Internet Research Freelance Jobs

A virtual assistant (VA) is a professional who provides administrative and support gigs. These can range from invoicing clients on a regular basis to managing a one-time project. Thanks to the wonders of email, instant messaging, conference calls, and video chat, your virtual assistant works remotely—he or she could be on the other side of the country, or even in another country—which means you don’t have to worry about finding additional office space.

Working from home, on your set schedule, from your own comfort, and earn more is not always as glamorous as it might seem. Becoming a Virtual Assistant it requires time and patience, along with some smart work. 

Assuming that you are clear with the basics of Virtual Assistant profession and know about the resources to find a Virtual Assistant services, let’s move on to how you can be more effective working as a Virtual Assistant.

How to become an Efficient Virtual Assistant?

Being an top professional Virtual Assistant is not rocket science and could be mastered with a little effort and patience. Given the high competition for these jobs, you need to stand out from your competition to land higher paying services.

Which basic skills make me a top virtual assistant?

Before you go on your virtual assistant journey, It is mandatory to make sure that you possess all the basic skills required. An ideal and successful virtual assistant would be on par with the basic skill-set required.

So do you think you have a good hold on the basic skills? Let’s go through a few basic skills expected by each client. Develope these skills and get hired today:

Comfortable with using Windows / Mac.

More than 45 words per minute.

Know how to use Internet and emailing.

Know the basics of social media marketing.

Have a good time and resource management skills.

Have a good understanding of newsletter creation.

Smartness

What should I do first to play experienced virtual assistant role?

Since 2007, virtual assistance has become a very in-demand field, and is seeing steady growth each year. With the numbers in mind, and the growing rate of business done online, it is no surprise that several virtual assistance companies have been born. These companies hire men and women from all across the world to work remotely and offer their clients the online support they need.

This is very good news for the brand new virtual assistant, because it means there are options for you to get a steady stream of work, steady paychecks, and professional support and training in the field. You can become a strong assistant very quickly, and then decide if you’d like to move up in the company or branch out on your own. Just be sure never to sign a non-compete agreement if you plan to eventually go it alone.

Learn about the basic ideas for the following term:

Customer Support

Processing Online Orders

Wordpress Maintainance

Keyword Research

Content Research

Email Management

Must have required tools for being a good virtual assistant

A right tool-set is a power in the hands of VA to build a legacy out of nothing. Make sure you have got nothing but the best tools before you jump in the market to play a solid role of virtual assistant.

A phone (cell or landline)

A good computer/laptop that works perfectly.

At least two up to date browsers.

A good email client.

Skype or other chat software.

A good speed Internet connection.

A perfect reminder device which tells or update you about your upcoming challenges.

These are just the basic tools required, and most of the people would mostly satisfy the criteria.

Can I work on fixed schedule as a Freelance Virtual Assistant

No matter you work locally or remotely, nothing is going to work for you if you neglect the importance of a fixed schedule. Although virtual assistant allows you flexibility from your home office, that doesn’t mean you wake up suddenly at the wake of the night and start working.

Make a habit of working during the same hours of the day, every day. You don’t need a 9-5 schedule, but a schedule is a must to get the most out of your work. Make a schedule as per the times when you are at your best with least distractions and day in day out, work during the same hours.

What strategy need to build?

If having a plan is good, having a plan B is a must. So, for every plan that you make, have an alternative plan ready to execute. Things might not always work out the way you planned them to, so having a backup plan will help you in the long run.

Build a strategy of how many hours you’re willing to work,

Where you’re going to work,

What about your taxes,

You should continue making a plan, and you will end up with more questions to be answered even before you accept your first service.

How to satisfy my customer’s as a virtual assistant?

Deliver more: When was the last time you over delivered and your customer couldn’t stop singing your songs? For customers to sing your song you need to provide that rare high-quality service. So it’s always good to deliver more, surprise your customers and keep them happy.

Don’t always do everything to earn more and at least sometimes do for the love of it. I love making people happy and go the extra mile to deliver more than anyone expects. Go out of your way to leave a legacy in whatever you do. Make people remember you for what you’ve done rather than as a man who’s always bugging about the next paycheck.

Whenever there is a discussion regarding storing information on a 3rd party's database system, questions on security follow. Entrusting another company to stage your valuable information safe is a massive step. Once that information is in your control, you are aware of the protection measures in place to keep it safe.

Google assures users that it keeps all information safe and personal unless the user chooses to share files with others. As a part of its security measures, Google does not discuss its approach to security very well. Since users should have a Google account to access Google Docs, and since all accounts need passwords, we all know that at least one stage in Google's security plan depends on password protection.

