Trained Virtual Assistant vs. Outsourcing to Contractors (1 by 1)

I outsource most of my linkbuilding & web development here and there, to different contractors/BST sellers/Gigs,
because I didnt have much sites to work with and hiring a VA wouldnt be wise for me (i dont know if I would have enough work for him)

Today, I realize that I have around 5 sites that are fully developed and reviewing my expense/cash flow.
I quickly realize that outsourcing 1by1 seems to 'add up' and was wondering if hiring a full-time VA will be a wiser option.
I went thru the BST section and came across a thread where I can hire a VA for $250 per month.

Just curious if anyone here is going thru / went thru the same situation I am in right now.

Should I continue outsourcing to different contractors/sellers or should I hire a full-time VA; building my team from there.

Any inputs will be appreciated.

If you have enough income, hire 1 fulltime VA for yourself from the Phillipines and train them, make them loyal to you. There are alot of job sites that you can look for.

If I were you, I'd try to look for female VA's. Why? They work 50% much harder. I've been through ALOT of employees, males do not last. My staff is 80% female.

How do you manage your VA? How many sites you give them to work on each time etc.
Please advise. Thanks

They are required to be responsive on Skype during all working hours. + we use Gdocs + a project management system where they can see their tasks for the day.

How many sites you give them to work on each team etc.
-As much as I want / can handle. But what do YOU want.

Why do you want to hire a VA - for what tasks?

supergoed said:

They are required to be responsive on Skype during all working hours. + we use Gdocs + a project management system where they can see their tasks for the day.

How many sites you give them to work on each team etc.
-As much as I want / can handle. But what do YOU want.

Why do you want to hire a VA - for what tasks?

Click to expand...

Most for SEO purposes.
Article Writing / Spinning / SeNuke / Scrapebox etc. etc.
Pretty much managing a few sites at once (and pretty much what I am outsourcing to other contractors right now)

How much do you spend per month outsourcing it to other contractors? Less or more then $250?

If you want 1 VA to be able to do all SEO tasks well - then the chance is small that you can find a good one for $250. That's why I divide all tasks up.

I've got a team of great article writers (90% of people who applies for this position doesn't get through the selection process)
One team that specializes in manual SEO tasks - (web 2.0 postings - video creation etc etc etc)
One team that controls all programs (SENuke / SB / UD etc etc)

Hiring a VA for $250 a month from another company sounds good, but it's really not. My ex-employee (had a brother, they were running a big VA company themselves, but he left due drama, and came working for me (long story) - last time I checked, his brother had 100+ VA's. What they do is this: Tell you that the VA you hired from them for $250 per month, only works for YOU. But in fact, 1 VA got 2 clients. That's how they make profit. But I had to fire this guy, I send 2 of my employees to Cebu - to scout for offices. Instead they went on a luxury trip, taking unnecesary taxi rides + went to STARBUCKS + went dining in an expensive cafe. I fired them the next day when I found out.

supergoed said:

How much do you spend per month outsourcing it to other contractors? Less or more then $250?

If you want 1 VA to be able to do all SEO tasks well - then the chance is small that you can find a good one for $250. That's why I divide all tasks up.

I've got a team of great article writers (90% of people who applies for this position doesn't get through the selection process)
One team that specializes in manual SEO tasks - (web 2.0 postings - video creation etc etc etc)
One team that controls all programs (SENuke / SB / UD etc etc)

Hiring a VA for $250 a month from another company sounds good, but it's really not. My ex-employee (had a brother, they were running a big VA company themselves, but he left due drama, and came working for me (long story) - last time I checked, his brother had 100+ VA's. What they do is this: Tell you that the VA you hired from them for $250 per month, only works for YOU. But in fact, 1 VA got 2 clients. That's how they make profit. But I had to fire this guy, I send 2 of my employees to Cebu - to scout for offices. Instead they went on a luxury trip, taking unnecesary taxi rides + went to STARBUCKS + went dining in an expensive cafe. I fired them the next day when I found out.

Click to expand...

I didnt think that far or that big (sending employee/VA to another country for scouting )
But I see what you mean. There is no way to see what the full-time VA is doing, even tho most agency claims you will get 9 hours (m-f) from them.

I Will recommend you hire a va from firstpageseo in the best section.

Supergoed: That did not go that "supergoed", did it ;P

Is there any VA company you DO recommend?

I am still interested in hearing more inputs. Thanks in advance.

hiring a VA would be great idea because as you grow ,you will not have time to handle all things.Its better divide things and set some one to take control of it.

garrido said:

I Will recommend you hire a va from firstpageseo in the best section.

Click to expand...

I had very bad experience with that company.
I have changed around 10 VA's and i just could not believe that they can not understand how to make web 2.0 with senuke.

marrrko said:

I had very bad experience with that company.
I have changed around 10 VA's and i just could not believe that they can not understand how to make web 2.0 with senuke.

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I thought they have different VA that specialize in different tasks;

VA that specialized in web development;
VA that specailzied in using softwares etc.?

Isnt that the case? Would love to hear more about this. Thanks again. Appreciated.

Automation beats outsourcing every time.
The only thing I've found someone competent enough to do was manual blog commenting...

Manually creating web 2.0s is a crapfest... it'd be about 50 times slower and 10 times as expensive as automating the task.
Generally a single VA can do around 50-100 web 2.0s (if you give them the spun articles) each day.
My bots can do around 5000 or so without breaking a sweat.

