work that I received.
I hired a programmer on E-Lance to create a tool for me. Not only did he create the tool for a reasonable fee, but per my request he commented it heavily so that I could understand how he programmed it and make changes if I needed to.
I have actually had good success with hiring an agency in India….not for spamming mind you…but for some data entry type of tasks. Here are some things that worked for me:
-For mundane data entry jobs, in my job description I asked potential candidates to complete 5 rows of a task and submit it to me in their proposal. That way I can make sure that they understand what I am asking them to do.
-Take note of applicant’s feedback. If they have less than 100% ratings then there could be an issue.
-I have found that many applicants will promise to have a job done in 24 hours that is not possible to complete in 24 hours. They’re just trying to get hired and hoping that you’ll be understanding when it takes them 3 days to complete the task.
Thanks for the great post!
Hey Marie, thanks for dropping in. Those are some great tips as well, yeah it’s refreshing when you find someone great and the relationship is mutually beneficial. I definitely look closely at the feedback they have received and make sure they are all REAL reviews and get a feel for their history. It’s always safer to go with someone with a proven track record, but I have had success hiring someone as their first job, they had a killer proposal though. Another thing is my test job I’d shoot for a really low cost, like $25-$50 since we’re hiring multiple candidates to test.
There are some good people out there, there is hope lol.
Hi Jacob
Nice post there.
How did you deal with taxes and employment laws when you had VA-s?
Did you ever worry about such legal nonsense?
I’m learning accounting and it’s a massive brainwashing that we go through with the training. It makes me always think about legalities, taxes and other non-important stuff. I’ve learned in the past 2 months that making money should be the priority and leaving the worrying to the nay-sayers is a good choice.
Or can you just plainly ignore taxes and laws when outsourcing to Asia and write these expenses off in your accounts as ‘whatever’?
Well I’m not a pro there by any means, it’s to my understanding that any off-shore labor like this is considered “contract labor” since the person is *not filing a US w2. I don’t think it’s much more complicated then that, also the freelancer networks help you handle this stuff with local employees.
Nice Article
Hi Jacob,
Great post and always quality as I’m an avide reader.
Quick question. Do you think tasks with The Best Spinner can be outsourced? That’s one of my most hated tasks and it takes up alot of time, but I’m worried that a non native english speaker will not return the quality that I would (Australian).
What’s your thoughts?
Cheers mate
Alex
I used to outsource this a ton, it can be done yes, it’s extremely hard though. The processes I described are that much more important since you’ll need good training and likely need to hire multiple people to find someone good. I’ll just say this though, the real blackhats aren’t manually spinning anything, ever. So there are ways around this and if you get a poor spin the output could be worse than just using a standard Kontent Machine output.
care to elaborate on ‘real blackhats arent manually spinning anything’?
are you referring to just kontent machine or something else?
Referring to beast mode.
Automation all the way. Teach me your automation ways.
Ya odesk is pretty solid. You really need to be as clear and as detailed as you possibly can though. Especially if your outsourcing parts of a dev project. If shit goes bad with your VA they say its best to communicate as much as you can via the odesk messenger, that way if you’ve gotta dispute its a little easier to prove where/how things went wrong.
Good write up Jacob, just found your blog a few weeks back. good shit
Get that link juiceeeeeeeee
I’ve also had much better with workers in the Philippines than…well, other places. It never occurred to me to have one just do ongoing work but maybe I’ll do it that way moving forward. For the writing I’ve been using textbroker a bunch. Have you tried them? There are always fresh, hungry writers there. Thank you for the heads up on the automation tools. This should help cut my workload further. You’re the man!
Nice article. My one way of avoiding cookie cutter applications is to write a phrase at the end of the job description that the freelancer must repeat in their application. Something like “To ensure you have read and understood this job description please use the phrase “freeelancer4u” in your application”
Yup this is definitely a good way to filter some bullshit out quick and easy. I like taking it a step further and making them actually answer some sort of question or something that actually requires thought vs just copying and pasting.
I’ve got a full time VA now as part of my team, invaluable asset. Hes doing more than what we pay people three times the rate he’s working at.
As you mention perseverance is key he vanished for a few months and the initial software project we took him on for through elance failed epicly. Then a few months later gave him some tedious tasks and he was really quick. Then used him for the odd job here and there. He kept asking for constant hours / permanent work but his rate was too high so we dismissed it. Then I realised we were getting him to do totally noob stuff when he was studying Software engineering. Crushed him down on his rate from $9 to $4.70 he now works 160 hours a month exclusively for us.
The amount he’s learnt is shocking and he keeps getting faster now he knows how to use our platform properly. some of the tasks hes done for us in weeks would have taken us over 4 months to complete. Skype is really useful for communicating as you can have groups, screen sharing, file sharing etc we also use teamviewer occasionally.
It sometimes can get really frustrating but patience really pays off.
Yup, it’s not magic but like you said with perseverance you can get the result you’re after. The more people you hire though the easier it becomes going through the process, getting started is always rough.
Jacob this is great! I’ve failed many times trying to hire a virtual assistant and it was always my fault for poor planning.
(Trying to outsource tasks I hadn’t described in meticulous detail and without expectations how long it would take) I now work with someone from Elance (Indian girl) I pay $1.00 more per hour than she asked for and the work is usually 80% quality but working on getting it to 100%.
I am super curious how you use ubot studio or winautomation :D :D.
Well mainly advanced methods of content generation have helped me a lot, some simple php scripts I have, creating resources for spam I can reuse over and over. Which also requires posting up heavily in one niche. Like titles and keywords for example, you can create those once and reuse them for other campaigns, stuff like that really important. I own both ubot and winauto, have almost made some shit happen with em but I’m not smart enough.
Ya I need to learn all that, if you can do superman pushups you can figure out ubot and winauto. :D
I was looking for some tips about hiring a virtual Assistant and came across your article. Really informative; I can really use lots of useful advice mentioned here. Thanks.
BIG POST!
So big in fact, we had to include it in our Definitive Guide to Filipino Virtual Assistants:
“Thanks for this awesome resource Jacob and keep hustling!
I am off to share this with my closest 9k Twitter followers ;)”
Thanks
Tom
So you just post a bunch of links then email everyone and tweet about it? That work out pretty well for you?
I found this pretty funny coming from a spammer:
“This way you can avoid most of the assholes who just mass apply for jobs with some cookie cutter bullshit and don’t actually read your description.”
In all sincerity, I love your blog.
Takes one to know one, that is kinda funny tho.
Love this! I think preparation and perseverance are the two most important takeaways. I’m good at preparation, patience and perseverance… not so much.
It’s the first time I came across your site and will be goign through it a bit. Would love to read more about how to properly outsource SEO work to VA’s. For example, per type of task and what to look out for per type of task. I think many people would be into this. Heck, you could even create templates and checklists.
Getting carried away here:-)