I have a burrning desire to talk about and review Efficise. Took me a while to start this article as there was so much to explore! I’ve never tried any different Virtual assistant platform, but from what I’ve heard in the reviews of the people who’ve already used VA services, I’ve stumbled on pretty awesome and affordable company from Pakistan.
I am basing this on little practical experience of the topic, but I am backed up with lots of theoretical knowledge. I am pretty convinced that there is high probability that you’ve read “4 Hour workweek” By Timothy Ferris. This is where I was first introduced to the idea of virtual personal assistants.
After this book, I’ve noticed that there are countless other bloggers out there, who are successfully applying the skill, and reap great benefits from it. And I want to tell you how my outsourcing adventures started. It’s one of those things that ultimately make you shift your mind about how your work gets done.
How this review started?
I got emailed by Ali offering me outsourcing services in exchange for a review. I always thought that outsourcing was a great thing, but never was motivated enough to try it out.
I thought this was going to be yet another failed service on the web, that is not worth my time. But a little voice in my head said: “Listen, this is an opportunity to test your outsourcing skills and see wether it’s worth your time!”
Turns out they got me as a client, and I didn’t get enough of them.
The plans and the value
The best value is of course the most expensive plan, but if you are just starting out, and you want to see wether outsourcing is for you, I would recommend that you try out the cheapest plan, which is 45$. It will grant you 30 short 15–30 minute tasks.
And as I said the results were mind blowing, especially from the point of blogger. Efficise guys are offering three basic individual plans. There are two additional plans: medium (50 requests + 2 extra hours) and large (100 tasks + 3 hours – 100$).
Note: If you buy the largest package, you are getting 30 minutes of VA’s time at the rate of 2$ an hour. You tell me, wether this is the bargain or not! Which effectively means, you are buying 53 hours of additional work time in your life.
There is also a business plan, for customers who have more complicated needs. I recommend you check it out as well.
What I’ve used it so far
Social media scheduling
With the techniques that I’ve used in order to leverage my social media efforts, I’ve successfully managed to leverage all the daunting update scheduling to them. For me this is a low value activity, in terms of time and energy.
They’ve got daily recurring task of scheduling 5 blog posts a day, at the peak hours. And the second recurring task of thanking all of my retweeters. Since I get a lot of retweets, this is a life saver for me. And I see all the retweets, and I have a peace of mind, knowing that my team will take care of it.
At one point I’ve assembled a system how my VA’s work with Hootsuite, and it’s an absolute blast.
Article research
If I am writing about the topic that I am not knowledgable of, but I think it would be the right fit for Alpha Efficiency, I don’t want to write out of my ass. I want to research prior to claiming anything. But the task of researching often can be really long and complicated, and I am not a big fan of it.
So I thought, why not let my VA’s do it? And so I sent them a task, along with the guidelines, how to do it, and they came back to me with a PDF report. PDF report contained a lot of valuable information. There were a couple of misses, but they were completely on my part, as I didn’t specify the task correctly. I just said outsourcing, and that’s what I got. Instead I wanted personal outsourcing, I’ve got that in the research too!
They’ve found top 5 bloggers in the niche, and pulled out 2 of the best articles from those blogs.
Second opinion on my blog posts
Now the better part about having a VA is that you can always ask for a second opinion. Sometimes before I publish the article I wanna hear a second opinion. So I thought, why not send it to my VA’s and ask them what they think, and what else would they include in the article. I was delighted with the response.
They’ve found a minor mistake in my text, sent me the correction, said that they’ve learned a lot through the article, and stated that I’ve teased the audience the right way (which was my attention, a successful one) and made a suggestion about the topic that I should include for sure in the text.
Conclusion
As this is my first contact with VA’s, for the price that I pay, I believe I am getting my money back and more. As my prior theoretical experience about VA’s, I can notice that Efficise.com team is capable of independent thinking, as you will learn in my next article on outsourcing series.
All of the people on Efficise team, know a real good English, so if something happens on the topic of communication, most likely it’s on you. As already happened to me.
For 45$, to have someone schedule your dinners, plan your trips, or just help you with your blog maintenance. This is a bargain, and a STEAL. Stay tuned, as I am going to write about the best ways of maximizing the potential of your virtual assistants.
