Tutorial: How to find expired domains and why you need them

If you want to step it up a level and you are serious about ranking your sites, you better get good at finding expired domains!!

For a long time now I have been purchasing expired domains and building a private blog network. A while back I thought it would be a good idea to start picking up expired domains because the future benefits would be worth it.

We all know that SEO and ranking sites is getting tougher, so having your own private blog network is the only way to guarantee solid back links to your money site!

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not expert at expired domains, but I have learned a lot over the past couple of years and I’ve gathered a wealth of knowledge that I will share with you here.

 

So why are expired domains important?

If you have read my post on Building your own private blog network, you will know that expired domains are important to give us a big head start when building our network.

You see…  when a domain expires, it usually goes up for auction or becomes available to register again. Now the great thing about an expired domain is that it still carries forward all of it’s SEO metrics…

Such as:

• Domain authority
• Page authority
• Page rank
• Age
• Trust flow

And everything else that contributes to the strength and authority of a domain!

By purchasing a domain that already has these metrics means that we don’t have to spend a whole lot of time doing SEO on a new domain.

We simply add content and links and build sites on these expired domains, we then link to our money sites to give them a shove up the rankings

What to do with my expired domain!

There are actually a few of things you can do with an expired domain.

301 direct to your money site.

This is the lazy way of doing it and is a good way of boosting the authority of your site.

By adding a 301 redirect from your expired domain to your money site means that when Google crawls the domain, it is re-directed to your site and the authority from that domain is also passed on.

Do this with a few different expired domains and you have immediately increased yours sites authority without actually building any links!!

Although this method used to be a great way to quickly rank sites, I wouldn’t 301 too many domains because this may look spammy. Therefore I would only recommend a small number, and then concentrate on building out Private blog network sites.

Here’s how to easily 301 re-direct your domain!

Put this html code into your public_html folder, usually you can access this via your cpanel or ftp.

—————————————————————————————————————-

<?php
$redirectlink = ‘http://www.urlToDirectTooGoesHere.com‘;
//do not edit below here
header (‘HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(‘Location: ‘.$redirectlink);
exit;
?>

—————————————————————————————————————–

This will now pass the:

• Page rank
• Moz rank
• Domain authority
• back link profile

onto your money site!!

Warning – This is something I am going to come to shortly, but if you use this method, you must make sure that the expired domain from which you are 301 re-directing from, was in the same niche as your own site that you are directing too!!

It’s no good having an expired domain that used to be a site about cats, and has a back link profile from cat and pet websites if your site is about forex trading!

** You must have niche relevant domains.**

How do you check this? use a site called archive.com, keep reading and i’ll explain exactly how to use it and how to find niche related expired domains!

Build a blog network (or feeder sites)

This is my favourite method and it’s something you should seriously consider. I wrote a post on How to build your own private blog network here.

This explains how to set up your PBN sites. You want to make them as natural as possible. Add unique articles, add images and videos.

Use different themes and topics.

Add links to other authority sites in your niche

Link to your money site!

You can find all the details right here

You should aim at building these kind of sites around your money site as it’s a great way to get high authority, niche related links! You also have total control over them so if you need to remove any, you can!

Aim for at least 5 PBN sites per money site. This will give you a real boost in the rankings! and this is a tactic that the big boys use to rank for highly competitive keywords!

I have many PBN sites in all different niches, just drop me an email if you are interested in acquiring links from them. These are my own personal sites. Not the rubbish you see on the forums! I don’t advertise them anywhere.

Build a site and sell for a profit

Something else worth thinking about is buying expired domains to sell on for a profit. If you can get your hands on a really good one, you can turn it into a website and sell it on sites like flippa!

Although this is not something I have done myself yet, I am actually in the process of doing one of these kind of sites, and it will be interesting to see what kind of profit I can make out of it!

I’ll keep you updated on that score!!

What am I looking for in a Domain?

When searching for an expired domain there are certain metrics that I am looking for, and here they are:

Domain Authority

I like to set a limit of at least 15 for Domain Authority. This is basically a metric by Moz that measures the actual domain according to age, popularity and size.