Of course, you need someone whose written english is awesome to use them to manually submit Guestposts etc... Good luck finding them for $250/mth and good luck getting your money's worth. Best situation is to use them for article writing, generate a ton of unique content, and then send them to manually comment on generated lists (ensure they're very clean, or you will have them wasting a ton of time)
Then use the unique content to send to guest posts as you get them.

You shouldn't even be using SEnuke or any of that garbage anymore... move on. SB takes 10 minutes maximum per day to set up.

Blaatje said:

Supergoed: That did not go that "supergoed", did it ;P

Is there any VA company you DO recommend?

Click to expand...

Hmmm...that went "superslecht"

Let's say you hire a VA from a company for $250 = 10.8k Phillipine pesos.

I've been through alot of job interviews to fill in the SEO positions. The average salary for 1 "good" All-in-one SEO + Article writer is 15-17k PHP. If you pay them lower than that, they either leave you within 1 week (untill they found a higher paying job) or they don't accept the job offer at all - the problem is, alot of them know what they are worth. My employees say that VA companies are notorious in the Phillip. about low pays + "exploiting" fellow countrymen. (I don't completely agree)

A very BADLY payed SEO'er get's 9k ($208) per month. Earning 9k in the Philip. is pretty low for a fulltime job, I asked my employees about this, but sadly, most VA's don't even get paid that amount - often even lower.

$250-$208 = $42 profit per month - per VA (best case scenario, think about the / delays / other costs /power outages and other drama that happens)

If a non-Philipino is running a VA business - then you can bet that the VA you hired for $250 - work for 2 clients (at least) that means you actually pay $500 per month. Plus, you'd get a VA that only gets paid 9k. That says alot about the VA.


And if a Philipino is running a VA business - then you can still bet that your VA works for multiple clients, or if the owner is honest (5% chance for that price), then the VA works only for you. ($48 profit per VA per month is "good" (in my eyes) for a someone from the Phillip. But DON'T COUNT ON IT. With money, comes greed.) Plus, you'd still get a bad+slowpoke SEO'er (Someone that I wouldn't let working for me, ever.)

So you were asking if I recommend a VA company - No, that means that i'd try to f* you over, wasting your money. But for pure SEO tasks, I recommend you to buy SEO packages, Cash202's service for example. Better value for money. (not trying to promote, just my honest opinion)

But I do recommend it if you are one of these types of persons & you have the money.
-I don't got time, but I do have money, so doesn't matter for me really, let's roll.
-Hello VA, I got 5 sites - take care of the linkbuilding okay? I will come check your reports once in a few days.
-Hello VA, you are pretty slow, I can do it much faster and better myself but you are doing a great job! I got money to blow!
-Hello VA, it frustrates me that you still messed up, even if I explained you the instructions more than once. But $250 for a fulltime VA is a "bargain", because I just don't know better.

Important.
-when you are not around to check on them - they WILL "slack" (or working for other clients). You should be able to notice immediately, little gets done. Something fishy is going on or you've got appointed mr. slowpoke VA.
-set deadlines - MAKE A SCHEDULE 3-7 days in advance with exact tasks. (If my employees don't get their tasks done, I let them do overtime without pay. Pretty strict but it's neccesary, believe me. Or don't, find out yourself instead.)


You have no idea what kind of person I can get working for me by scouting online for +$25 of the price you pay for a VA monthy.
It takes some work, but it's worth every single minute I spend on job recruiting/searching. But even if you'd find a good person for a good price, you'd have to be able to motivate them. Give them a reason to work hard.

There are alot of talents walking around, waiting to be recruited (by myself, hopefully).

-Expertpeon

Your UbCub thread was awesome thanks for that one. I guess you've made yourself a database of highly readable spun paragraphs already, yes?

supergoed said:

-Expertpeon

Your UbCub thread was awesome thanks for that one. I guess you've made yourself a database of highly readable spun paragraphs already, yes?

Click to expand...

For the niches I'm in now, yes basically. I have more or less "infinite" content... though if you believe google is doing N-gram analysis on your tier 2s then it's probably not sufficient enough even then. However, that's far too computationally heavy so I tend to keep tier 1s with their own separate master article and tier 2s use 2 different massive ones... have only seen positive results so far post penguin with this new method.

I can see the value in white hat VA building though, depending on what it is.

After 1 year on "contracting" we began to hire full-time workers.
But we are still outsourcing a lot of work.

Nice post, im looking for a VA aswell, maybe 2 and I am willing to pay 300-400 a month, but where is a good palce to look? odesk, freelancer, has anyone found ones from here?

I tried contacting pageoneseo from here but he's hardly on skype and hasnt sent me any info as he said he would so i don't like the chances of having a reliable va from him.

What supergoed had said is similar to what I have experienced with VA companies. Some of my current employees who used to work for outsourcing companies said the same things about the number of clients each employee works for. It can be as bad as 4 to 5 customers per VA at a time. That's why you get poor quality work most of the time.

As regard to the pay, depending on which city you are looking at, these VA companies are paying their staff as low as $100 for a new VA without much experience. So in fact they are not making just $50 for an VA. It can goes as high as $100 to $200 for one. Go figure that out how much profit the business owners are making.

Your best option is to find good people and build up your own team. However, you have to take note that it will not be easy. You have to train them, keep them motivated as well as keep on monitoring their work. Otherwise, most of them will tend to slack off over time. Then you have to deal with internet and power disruptions and all sorts of personal problems from time to time.

My advice is to stay away from VA companies and look for your own VA instead if you have the time and patience to train your own people. Otherwise a VA company will be a good starting point for you. However, I do not have any recommendations for a VA company.