Outsourcing Market Research: VA's Way Of Optimizing Your Niche

Written by Tyrone Shum Sunday, 15 May 2011 06:42

Basically many people have been returning to me and so saying, "Tyrone, I'm wanting to setup a system where I can get my virtual assistant or my virtual staff as a way to research on some topics and so forth" then it's actually quite easy to perform. All that you really need is to make sure that you have the right system. So what I would like to give you today is how to accomplish that and how I begin setting all this up. Fairly recently, I had a lot of people who had been doing a lot of work for me then getting a lot of research done for my niche selection topics. Now, what I'm talking about this is the niche duel challenge that I'm running currently with Pat Flynn. And, it can take some time for you to undergo then find the suitable niche markets then to find the appropriate products that will suit what we're currently doing for our projects. Now I outsource all that research tasks then all that type of niche market selection then so on. And so to undertake that properly and to complete that correctly is firstly I have to ask them to understand what precisely I'd prefer.

Basically many people have been returning to me and so saying, "Tyrone, I'm wanting to setup a system where I can get my virtual assistant or my virtual staff as a way to research on some topics and so forth" then it's actually quite easy to perform. All that you really need is to make sure that you have the right system. So what I would like to give you today is how to accomplish that and how I begin setting all this up. Fairly recently, I had a lot of people who had been doing a lot of work for me then getting a lot of research done for my niche selection topics. Now, what I'm talking about this is the niche duel challenge that I'm running currently with Pat Flynn. And, it can take some time for you to undergo then find the suitable niche markets then to find the appropriate products that will suit what we're currently doing for our projects. Now I outsource all that research tasks then all that type of niche market selection then so on. And so to undertake that properly and to complete that correctly is firstly I have to ask them to understand what precisely I'd prefer.

I strive for getting the information that I have in my head and then put it into a video recording or into a document in order to understand specifically detail by detail what to accomplish. And so the first thing You should do is to create a simple video tutorial. Perhaps no greater than 5 minutes then you can use a really good software called Jing. Or if you don't have Jing and so you don't want to download it, it's free, you can use Screenr.com which is also free online screen capturing software then screen capture exactly what you want her to try and do. And so let's just take for instance, I wanted my virtual assistant to do a research task on Clickbank to find out which markets would be viable to market and promote products in a niche market which is untapped. And, it wasn't that tough. All I had to is just get my Screenflow software on and I said look, please go here, click there, go here and simply bit by bit process of what she needs to try to to. And so she needs to perform 20, 30 of these kind of researched topics then obviously she knows the procedure that's going all in there. Then that's how I begin recommending her to carry out research topics.

Also, if she needs to try to to something which I think that she's quite intuitive and so if you allow them the responsiblity too, I would just say look to complete research topic on say this specialized niche, please go out then find top 10 topics that you would be interested in and also potentially creating content. This is a two-hour time frame that you have for getting this completed and so go ahead and so do it. Now, notice how I said two hours or time frame limit. If you don't specify that, you simply are providing them with a legal limit in order to say look, I'm going to go out there and so just spend as many hours as I'd prefer. We hope they don't do that but if you don't restrict the time, it really doesn't know how long they should be spending on a task. By forcing a time say 2 hours, 1 hour for research topic then it enables them to think okay, I've got to specify within say 2 hours, I have to spend 20 minutes or say 12 minutes on each topic researched then that's it.

And so that's how I go about researching topics or researching tasks. The other thing I just want to note as well, too is I don't recommend sending these materials via email to them because it's tough to observe what's going on. As I've recommended numerous times to a lot of my students also to a lot of my members is to apply a project management system. A project management system allows you to watch all the things that are happening inside your project. So project management system I recommend is using ActiveCollab. Then inside ActiveCollab, you can do, you can set it all up as a way to setup your projects, setup your milestones then the tickets which is basically to-do tasks. If you don't have ActiveCollab, try BasecampHQ as well. That's an excellent piece of project management software.

Then that's generally how you go about planning your research tasks to your virtual assistant then just be certain that they understand what you want to accomplish because the more that you specify then the more you're clear concerning the description and so the duties that you've got in hand, the quicker you get it done.