Google Docs is the free data processing software that comes with a Google account. It’s designed to be easy to use. It can be used to create documents with rich formatting, images, and tables and features like footnotes, headers and footers, and page numbering. You can create your documents more engaging with pictures, drawing objects, and tables in Google docs.

Why Google Docs is the best way to create blog

If you're a professional blogger, all that you write must obviously be a result of your thorough research and will basically involve hard work. Whether it's Blogspot or WordPress, text editors of each of those blogging platforms are up to notch. Each text editors not only automatically save the post you are writing but also provide sufficient resources for content data formatting that helps you present well your content. Google Docs offers you the easiest and simplest way to format your content, provide blog templates, share it with collaborators, and even upload immediately to whichever CMS you use.

Integrate google keeps with google docs

Google Keep has officially been labelled as a part of the Google Suite of tools. It’s currently very easy to keep notes for a document you're working on. Along with the Explore feature, Google Docs has become a seriously impressive tool for business, education, and just about the other purpose that requires note keeping as you write. Google docs provide a tool to integrate google keep notes into document.

Migrate google docs to Microsoft word

Google Docs are in a web format, we can’t simply import them into Word! To open Google Docs in Microsoft Word, we need to need to convert Google Docs to Word’s DOCX format, then transfer it afterward. You can easily perform this conversion from Google Docs.

Google Docs has been around for a little while now. Businesses are adopting the tool as the way to extend efficiency and usability of information. I have yet to work for a business that actively uses Google Docs on a day to day, however I will definitely see the benefits of google docs.

1. Accessibility: With Google Docs, staff can access the information 24/7 where they have an internet connection. This kind of flexibility is very useful, particularly for workers who are typically travelling and working from mobile devices.
2. Version Control: Collaboration have a lot of importance within the workplace. Being able to not only access information from anyplace, but to be able to control the version of any document your staff are working on is a huge asset to your company. Google Docs permits you to add and take away collaborators. You can control exactly who can make changes to the document. In addition, multiple users can access and edit the same document at the same time.
3. Easy to Learn: Google Docs is very straightforward and easy to pick up. If you have any experience with a word processor or programs such as Word, Excel, etc.
4. Import/Export Flexibility: Google Docs imports and exports most file types, giving you the flexibility, you need when sending and receiving files from colleagues.

Hire Google Docs experts on Toogit.

What is a web scraping?

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may access the World Wide Web directly using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or through a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying, in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

Web scraping a web page involves fetching it and extracting from it. Fetching is the downloading of a page (which a browser does when you view the page). Therefore, web crawling is a main component of web scraping, to fetch pages for later processing. Once fetched, then extraction can take place. The content of a page may be parsed, searched, reformatted, its data copied into a spreadsheet, and so on. Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else. An example would be to find and copy names and phone numbers, or companies and their URLs, to a list (contact scraping).

What you can do with data scraping?

Web scraping is used for content scraping, and as a component of applications used for web indexing, web mining and data mining, online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping (to watch the competition), gathering real estate listings, weather data monitoring, website change detection, research, tracking online presence and reputation, web mashup and, web data integration.

Using data scraping you can build sitemaps that will navigate the site and extract the data. Using different type selectors you will navigate the site and extract multiple types of data - text, tables, images, links and more.

What role scraper should play for you?

Web scraping is the process of automatically mining data or collecting information from the World Wide Web. It is a field with active developments sharing a common goal with the semantic web vision, an ambitious initiative that still requires breakthroughs in text processing, semantic understanding, artificial intelligence and human-computer interactions. Current web scraping solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human effort, to fully automated systems that are able to convert entire web sites into structured information, with limitations.

Below are the ways for scraping data:

• Human Copy Paste : Sometimes even the best web-scraping technology cannot replace a human’s manual examination and copy-and-paste, and sometimes this may be the only workable solution when the websites for scraping explicitly set up barriers to prevent machine automation.
• Text Pattern Matching : A simple yet powerful approach to extract information from web pages can be based on the UNIX grep command or regular expression-matching facilities of programming languages
• HTTP programming : Static and dynamic web pages can be retrieved by posting HTTP requests to the remote web server using socket programming.
• HTML parsing : Many websites have large collections of pages generated dynamically from an underlying structured source like a database. Data of the same category are typically encoded into similar pages by a common script or template. In data mining, a program that detects such templates in a particular information source, extracts its content and translates it into a relational form, is called a wrapper. Wrapper generation algorithms assume that input pages of a wrapper induction system conform to a common template and that they can be easily identified in terms of a URL common scheme.Moreover, some semi-structured data query languages, such as Xquery and the HTQL, can be used to parse HTML pages and to retrieve and transform page content.
• DOM parsing: By embedding a full-fledged web browser, such as the Internet Explorer or the Mozilla browser control, programs can retrieve the dynamic content generated by client-side scripts. These browser controls also parse web pages into a DOM tree, based on which programs can retrieve parts of the pages.
• Vertical aggregation : There are several companies that have developed vertical specific harvesting platforms. These platforms create and monitor a multitude of “bots” for specific verticals with no "man in the loop" (no direct human involvement), and no work related to a specific target site. The preparation involves establishing the knowledge base for the entire vertical and then the platform creates the bots automatically. The platform's robustness is measured by the quality of the information it retrieves (usually number of fields) and its scalability (how quick it can scale up to hundreds or thousands of sites). This scalability is mostly used to target the Long Tail of sites that common aggregators find complicated or too labor-intensive to harvest content from.
• Semantic annotation recognizing : The pages being scraped may embrace metadata or semantic markups and annotations, which can be used to locate specific data snippets. If the annotations are embedded in the pages, as Microformat does, this technique can be viewed as a special case of DOM parsing. In another case, the annotations, organized into a semantic layer,are stored and managed separately from the web pages, so the scrapers can retrieve data schema and instructions from this layer before scraping the pages.
• Computer vision web-page analysis : There are efforts using machine learning and computer vision that attempt to identify and extract information from web pages by interpreting pages visually as a human being would.

Key Features of Web Scraping

In order to remain competitive, businesses must be able to act quickly and assuredly in the markets. Web Scraping plays a big role in the development of various business organizations that use the services. 

The benefits of these services are: 

1. Low Cost: Web Scraping service saves hundreds of thousands of man-hours and money as the use of scraping service completely avoids manual work.
2. Less Time: Scraping solution not only helps to lower the cost, it also reduces the time involved in data extraction task. This tool ensures and gathers fast results required by people.
3. Accurate Results: Web Scraping solutions help to get the most accurate and fast results that cannot be collected by human beings. It generates correct product pricing data, sales leads, duplication of online database, captures real estate data, financial data, job postings, auction information and many more.
4. Time to Market Advantage: Fast and accurate results help businesses to save time, money and labor and get an obvious time-tomarket advantage over the competitors.
5. High Quality: A Web Scraping solution provides access to clean, structured and high quality data through scraping APIs so that the fresh data can be integrated into the systems.

Finding and hiring expert scraper/crawler

It’s important to note that not all scraper will be ideal fits for every project. For example, those with highly analytical backgrounds in software engineering would be ideal for developing algorithms but may not be the right fit for a data scraping project. That’s why it’s so important to understand what type of scraping expert will bring the most benefit to your company and business goals.

Here are some questions to consider:

What is the overall learning you hope to find? 

By including your goal in the project description, it allows professionals to better understand what type of work is required.

What core skills will scraping experts need to complete the project? 

The answer will revolve around your current data infrastructure and the processes used to extract information.

Would you benefit from someone with highly specialized skills in a few areas of data scraping, or would a well-rounded expert serve you better?

Are there any time constraints to consider with this project?

Let professionals know the amount of hours of work that might be involved.

What kind of budget will this project have? 

The more experience and expertise a data scraper has, the higher they expect to be compensated. Higher budgets will more likely give top-tier experts a reason to submit a proposal.

Web scraping project template

Below is a sample of how a project description may look. Keep in mind that many people use the term “job description,” but a full job description is only needed for employees. When engaging a freelancer as an independent contractor, you typically just need a statement of work, job post, or any other document that describes the work to be done.

<Job/Project Title>

ABC Company is looking for a web scraping expert to help us study our website traffic patterns and find areas of improvement. This project is estimated to require approximately 20-25 hours per week for the next few months to achieve the following goals

• Reporting findings in a weekly summary
• Split testing underperforming pages and recording results
• Discovering which pages currently perform best
• Organizing site data into spreadsheets

The following skills are required:

The ideal freelancer will be a creative problem solver with an excellent work history on Toogit. To submit a proposal, please send a short summary of similar projects you’ve completed and why we should consider you for this project.

• Excellent technical abilities
• Knowledge of quantitative split testing
• Experience with WordPress and Google Analytics
• A thorough understanding of MySQL databases
• Expertise or extensive experience with Python

Hiring the right Web Scraping talent

Remember that technical ability is only a small portion of what makes an excellent web scraper. Great web scrapers are inquisitive—they want to ensure that they’re seeking the right types of answers, plus they’ll take an interest in your business to better understand it. The ideal professional will also be able to advise you on additional metrics to analyze and compare in order to help you meet your goals.

Also, keep in mind that communication is always a key consideration in the data science field. A brief interview can allow you to gauge how strong each professional is in expressing ideas and explaining their process. The more you speak to each professional by phone, email, or chat, the better you’ll be able to gauge their professionalism and communication skills and determine whether they’re right for your project.