Question: What’s one of the top most powerful business development strategies for your fitness or personal coaching business right now?
Answer: Hiring and training a rock star overseas Virtual Assistant (VA) to do the vast majority of your most time consuming, but critical daily online tasks.
For example:
1) Quickly Growing and Actively Engaging a Large Social Media Following for you,
2) Frequently Writing and Posting Fresh Blog Posts to your Business Blog or Website
3) Creating Stunning Visual Content for Social Media Sharing,
4) Building a Large Targeted Email Marketing List (i.e. from your quickly growing social media following).
What Makes a Rock Star Virtual Assistant so Valuable?
First, Effective content marketing and social media management is essentially a full time job.
For example, actually growing and actively engaging a large niche-target social media tribe, with thousands if not tens of thousands of real followers takes about 5-20 hours per week (over about 3 months applying the most effective strategies and tools). The time required will grow steadily as your social media community grows increasingly, and as your digital brand awareness begins to snowball.
Second, high frequency business blogging is one of the most powerful organic SEO and content marketing strategies currently available to you. But content curating and especially blog post writing can take 4-6 or more hours per day to do right!
Having a rock star virtual assistant on your team is going to free up your time so you can focus on delivering your coaching or fitness expertise directly to your growing client base. This will allow you to focus your creative energies on coming up with fresh educational content, branding and social selling strategies, that can then be executed in large part by your VA.
Second, you can hire an overseas VA for example, from the Philippines, at literally a fraction of the cost (i.e. $3-5 per hour) of a US based VA (i.e. $9-$20+ per hour).
At first, you may choose to hire and train a VA to work part time hours and then increase those hours as your business grows. You can also offer an increasing hourly rate as your VA becomes more and more effective at meeting or exceeding your clearly defined performance goals.
So What’s the Best Way to Hire an Overseas VA?
There are 2 basic strategies for hiring a VA. The first way is to hire through a third party agency.
The benefit is that some basic screening and training will have been done for you. The disadvantage is that a good chunk of the money you spend each month will go to that third party. And you’ll still need to train the sub-contracted VA anyway once you’ve agreed to hire them.
Your second option and the one I’m recommending here, is that you hire and train your own VA directly. Doing your own hiring and training translates into a huge savings over time through your paying a lower hourly rate. You can also greatly reduce the likelihood of hiring someone who is not ideally suited to join your dream digital marketing team.
Most importantly, by doing your own video interviewing you’ll really get to assess the readiness of a prospective VA for becoming a key contributor to your digital coaching or fitness business.
For example, having very strong proficiency in English (spoken and written) will be critical to a prospective VA’s effectiveness in communicating with you as a member of your team. This is also true for content creation and for interacting with your ideal customers online.
Where Can I find High Potential Candidates for my VA Role?
This is such an important question!
Right now, arguably the best place to find a large pool of qualified overseas VA candidates is Elance.com soon to be called UpWork Enterprise . According to a recent communication with Elance customer service, it’s advised that you set up your account at UpWork right now rather than at Elance.
What Makes Elance/UpWorkEnterprise a Good Choice?
There are 5 key strengths or features that make Elance/UpworkEnterprise a great choice for recruiting an overseas VA. These include an:
1) Escrow payment service (guaranteed payments) that allows you to pay for work only once it’s been completed as per your work agreement with your freelancer
2) Workview (Work Diary on UpWork) allows you to monitor your freelancer’s work with real time screen shots of the online tasks their doing
3) You can see past customer feedback with a 5 star rating system and comments
4) You can review work samples that are often posted on each freelancers profile
5) You can communicate with prospective freelancers via the Elance/UpWork workroom or work diary.
Ok so now you know about the incredible value and business benefits of adding a VA to your fitness pro digital marketing dream team. But what’s the best way to actually screen for high potential VA candidates to maximize the likelihood of finding and hiring a VA who shares your enthusiasm and drive and who has the key knowledge, skills and abilities to really excel in their role? In other words:
What Specific Hiring Strategy Should I Use?
One definition of high performance teamwork is 2 or more people working interdependently towards shared performance goals.
So to start with, you want to have the mindset that you’re hiring a key member of your business team, because that’s what you’re actually doing. That means you want to apply some of the best practices that the top recruiters use when hiring and onboarding new employees for leading organizations.