Now obviously the higher the DA, the more trustworthy it appears to search engines and the more authority is has! If a site has a high DA, then you know it has quality links pointing too it.

You can use opensiteexlorer to find the DA of a site.

Here is a full explanation of Domain Authority: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Page authority

Similar to DA, but this time Page authority looks at the probability of a specific page appearing on the search engines. it looks at the relevance of information and links to the page.

This is an important metric because we are looking for relevant ‘domains’ to purchase. So I always look for a PA of 20+

Here is a full explanation of Page Authority http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority

 Google Page Rank

PR is something that everybody focused on at one point, it was the bee’s all and end all of SEO metrics. The higher the PR the better.

However, times have changed and I don’t factor PR as important anymore. I would much prefer a site with good DA and PA than a site with PR4 that had a poor back link profile and low PA.

Don’t get me wrong, if you can find an expired domain with pr4+ then great! but make sure it is backed up with all of the other metrics!

There are tons of pr 5 and pr 6 sites that have no back links and poor DA and PA. These will not stand the test of time and the majority have fake pr’s. So keep away from them!

Remember, relevance is what we are looking for!!

Trust Flow

This is a metric from MajesticSEO.com and as you guessed, it measures the trustworthiness of a site.  I for a trust flow of 15+

Here is a detailed explanation on Trust Flow

Citation Flow

Another metric from MajesticSEO.com – Again it measures the likely hood of a site ranking depending on the links to it. Basically it’s measuring the popularity of the site. Again, look for 15+

Age

I try to get domains that are at least 2 years old. If you follow the requirements above, then you will probably find that the domains are aged anyway!

Guide:

• Domain Authority = 15+
• Page Authority = 20+
• Page Rank = 0+
• Trust Flow = 15+
• Citation flow = 15+

These are the minimum requirements that you should be looking for, but don’t worry if you don’t meet all of them. You might find a great domain with high trust flow, high domain authority but the page authority is only 15.

It’s ok, you can easily improve that! these are just guidelines to follow.

Backlinks

When you find a suitable domain you need to check the back link profile to see if it has genuine, relevant backlinks, and nothing spammy going on!

I use Ahrefs and here are the things I look for:

– Number of links

– Number of referring domains

– Anchor links

Where to find expired domains

There are some good free sources to finding expired domains and my favourites are:

http://moonsy.com/expired_domains/

http://www.expireddomains.net/

https://auctions.godaddy.com/‎

This is the best place to start:

Head over to ExpiredDomains.net and sign up as a free user.

Now type in your niche or relevant keyword into the search box:

For this example I’ll use the muscle building niche:

Ok, I typed the word ‘muscle’ into the search box, and I was shown 8,040 domains!!

We now want to narrow this down a bit, so click on ‘show filter’

Now select – ‘no fake PR’s’

Select minimum back links 10+

Now click on ‘Adwords & SEO filter’

Select ‘min MOZ domain Authority’ 10

Select ‘min MOZ page authority’ 10

(It doesn’t give us the option to select 15, therefore I prefer to select 10 rather than 20)

Now click ‘Apply Filter’

This has now narrowed it down to 172 domains!

Already I can see some decent domains, starting with the first on the list. 3daymusclebuilding.com.  Currently on $10.

f there is a price (in green) next to the domain, then this means it’s a Godaddy auction and you can bid on that domain.

If it says ‘register’, then you can simply register that domain right now and pay just the small registrar fee!

These are the 2 types we are going to focus on.

Check the metrics and backlinks

Look through some of the domains that are either free to register or are in your price range.

Highlight the domain and copy it.

You will now need these 3 sites open in separate tabs:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ – This is to check the DA and PA

http://ahrefs.com – This is to check the back link profile

http://archive.org/web/ – Here you can see what the site looked like in the past

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php – This checks the Google PR

1) Check opensite explorer

Paste the domain and click ‘search’

As you can see, this domain has a DA 14 and PA 28, which is ok for us!!

