As I mentioned in my post Working From The Virgin Islands, I have started reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. So far I’m about 175 pages in and saving the rest for the time I’m going to waste in the airport because of the “Blizzard of 2009″ that has struck the east coast. However, I’ve already covered a vast number of concepts that I’m thinking of making series about because the question is: How do they apply to Internet Marketing as we know it?

Sure, he started his business BrainQuicken, LLC and sold male supplements online but our business models are entirely different. Ours are ever-changing and their are an infinite number of differences between our business plans and traditional e-commerce websites. The first idea that I’ve been thinking about is the idea of having a virtual assistant. I remember reading a blog post a while back by Justin Dupre that talked about how he wanted to hire a VA and he had a lot of very good questions about how much a VA could actually understand about Internet marketing…

I’m going to be honest, I thought it was ridiculous before but now I really want one! I feel like I do so many tasks that waste time during the day and having someone monitor IM’s and emails would free up a lot of my time for real work. However, there is a downside… if you want someone cheap then you have to go foreign and with that comes trust issues as well as a language barrier most of the time. Ferris recommends two sites in particular, I won’t reveal all the sources publicly because that’s probably not legal nor is it fair but he recommends to check out these two: B2k Corp and YourManInIndia.

I wouldn’t feel 100% comfortable having a VA pause and resume my campaigns plus the training for doing something like that might be a little excessive but I could see it working. If you could just specify if the CTR does not reach this level by X amount of impressions, do so and so. Something that simple is easy if you work full-time but if you are busy travelling or whatever you could have someone monitor your campaigns and perform tasks like this as long as you gave out very detailed instructions.

Having a VA monitor instant messaging clients, emails and your campaigns to a certain degree while sending you a daily report at the end of the day could free up a considerable amount of time. I would love them to be a buffer to affiliate managers out there that hound my screen name or phone number.

One very interesting question that Ferriss asks in his book to determine whether you could consider a VA is as follows:

Each time you are interrupted or change tasks, ask, “Could a VA do this?”

I think the aforementioned tasks definitely apply to that question. What are some other ideas/tasks that you think a VA could handle in your day-to-day?