Outsourcing All Your Email to Virtual Assistants
Right before Christmas I decided I needed more “Freedom.”
Freedom from EMAIL BONDAGE.
I get 200-300 emails a day.
About 20 are ones I actually should read and respond to. And about 15 of those 20 I can have a trained assistant answer for me.
The others, are just auto responders, spam, viruses and scams.
I’ve been teaching about using virtual assistants as a way to bring about business leverage since 2007, you’d think I’d have this one “wired” by now, right?
Well, like most, I am stubborn and proud.
I thought, “Only I can answer my emails, this MUST BE THE THING I DO.”
What a fool I have been!
I’ve even read the Four Hour Workweek where Tim Ferriss talks about reducing email time waste by only checking it 2 times per day. But I ignored it and made myself “busy” with a Non-Money Making tasks. (Focus on the money generating tasks!)
Now, would you like to know exactly – step by step, what I did to liberate myself so I only have to read 10-20 emails
per day and not be drowned in emails?
Remember, I can train you to do the exact same thing – but the problem is – you’ll need someone to read and answer all your emails first!
I can help with that problem.
I actually can get you an email reading assistant or basically – whatever kind of assistant you need, provided by a happy and skilled worker from the Philippines.
WATCH WEBINAR SHOWING YOU HOW TO HIRE FILIPINOS
I have a team of 7 staff members now, many who have been with us for over 2 years now. They are fantastic workers, and all great human beings. We love our Filipino staff.
This year, I was able to do something VERY SPECIAL – I was able to send each one of our workers an iPod Touch.
Now they can text me, do facetime video chat, use mobile apps, and experience all the fun, music and games that the iPod touch brings. It’s basically an iPhone, just… without the Phone part.
Here are some pictures of my team showing off their brand new iPods 
[these cost a lot if you buy them in the Philippines].
So, you came here today to learn a lesson on email management, and you got a bonus too – that bonus was – TAKE CARE OF YOUR OVERSEAS WORKERS. They are FAMILY, treat them as such and they’ll work with you for a long long time!
Outsourcing Email Management
1. Create a new private email, that only your staff, friends and family know – don’t add it to any lists or newsletters. This is email is ONLY for personal communications.
2. Have your email assistant receive all your emails. You can do this two ways. (1) Forward all your email to their email address. (2) have the VA download the email to their outlook in pop email.
3. Establish rules for your VA to follow
- What kinds of emails can be deleted
- what kinds of emails are scams
- what kinds of email they can personally respond to for you as your executive assistant
- what kinds of email they need to forward to you for record keeping
- what kinds of emails they need to forward to you to answer personally
- 4 hour digests to send to you until they get the hang of answering all your emails
The trick is, you know everything, the VA does not.
So, if they are going to be answering your emails, they need to know what you know.
The only way they will know this is if you start CC’ing them on all your correspondences so they see the “tone and feel” of your writing style.
Also, your VA should send you a 4 hour digest, where they collect emails they do not know how to answer and send you the MAIN QUESTIONS in 1 email as a list every four hours or so. In the beginning, it’s possible you’ll miss an urgent email or two, but really… email should not be treated as urgent and if it is, start telling people to CALL OR TEXT you if things are really that urgent. Tell them you don’t see your emails anymore or if they are a close friend, give them your private email.
When you get your digests, you go through the email, and go question by question and answer them and send that email BACK to your VA to send responses for you. Don’t get fooled into thinking you need to send these emails yourself with you answering them to the originators, if you do, you’re back doing work your VA’s can do for you.
I found in emails, people just want ANSWERS, and they don’t care WHO sends them the answers. As long as they get the info they are looking for, they will be happy, even if it’s not from me personally.
Have your executive assistant/email reader, use a professional email tag/signature line saying something official at the bottom of all the emails they send for you, like…
Their Name
Executive Assistant to YOUR NAME
Email for Assistant/phone/skype contact
To make this work properly, just realize this is not a QUICK FIX procedure. It can take at least two weeks of trials and errors before you can truly walk away and know your virtual worker is gonna do the job just right and now you can focus on other more important money making tasks. Be forgiving and make sure to over communicate during the two weeks when you take yourself off email, so everyone learns as much as possible to be able to do their jobs the best way they can for you.
Resist the desire to “check email constantly”. I know it’s hard to get away from it, but you can do it, especially if you start doing other things you’d use your email checking time for, which produces better results for your business!
If you are buried in 200-300 emails like I used to be, using a virtual worker to screen, read and respond for you will save you at least 2 hours per day from time wasting emails and allow for them to answer for you simple ones that they can be trained to respond to.
If you need a virtual worker, email reader, blog poster, SEO link builder, article writer or other types of virtual workers, I started my own hiring system, using the same principles we’ve used to hire our team of 7 VAs from the Philippines for the last 4 years.
Make sure you spend 1 hour to review my free webinar, showing you how to get great workers at low prices to do all your hard and boring internet marketing work, including email management. Watch the Outsourcing Secrets Revealed Webinar.