It’s all showing that it has established backlinks, which is also what we are looking for.

2) Check the backlink profile

I personally use Ahrefs because I think they are the best. You can actually do this on MOZ opensightexplorer.

Paste the domain and click search:

Ahrefs is indicating that this domain has 176 backlinks from 6 reffering domains.

I would like to see more reffering domains, but at least it does have some.

Now click on ‘Anchors’

Just check to see that the anchors match the niche, and that there aren’t any spammy anchors such as adult or other spammy links.

Although this domain does not have many, it looks clean!!

3) Check the history of the domain

Go to http://archive.org/web/ and paste the domain and click ‘Browse History’

This will bring up a calendar. Now click one of the dates highlighted in blue. This will show you what the site looked like on that date.

In this example I clicked on August 7th, and it brought up a very good looking site on building muscle, which is exactly what were hoping for, and it proves that this site was used for that purpose!

You can go back and check other dates if you like.

Just make sure the domain has not been used a number of different times with completely different sites on there.

4) Check the PR is real

Go to http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Enter the domain and click ‘Check PR’

As you can see, this has confirmed that this domain is a PR 1, which is good.

Is this domain suitable?

It sure is!!!

And this is the first domain that we have researched, there are plenty more too!

Blog Networks will die out! Be smart, Be relevant!

We’ve all seen ads promoting high pr blog network links. Maybe something like….  ’50 pr2-6 private blog network links for $199′

or

’30 pr5 links for $85 a month!’

Problem is, although having 50 pr 2-6 backlinks sounds good, they are a waste of time because pretty much none of them will be relevant to your niche!

Not only that, but the sites from which they will come from will also be linking out to hundreds of other completely random sites.

Now this does not look good does it?

Google will be able to detect this sooner or later.

I would much prefer to have 5 highly relevant backlinks than 50 backlinks from random, none relevant sites!

Not only that, but if you purchase these link packages, there is a chance that the blog network will get shut down by Google, and you will be left with no links at all!!

So put a bit more time and effort in and build your own mini network that you can be certain is relevant and will not come under Googles radar! Or drop me an email if you would like to use some of my personal pbn sites!

Protect yourself, Don’t leave a footprint

When building your mini blog network with expired domains, it’s important that you don’t leave a footprint. If you stay 1 step ahead then your network will be completely safe!

Here are some things you can do to ensure that you don’t leave a footprint:

- Use different hosts. There are some cheap hosting accounts:

JustHost
Hostgator
Bluehost

There are tons of them!

- Don’t use SEOHost or SEOhosting as there is a good chance that Google monitors IP addresses from these host! Best to be on the safe side.

- Use a VPN when buying and setting up the new sites. I personally use HMA VPN which changes my IP address when Im working on Blog network sites

Make all of your sites different:

- Use different themes

- Use different usernames

- Don’t use exactly the same plugins on every site

- Use different images and videos

- Add a unique about page to each site

- NEVER interlink your sites

- Use different anchor text when linking back to your money site

- Interlink articles on the same site

- Vary the length of your posts

- Link out to other authority sites in your niche

- Add some form of monetization to some of your sites! Make it look real

- Basically, Just mix everything up as much as possible

Relevance, build a niche specific network!

Forget big blog networks and monthly packages! just forget them! If you want to get ahead in this game then build yourself a mini blog network for each niche that you are in.

For example, Im in the SEO niche, so I start out with a mini network that looks like this:

Expired Domain 1

Expired Domain 2

Expired Domain 3

Expired Domain 4

Expired Domain 5

web 2.0 (1)

Web 2.0 (2)

Web 2.0 (3)

Web 2.0 (3)

Web 2.9 (4)

Web 2.9 (5)

All 5 expired domains were sites originally based around SEO, internet marketing, blogging etc, they all have a decent backlink profile relevant to my niche!

The 5 Web 2.0’s are all SEO based blogs that I have created.

