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If you're a small business owner and haven't yet thought about hiring a virtual assistant, you're missing the boat*not to mention a chance to earn significantly more than you are now. That's because working with a top virtual assistant could easily free up 10 hours or more every week for you to focus on what's really important - growing your business.

What is a virtual assistant? In the simplest terms, a virtual assistant is a professional who's an expert in any of a wide variety of tasks - from simple administrative work to more specialized fields such as copywriting or graphic design. A virtual assistant makes sense if you feel that you're "wasting time" doing tasks that would better be left to someone else.

Virtual assistants have many advantages over hiring full- or part-time staff, including not dealing with the headaches of maintaining a payroll, not having to provide office space, and more. But working with a virtual assistant isn't foolproof. Here are three ways to find and recruit the best virtual assistant for your small business:

* Use virtual assistants that have been pre-screened. Companies that know the virtual assistance industry inside and out can help you pre-qualify virtual assistant candidates by assessing their skills and abilities ahead of time. And this means more than just getting a read on their "hard" skills. It also means assessing "soft" skills such as communication style and rapport, which are critical in matching small business owners with the right virtual assistant. This can take a lot of the work out of hiring the right person. Check out www.Top100VirtualAssistants.com for an example of a service that pre-screens virtual assistants.

* Decide on your specific needs. Where do you need the most help? What are the tasks that need to get done, but that you can't or don't want to do yourself? Knowing exactly what you want before you start interviewing potential virtual assistants is crucial. You don't want to hire someone with a set of skills that, while they may be impressive, aren't right for your particular job.

* Budget wisely. Do a self-assessment and determine how much money you might typically make for an hour's worth of work. Then decide how much a virtual assistant is worth to you. For example, if you make $100 an hour, and you hire a virtual assistant for $40 an hour, by outsourcing just 10 hours worth of work a week, you would give yourself the ability to earn an extra $2,400 per month (or about $30,000 per year). It's also important to remember that a skilled virtual assistant can often do the same task in about half the time it takes the average small business owner (simply because they are a master of the technology, systems or other expertise that makes the task hard for someone not familiar with it). When this is the case, the right virtual assistant could wind up saving you more than $3,000 every month.