Monday, June 14, 2010

The VA forray

I've made first attempt at a Virtual Assistant. There are so many articles out there that I can't even begin to list them all (but American Express has a nice article on "9 Tips for Working With a Virtual Assistant").
I've ended up working with oDesk for this particular project. oDesk allows you to post a job and then have thousands of VAs apply for the task. My task was to go through a list of 75 websites, collecting links and data from each. Simple enough. Within one hour I had 9 responses, ranging from $0.89/hour all the way to a whipping $5.65/hour. Not too bad.
Ultimately I'm going to try someone from the Phillipines. She has been very nice, has blessed me many times, and even thinks I have a great name because it's in the Bible. Now that's salesmanship - butter me up and bless my eternal soul.
On the plus side, my VA has already started, even though oDesk hasn't "authorized" my account (they have a crazy credit card authorization process that must be a response to some crazy Nigerian spam ring). Good to see the VA world knows that execution matters.
We'll see what happens tomorrow. In the mean time, I'm going to watch Fletch.

2 comments:

nogoyo said...

Ended up going with someone at $3.33/hour. Results pending.

nogoyo said...

VC finished the project in 4 hours. Now I'm verifying the results. So far so good...