That’s 10 highly relevant authority blogs linking to my money site. This will boost my own DA and PA and also shoot me up the rankings!

Summary

Finding expired domains requires a bit of work, but the rewards are great. If you follow my advice you can pick up some really good domains for next to nothing.

Remember to focus on your niche and build a mini blog network around that!

This is a really powerful method to boosting your rankings. I have been purchasing domains for a few years. If you are looking for some niche specific blog network links, just drop me an email and I maybe able to help you out!

Read more: How To Find The Best Expired Domains http://doseoyourself.com/how-to-find-expired-domains/#ixzz3PfPqwuWj
Follow us: @doseoyourself on Twitter

Người Hà Nội chen chúc mua xôi giá 5.000 đồng ở phố cổ

Sáng nào cũng vậy, từ 6 giờ đến hơn 8 giờ, vỉa hè trước cửa số nhà 44 phố Hàng Hòm (Hoàn Kiếm - Hà Nội) lại đông nghẹt người mua xôi giá chỉ 5.000 đồng.

Với giá rẻ khó tin, chỉ 5.000 đồng/phần, hàng xôi của chị Hiền, chị Hải sáng nào cũng đông nghẹt khách chờ mua.

Là dân làng nghề nấu xôi Phú Thượng, từ lâu nức tiếng đất Bắc, chị Hiền, chị Hải nhiều năm nay bám trụ phố cổ Hà Nội bán xôi sáng mưu sinh.

Xe máy của khách mua xôi để tràn cả xuống lòng đường phố Hàng Hòm.

Giá rẻ, xôi ngon lại có đủ loại từ xôi xéo, xôi vò, xôi đỗ, lạc...  nên lượng tiêu thụ của hàng này trên dưới 2 tạ mỗi buổi sáng.

Nhiều người mua lượng xôi lớn cho cả nhà với giá 30.000 đồng/kg.

Do đông người chen chúc mua nên chủ quán phải treo biển cảnh báo giữ trật tự, chỉ dẫn để xe máy.

Thìa dùng một lần được treo trong túi nilon, ai có nhu cầu sẽ tự túc lấy.

Khách mua xôi sáng luôn đông nghẹt, hết lượt này đến lượt khác.

Với suất xôi sáng 5.000 đồng thế này ở khu phố cổ có lẽ chỉ có duy nhất.

Giá rẻ, nên khách của hàng xôi 5.000 đồng này rất đa dạng, từ người già đến bạn trẻ, phụ nữ đến đàn ông.

Suất xôi 5.000 đồng đủ no cho thanh niên khỏe mạnh.

Từ 6 giờ sáng người mua đã chen chúc vòng trong, vòng ngoài, đến khoảng 8 giờ sáng, những thúng, bao tải xôi đã được bán hết sạch.

How To Find Awesome Content Writers For Less Than $3 Per Article

Following my article on Building a Private Blog Network, I have been asked by a lot of people if I can reveal or even share my article writer, who I use to write content for my niche and blog network sites.

Whilst I can’t share him or his writing services, what I will be showing you in this post is how to find your very own premium content writer, for less than $3 per 500 word article.

What You Will Learn

• The Exact templates I use to get quality applicants
• Three tips to save you hours of time
• How to work with and manage your VA
• Outsource tasks to an All -Round VA for just $1 per hour

Where to Find Quality Writers

Thank you for sharing and dowloading this PDF, it is much appreciated!

• Download the PDF

It wasn’t until 2 years ago that I began to understand the power of outsourcing and the time and cost benefits associated with it.

I have tried a number of freelance sites that allow you to hire and outsource tasks to virtual assistants all over the world. However my go-to site for articles has always been oDesk.com

I have tried others such as Freelancer and eLance.com, however I have had much more success finding quality writers, for the right price using oDesk.

I also love the way oDesk lets you manage your team with the messaging facility and the automated billing system means I can spend less time working IN my business and more time working ON it.

As with anything online, you will get those who claim to be able to meet your requirements, however when it comes down to it, they can’t. Whilst this is both frustrating and time consuming, the beauty of oDesk is you don’t pay until you are 100% satisfied.

