Hiring a VA for topic research?
Have you ever hired someone (like a virtual assistant) to do research on a topic for later writing up on the subjet? If so, how did it work for you? How much did you pay, and would you do it again?
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I just hired a VA. I hired her to be an assistant, basically someone I can ask random things in the morning when I'm a little busier with other tasks. I also have ongoing research tasks.
This is the second time I hired a VA.
The hiring was fine, but I have a process.
The tasks are harder. There's a lot of context needed. My first VA I had plan travel stuff, etc, and things were okay, but a lot of direction was needed.
This VA I just started with, hasn't been a week. I think it will be similar until I can establish more time. I haven't had a chance to look over her results yet, but I suspect there will be a lot of back and forth. The biggest problem is context. VAs aren't a magic box that returns whatever you want, they are people with their own biases and understanding and they are virtual - meaning not sitting next to you not able to ask you for details that you didn't think of yet.
That said, the longer I work with someone remotely the more I get a feel for what level of detail I need, and the more they can just make assumptions on my behalf.
I've paid $4-5/hr, and I capped them at 10 hrs a week. That works out to a few hundred a month, which isn't too bad since it easily saves me that much time (I consult, so I can measure the savings very clearly).
I definitely recommend it if you can afford it. A lot of people are living under lockdown and their normal means of supporting themselves is non existent.
Very informative, thanks!
How did you find the VA? I think I'll just go for it for some months and see where it leads me. Indeed, training and coaching them is important.
Sure, I should write this up in detail somewhere:
It's never perfect, and honestly I'm afraid of the onboarding time that I'll need. If I have a business that can justify a full time VA, I will try to hire two VAs so I'm never without one. It sounds silly, but if you can free up your time to do other things, that's great. If your business can bring more value with more people, then great.
Thanks a lot for all the information!
You did an excellent write up, so you are almost there to get a blog post up somewhere for future reference
I'm also looking for the same for my newly emergency1010 website, you can the blog and read some documents which I want https://emergency101.ca/