These include:
1) Posting a very clear and specific Job description (this is also essential for training)
2) Proactively inviting high potential candidates to apply
3) Selecting and creating a top list of candidates
4) Checking past customer feedback and work samples,
5) Conducting detailed video interviews
6) Selecting the top candidate for a trial period, and then
7) Starting a structured onboarding and training process.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each step in the recruiting and hiring process:
1) Posting a very clear and specific Job description
Arguably the top critical success factor in effectively recruiting, hiring and training a truly great VA will be to provide continuous role and task clarification. This has to start right from your initial job posting and guide your structured training process as well. That means you need to develop a clear idea and then write a shareable point form list of exactly what:
• specific tasks you want your VA to do each day,
• the specific tools you want them to use, and
• the amount of time you want them to spend on each task
Now as important as having a very clear breakdown of the daily tasks that define your VA’s role will be, you also want to be clear in your job posting that you’re looking for someone with enthusiasm, and a real interest if not an outright passion for digital marketing for your kind of business.
Again, I can’t stress enough how very important it is that you clearly state your need for a very high level of proficiency in spoken and written English. In fact, you may want to highlight this right at the beginning of your job description.
It’s also a great idea to optimize your Upwork job description for the most important keywords. You can actually add tags such, Virtual Assistant, Social Media, English Grammar and Article-Writing.
2) Proactively inviting high potential candidates to apply
Now, once you’ve set up and posted your VA job description you can strongly increase your chances of finding great potential hires by actually searching VA profiles based on the specific skills and strengths you’re looking for and invite them to apply for your Job.
3) Selecting and creating a top list of candidates
Once your job posting is populated with potential candidates, you then want to carefully review each application and make a top list of high potential applicants based on a careful review of their profiles.
4) Checking past customer feedback and references
As you create your top list, pay close attention to posted examples of each candidate’s past work examples, the related skills they’ve tested for and of course: their customer feedback and ratings.
5) Conducting detailed video interviews
This is very likely the most critical part of your VA hiring strategy! It’s during your video interview with a prospective candidate that you can really get a sense of the essentials. You can assess person to person factors like their positive energy levels, English proficiency, level of professionalism and even the reliability of their internet connection.
[Related Bonus Tips: Check out this great infographic from Lemonly: on “How Not to look Ugly on Webcam”!]
Most high potential VA candidates will be familiar with and ready to video conference with you via Skype. You can also interview via Google hangouts. In fact regular video communication will be an important onboarding, training and continuous communication tool as well.
It’s important to set up your interview questions in advance. Ideally you’ve given high potential candidates links to your social media accounts and to your blog or website well in advance of the interview. That way they can get of sense of the kind of products and/or services you offer as a fitness pro or personal coach.
Remember, having an amazing virtual assistant can be one of the keys to serious online business growth and building a digital brand for yourself as THE go-to expert in your field. I recommend that you ask them in advance to write you a top 10 list of reasons they want to join your team. This will give you a sense of how well they’ve prepared for the interview with you while at the same time it will give you a basic sense of how well they can express themselves in written English.
Make sure to really go over any work samples they’ve posted on their Elance/Upwork profile and carefully review their customer feedback. Right down any questions or concerns you have and be sure to address these issues in a structured way in your interview.
Within the context of the clearly structured job description you’ve provided, ask the prospective VA you’re interviewing for suggestions on how to improve the task structure you’ve setup and on how to more effectively meet your digital marketing goals.
Their direct input into how you design there role will likely to increase their buy-in to your work together. It’s also a great opportunity to clarify and agree on the time that will be allowed for the completion of each task.
It’s really important not to rush the hiring process. Don’t make the all too common mistake of trying to hire a VA in 24-48 hours. The reality, even with third party agencies is that it can take 2-4 weeks to find a truly high-value overseas VA.
As you complete each video interview, it can be quite helpful to rate each interview on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being “don’t hire” and 10 being “likely a rock star”). You can also make some quick point form notes describing the negatives and positives for each candidate to help you make your hiring decision.
Ask yourself: can this potential weakness be trained or coached into a strength? Excellent written and verbal English skills, for instance are likely not something you can teach them on the Job. On the other hand, learning how to use a new social media management tool can be learned quickly.
6) Selecting the top candidate for a trial period
Once you finished interviewing your top 3-10 high potential VA candidates for the role, it’s time to hire the top candidate. It’s strongly recommend that you start with a small trial project say, to add 500 new niche target Twitter followers to your account and/or to set up and optimize your new YouTube video channel.
This short trial project period is that critical period when you can really assess the role-effectiveness of the new VA. It’s also the time to begin your incredibly important structured training and onboarding process.
Leverage your time with the proper help!
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