There are ways to ensure we don’t waste our time and money. The steps below will put you on the fast track to hiring a quality article writer that will work their ass off to please you.

How to Write a Job Description

Probably THE most important and overlooked part of the whole process is writing the job description.

Make shortcuts here and I assure you, it will cause you headaches further down the line. (I have learnt the hard way!)

I have tried many different variations of job description and today I want to share with you the one template that has proven time after time to yield great results.

Job Title – Premium Writer Required for 1000 Word Article

Job Description

Hi,

I have a article writing job that requires a minimum of 1,000 words.

I will provide you with the article title and subtitles and would like you to research and write a 1000 word article.

The article must be high quality and future work will follow for the right applicant.

Required:
– Native English
– Interested in completing this job quickly
– Interested in potential longer term writing assignment
– Article must be 100% original and pass copyscape
– Bid at or below the $6 guideline
– Include examples of you previous written articles in your application

Please start your application with the word [insert crazy work] so I can be sure you have read and understood the job description.

Ok now you’ve got the template we can move on to explaining why it works so well.

Weeding Out the Crap

The job description template has 3 key elements that will save you time and money.

1. We asks for Premium Content Writers and 1,000 Words

• The title is designed to attract writers looking for a longer term gig, these are the guys that will be proud of their work.
• By using the words “Premium Content“, I find many of the applicants who blindly apply for all content writing jobs, actually think twice about this one. It gives off the impression that we mean business and won’t accept anything below par.
• Having “1,000 words” in the title also puts off those who want to rewrite and submit crappy 500 word PLR articles.

2. We use the Crazy Word Filter

We will end each job description with the line below;

Please start your application with the word [INSERT CRAZY WORD] so I know you have read and understood this job description.

This may seem strange, however let me explain.

I won’t lie to you, you will get LOTS of applicants whose English writing skills are…poor to say the least. Awful would be more fitting.

What you will find is that these people will see your job title, not bother reading it and send you a copy/paste application that they have stolen/borrowed/or had someone else write.

By asking them to include our “crazy word” (which could be a fruit, an animal or a colour) at the start of the application, it allows us to quickly filter out those that have not read the description and didn’t include out “crazy word”.

As you can see from the image above, using this sample of 4 applicants, 3 are using my crazy word “Tiger”. The one who didn’t was rejected instantly.

Trust me you are better off without these applicants. If they can’t follow simple instructions, they will be the cause of those headaches I spoke about earlier!

3. We ask for Sample Work

This step may sound obvious, but it’s a big one that will save you a lot of time.

I often reject applicants based on the sample articles they attach. If I am still not sure I run the article through a plagiarism tool to check the uniqueness (tool is given below in the “Assessing the Quality” section).

If they don’t attach sample work even though we have asked for it in our job description, once again I will reject their application. This keeps the process slick and only allows those who can follow our simple instructions through.

Additional Filters

There are additional filters we can add to our job listing to further funnel our applicants.

• Skill Required – This section comes in handy as oDesk will show you how many of the skills you list here are met by each applicant. I use article writing, content writing, article curation and internet research.
• How would you like to pay? – Always fixed price for a writing job.
• Budget – I use $6 for a 1,000 word article as a guideline, applicants will generally come in under this amount.
• Estimated end date – I usually allow 4 days
• Freelancer Type – I only work with independent freelancers as agencies can be a pain!
• Marketplace visibility – I choose “only oDesk users can find this job”
• Preferred Qualification – It’s easier to show a screenshot for this section;

So that’s all for the additional filters. Those should put us in a good place to get some good applicants.

N.B – There is a new section when posting a job on oDesk titled “Screening Questions”.

Whilst I haven’t used it myself yet, I do think it’s a great idea for other jobs such as video creation or hiring a programmer. However for article writers and VA’s it will just slow us down having to read the answers to the questions.

Feel free to give it a go, however I prefer a slick process.

