The following is a guest post by Angela Wills, an Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant who I’ve worked with on several occasions.

Your business is growing monthly and so are the tasks you need to do to keep up. Right about now you’re thinking “it’s time to get a virtual assistant to help me with this workload!”

But, are you really ready for a virtual assistant?

As a virtual assistant for a year and a half now I see a common theme with clients who eventually stop working with me. It’s not because I don’t do a great job (and not to be self-serving but I do a great job!) and about 99% of the time it’s not do to any personality conflicts (but those do eventually happen).

In most cases the client has failed to plan goals for what they expect from a virtual assistant.

Yes, setting goals is work, but what business task isn’t? Setting solid goals is so important to a profitable relationship with a virtual assistant that it should be something you do well before you even interview your first VA.

It’s not enough just to set goals and be done with it, either. I know, more work, but you really need to be tracking, testing and calculating a return on investment. You want hiring a virtual assistant to help you make more money, not cost you money in the long term.

Let’s put it into an example: Let’s say you’re paying a virtual assistant to submit your articles to various article directories. You need to know why you’re doing this. What’s your goal? What return will you get? How will you track that return? Don’t just submit articles because it’s the thing to do, make sure the time, effort and investment brings you a return that makes it worth continuing to do.

When you hire a virtual assistant you have to be responsible for making sure it’s profitable. The VA you hire doesn’t know your business well enough at the start to set your goals for you. A good VA will always be open to helping you get set up to properly test and track the tasks they are working on because they know it not only helps the client but also gives them a happy client who continues to need their services.

– Angela Wills, Internet Marketing VA