A lot of the other comments are spot on. Namely hire selectively, treat it as you would any relationship, be clear in your instructions and get a sample of each

A lot of the other comments are spot on. Namely hire selectively, treat it as you would any relationship, be clear in your instructions and get a sample of each task before having them spend 10 hours doing the wrong thing. A lot depends on the kind of work you want them to do, but I recommend hiring two at a time. One in the $10-15/hr range, and one in the $3/hr range. The higher paid one is for things that require critical thought, good english, and reliable judgment. Writing emails, filtering out the useless info provided by VA#2, managing other tasks. The $3/hr one is for pure menial labor. For instance, you want to find a group of blogs on snowboarding to contact regarding your snowboarding product. Have them return an excel file with the blog name, blogger's first name, blogger's last name, blog address, link to relevant article. Stuff like that. The fact is that you're outsourcing work, but not all of that work is the same. Don't pay someone $15/hr to do stuff that someone can do for $3/hr. And don't waste your time and money by paying the cheaper VA to do tasks that they can't do well.