The Interview Process

The interview process can be a big time drain. We should have filtered out the poor applicants by now, however there will still be some that have slipped through the net.

I take a different approach to most on interviewing; I prefer to pay a little upfront in order to save a lot of time.

Here’s what I recommend you do;

1. Shortlist each applicant you are interested in.
2. Send each one a message with an article title that you can use for a niche site/private network site.

Message each applicant with the following (adding your own info between the square brackets);

Hi [VA’s Name],

I am considering you for the role of [YOUR JOB TITLE] and wanted to ask if you would complete a paid test article?

Please could you write a [500] word article on the following topic, using the same for the article title;

“[insert article title]”

Please add relevant facts and figures, including tables and quotes where possible.

Content should be 100% unique and pass copyscape, I check all articles I receive.

Once I have your article I will review, make payment, and then decide if we can work together.

Thanks

– [Your Name]

** Don’t forget to replace the text in brackets with your own information!

The above message gets a very good response rate as the writer will get paid for the work. It also provides us with immediate content which you will be able to use in one way or another;

1. Money site
2. Private Blog Network site
3. Web 2.0 site
4. Fiverr Gig Guest Posts

Assessing the Quality

This should be fairly easy for you to gauge, as it will be your own site you are posting the content on. For money sites I run a tight ship, for PBN sites I am a little more relaxed but it’s getting to the point where even those need to be top notch.

For example, on my money sites I want multiple levels of detail such as facts and figures, tables and links to resources etc.

For blog network sites I am still after quality, but I allow the writer a little more freedom to let the writing take them where it may…as long as they stay on topic of course!

If the writing is very poor then I would consider using this for web 2.0 link building.

I use just one key tool when it comes to assessing the uniqueness and quality of an article;

The Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker – http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/

When you find a writer that gives you 100% unique articles like this, it’s worth hanging on to them 

Negotiating a Price

Once you’ve found a good writer or two, you need to work out a price that both parties are happy with. One good tactic I use is to calculate the price per word you have paid for the initial article.

To use one of my own writers as an example. I paid $5.56 for the initial article of 1,000 words, which works out to be $0.00556 per word.

After a couple of weeks he was producing 1,400 word articles when I asked for 1,000, 800 when I asked for 500 and so on. The content was that good I thought I was under paying him and I went back and offered him more work on a per word basis.

So I now have him writing on a $0.0056 per word basis. To give you an example I now pay the following;

500 words = $2.80

1,000  words = $5.60

1,500 words = $8.40

2,000 words = $11.20

Managing Your VA

You can download my spreadsheet below which will help you manage your VA and enable you to keep track of content you have requested, received and planned.

Article Manager.xlsx

The bullets below explain each column in the sheet and why I include them. Feel free to take the sheet and modify to your own needs.

Column Name	Description
Title	The keyword(s) the article is targeting
Exact Search Vol	The Exact number of searches from the Google Keyword Planner
CPC £	The Avg CPC from the Google keyword Planner
Assigned	Have you have assigned the article to a VA?
Assigned Date	The date the article was assigned
VA Name	The name of the person you assigned the article too
Location	VA's location (helps with contact times etc)
Cost /word $	The cost per word in USD
Delivered	Has the article been delivered?
Length	How many words the article contained (to calculate total cost)
Article Cost	Total cost of the article based on number of words contained
Published	Has the article been published to a website?
Published Site	Which website the article was published too
Comments	Any other comments (useful if an article is sent back for revision etc)

For each new VA,  I will assign them 5 articles and I always ask them to send the first completed article back to me before writing another. This enables me to check the style, grammar and direction and put them on the right path if need be.

Once I am happy with the quality and style, I will then send batches of 10 articles each time and ask them to get back to me once they are all completed. This is a massive time saver and one step I recently implemented, which removed the need to continuously log in to oDesk and download documents.

Extra Tips

This section covers some additional tips and tricks I have found to get the most out of oDesk and your virtual assistants.

Finding an All-Round VA

I like to have a few VA’s in my team that can cover the tasks that take up a lot of my time, or for those I just plain don’t want to do.

