The Newly Rich

Today’s example was the first “ongoing” task I requested of our virtual assistant.

Having an online business, I wanted to know how it stacked up against our leading competitor by measuring Google search rankings. Not only that, but I wanted to gauge how my company rankings changed week-to-week compared to my competitor. This was a task for George. So I explained to him that I wanted a weekly update on the rankings posted on a Google spreadsheet.

I left this task fairly open-ended for George because I hadn’t thought through best way to format the rankings. I just provided him with a list of words or phrases to search for, asked him to come up with a format to make the rankings easy to compare, and let him have at it.

George,

I want to be able to make comparisons between —— and ——. To do this, do a Google search on each of the words or phrases below and record the rankings on a Google Spreadsheet. Come up with a format that makes it easy for me to compare rankings and then share the spreadsheet with me. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

-Jed

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This is one of those tasks where I really didn’t want to be pestered with questions, I just wanted it done. After a couple weeks, I noticed that I wanted something changed on the formatting, so I made a comment for George once I saw the results:

Great work thus far with the spreadsheet! I’ve got a few things I want to tweak with the formatting. The goals are to be able to see at-a-glance:

1. how we stack up against — for each given term
2. what rankings have changed (for better or worse)

The spreadsheet you currently have can accomplish that, but I think we can tighten things up a bit.

With that, he made the changes, and I had a regularly updated spreadsheet with rankings for the next three months.

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