How to Know Why and When to Hire a Virtual Assistant

Let’s have a survey:

Do you own a microwave?
Do you own a food processor?
Do you own a dishwasher?

I think running water, toilets and a refrigerator are more in the need category, but the things above…well we can live without them, but they save us so much time!

Here are a few more that you *may* say yes to:

Do you hire someone to mow your lawn?
Do you hire someone to clean your house?

These are things that we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves.  It costs us money to have someone else do it, but it saves us TIME.  Precious time.

This is the big question: How valuable is your time?

So many of us love to DIY things.  Learn a new skill?  No problem!  No need for professionals.  It costs too much to hire a contractor!  It costs too much to hire a web developer!  It costs to much to hire an interior designer!

It is totally true that anything that you want to get done, you might try and do yourself.  But so many times we do not factor in our TIME as cost to us.  We always think that doing it ourselves saves us money, but the cost of our time is a serious factor that we overlook.

Let’s discuss blogging.

I am what I call a DIY blogger.  I can pretty much do almost everything myself, or figure it out if I put the time into researching.  I am not a full-time blogger nor do I make a full-time income…yet. My motivation for DIY-ing it, as I have been blogging for 18 months, has been that I HAD to do it myself because I had no money.  Great!  We’ve all been there, right?

But the money does come, and then there is the big decision…Spend the money to save time? or keep on DIY-ing it?

I’ll tell you my first time vs. money decision was house cleaning.  I hate to clean the house and feel it is a massive waste of my brain power.  I don’t enjoy it.  It is 4+ hours of my week wasted. Except…it has to be done.  I want a clean house.  So the first thing I did was decide that I could use my time better blogging, and that if I blogged all week to pay the cleaning bill then it was worth it!  Lol!  To me…I would work minimum wage blogging over $30/hr cleaning!

Okay…but then blogging became more work.  I got smarter which made my blogs more successful.  But with that brings more work and more lofty goals.  And not enough time.

But I’m still not making a bunch of money to throw away.  I have to make a value decision.  Right now my thoughts are still in the “investment” stage of my blog.  I am in it for money in the long run, but if I don’t sacrifice some income right now, I’m not going to grow.

I decided to hire a Virtual Assistant for some tasks that I could off-load.  For me, I needed repetitive data entry for my stock photo listings.  That was the first time I hired a VA.  Before I launched Blog Chicka Blog, I had 500+ photos to load into Woocommerce in order to have my store ready.  It was an overwhelming task, but it HAD to be done.  By hiring someone, it saved me hours of time.  If I had to do those tasks, I would be completely deflated with the tedious tasks of my blog without doing the things that could move it forward each week.  So I made the decision to regularly pay for someone to input new stock photos.

Christina Berry, VA and blogger at Inspired Blogging Services, told me:

You don’t have to be a “big blogger” to use a Virtual Assistant. One of my most suc cessful clients today hired me 2 years ago when she had 35 Facebook followers and 10 email subscribers for her blog. Today she has almost 3,000 FB followers, over 5,000 email subscribers, and the money she’s made from her blog this year is sending her family to Italy next spring.

When should you hire a VA?

• When you have a bulk of repetitive tasks that you can easily show someone how to do.
• When you have a huge goal that requires more hours than you normally have for blogging.
• When you have a task that you absolutely hate and sucks the life out of you!

So just in case you are wondering…I still do the laundry, cook all the meals, am the handyman around here and I still try and learn new things about blogging all the time rather than pay someone…IF that knowledge will benefit me going forward.

Don’t be afraid to spend your money to save you time.  Because you will use your time to do things that ONLY YOU CAN DO.  Only you can be you and you can’t pay anyone to be you.  And YOU is why your blog is awesome!