For example I had a niche site that required a huge directory containing locations throughout the UK, including names, addresses, email and telephone numbers. I wasn’t looking forward to the task and as such I continually put it off for 3 weeks!

I decided enough was enough and I assigned the task to one of my VA’s. Long story short, the task was done in 7 hours…whilst I was asleep! I woke up to a completed excel file containing all of the details I needed.

I then assigned the next task to another VA who had access to the backend off the website. He was to use a page I had already created as a template and created over 100 pages just like it.

So it took me all of 10 minutes to create the template and assign the tasks. Total cost to me = $15!

Here’s how I find VA’s for $1 Per Hour

Here’s my process in a nutshell.

1. Create a job description similar to the one above for the writer – however I make a few changes;

All Round Assistant – WordPress, PDF, Excel, Post Articles

Entry Level ($) – I am looking for freelancers with the lowest rates

Job Description

Hi, I’m looking for a great all round assistant who can do the following;

– Create posts & pages in WordPress
– Add images to posts with Alt tags and descriptions
– Web research to find images relevant to posts
– Able to create PDF documents

IF YOU CANNOT DO THE ABOVE PLEASE DO NOT APPLY

Other Requirements:
– Good level of English
– Great with WordPress
– Great with Excel
– Good spelling, grammar and writing skills

IF YOU CANNOT DO THE ABOVE PLEASE DO NOT APPLY

I am looking for a long term assistant who can find their way around WordPress without assistance.

Please start your application with the work TIGER so that I know you have read and understood what is required.

Please provide evidence of recent experience.

Thanks

Notice how I repeat the sentence “IF YOU CANNOT DO THE ABOVE PLEASE DO NOT APPLY”, you will get a lot of applicants. I regularly get over 100 for such a job posting.

Also see the “Crazy Word” tip in use at the end! 

The Hire or Fire Method

What I do is shortlist the standout applicants.

• Those who include the “Crazy Word” at the beginning of the application
• Those who have a good grasp of English
• Those who have a reasonable hourly rate ($1-$2 per hour)

Sending The Test

The next step is to send a blanket test to your top 3 applicants.

This is a big timesaver and the reason I choose my top 3 is simple. If one of them passes the test and I am happy, I hire. That’s it, no messing about waiting for 50 people to complete your test.

If none of the first 3 pass the test, send it to the next 3 and so on until you find your All Rounder VA 

What Is the Test?

Here is my test template;

Hi [VA’s Name],

I am considering you for the role of [YOUR JOB TITLE] and wanted to ask if you would complete a simple task so I can assess your suitability for this role?

Please can you find 1 suitable image and 1 suitable video for the article below.

You can use Google Images and YouTube or any other media source you know of.

[insert article link]

Please choose an image and video that fit the topic of the article and reply back with the URL links to both the image and the video.

Once I have your links I will review and decide if you are suitable for this role.

Thanks

– [Your Name]

** Don’t forget to replace the text in brackets with your own information!

The above test does 4 things.

1. Test the VA”s understanding of written English and their ability to associate an image and video to an article is a biggie, as I have my VA’s frequently find media sources for my niche sites.
2. Asking them to send the URL’s is a simple step and anyone computer savvy should be able to do this….you would be surprised how many don’t understand this step!
3. Shows us if they can follow simple instructions, whilst also testing their research skills on both YouTube and Google Images.
4. We also test the response speed and communication skills of the VA.

From this we can determine if we should Hire or Fire.

Be ruthless, if you didn’t like something either explain and let them correct, or move on.

Conclusion

I hope the tips and templates in this article will help you to hire your first VA if you haven’t already done so. I honestly believe the best way to grow your online business is to outsource.

By outsourcing you will free up your own time, so you can spend that time doing those things that will enhance and grow your business.

If you have any tips or best practices for hiring and working with VA’s, let me know in the comments below.

– Lewis

http://www.cloudincome.com/find-awesome-content-writer-for-less/