This week I hired my first International virtual assistant!

For only $2.50 per hour, my new digital assistant is going to take a huge amount of work off my hands (work that I don’t like doing in the first place) so that I can concentrate on the stuff I really need to be doing.

If you too are interested in hiring a competent International worker to perform tasks for you or your business at a low  hourly rate like I’ve just done, then please keep reading. This article has been written just for you.

How To Find Your First Digital Worker

There are a number of websites, services and companies you can use to find cheap International workers (Read The 4-Hour Workweek for more information), but I chose not to go that route. I was fearful that getting assigned a random worker from an on online agency might not be the best way to go.

Instead, I went around and asked all of my Internet business friends and mastermind partners who they were using for their outsourcing. I knew that several of my business contacts were already using workers in other countries to help them perform simple and repetitive tasks within their businesses, so I contacted these people first and asked them for their assistance.

I got a lot of good advice from my business friends and mastermind partners. One mastermind partner in particular really helped me out. He said, “I’ve been working with this girl in Thailand. Her English is really good. I’ve only been working with her for a few months, but she’s doing a really good job thus far. If you want, I’ll give you her email and you can contact her and see if she can help you out.”

Making First Contact With Your New Worker

So, that’s exactly what I did. I emailed the young girl in Thailand and explained to her exactly what I needed her to do. And because I wasn’t sure how good her English would be, I did my best to make my email short and easy to understand.

This is what I wrote:

Hi ________,

My friend _________ gave me your name and email address. He said that he has been working with you for a while and that you are doing a really good job.

I am looking for someone like you to help me with some simple website stuff for my business and I wanted to see if you could help me.

At this point, I would only be looking for about 4 hours a week from you. You could do all 4 hours of work on 1 day.

The work I would want you to do at this point is to simply read from a list of blogs and websites that I would provide… and then you would need to leave comments on those various blogs and websites. And at the end of the 4 hours you would report back to me and tell me how many comments you left on various websites. In the future I may add more responsibilities (such as checking and responding to emails, adding photos to blog posts, researching various topics, etc) and more hours, but this would be a good place to start.

If this sounds like something you are capable of doing… and you have the time to work with me for about 4 hours a week, then please write me back and let me know how you would like to get started and how you would like to work out the payments, etc.

Thanks for your time… and I hope to hear back from you soon.

The girl in Thailand then wrote back and we exchanged about 4-5 emails where we talked about how much I would pay her, how exactly I wanted her to go about her work, etc.

Explaining The Work That Needs To Be Done

To make things even easier for my new worker (and to make sure she did the work exactly as I wanted her to), I created a step-by-step instruction sheet that detailed everything I needed her to do while leaving comments on other blogs and websites. I created the document using Google Docs and then emailed the final product to her as a PDF document.

After emailing the instruction sheet to my new virtual assistant, she wrote back and said she would give it a try.

I responded by saying:

Hi _________,

Yes. Go ahead and do 4 hours of blog commenting using the instructions I sent you in my last email. Just leave as many comments as you can. After you finish the 4 hours of work, send me an email and let me know how many comments you were able to leave during those 4 hours. After you do that I will send you the money via PayPal for the time you worked… and we can talk then about having you do more work like this in the future. Thanks!

And so now, at this very moment, my new VA is doing her first four hours worth of work for me.

I had her start small because at this point I have no idea what type of performance she is going to give me. I told her I’d like to get about 40-50 comments from her during these first 4 hours of work, but whether she will be able to do that or not is still the big question.

If worst comes to worst and the performance of my new virtual assistant is less than stellar, I’m only out $10 USD and I can move on to another worker who is capable of performing to my expectations.

So, step one is done. I’ve hired my first International virtual assistant and I’ve created a document that can now be passed on to new VAs in the future if this current one doesn’t work out.

Now I just have to wait and see what kind of results I get back. And if the results are good I’ll give my new worker more tasks to perform, which will free my schedule up even more, and the end result of all this will hopefully be a lot less work for me… and a whole lot more money in my bank account.

Stay tuned for more in the future! I’ll let you know what happens with my new virtual assistant.

Thumbnail image by permanently scatterbrained