Dennis Yu

The Mindless Video Editor and SEO Expert are Irreversibly Doomed

Virtual Assistant, Clients, Office Hours /

This morning, I told this incredibly talented video editor that he would fail trying to work on my content. Despite his vast experience in video editing and his deep knowledge of all the tools, he would still fail. Because what matters most is actually understanding the content. Imagine you are a Greek language instructor specializing in advanced conversational techniques in Greek. Someone who doesn’t speak a word of Greek confidently tells you they can create killer short-form videos that will make you a sensation on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. What would your response be? Often, a video with zero editing has more impact than one with 50 hours of editing by a mindless VA who adds distracting bits to make it “interesting” in their eyes. What they fail to realize is that the purpose of editing a video is not to add unnecessary, oddly placed special effects, but to improve how the video conveys the intended message. To achieve this, video editors must first understand the content itself. Consider this short-form video on Instagram: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jason Hunt (@jayhuntofficial) AI tools like Opus.pro can create these clips for a nominal monthly fee. They are actually far better at selecting clips from long-form videos than many video editors, who struggle because they do not fully understand the content and believe they don’t need to grasp the GCT of the material they are working with. While AI tools are powerful, they can’t deliver optimal results on their own. Human curation is still essential, but it must be done by someone who truly understands the content. When a person fully grasps the goals, content, and targeting, they can complete the task a hundred times faster, avoiding the #1 VA mistake. And this doesn’t just apply to video editors; it includes “social media experts,” website builders, and really anyone with a specialized skill. Most tool experts or experts in digital marketing make this mistake every single day and aren’t aware of it. How about an SEO expert or agency that claims they can drive you 100 more leads each month? If the “expert” doesn’t understand your business or your strategy, it doesn’t matter one iota how many years of experience they have. They will fail to deliver results. We have already seen how AI tools outperform humans in mechanical tasks like editing videos, writing articles, and managing PPC campaigns. But these marketing companies are not intentionally scamming you. They honestly believe that they are qualified to take your money. That’s why anyone in SEO, social media, or digital marketing needs to specialize in a niche or an industry vertical, such as plumbers. They should focus exclusively on plumbers, deeply understanding what works for them rather than trying to invent something entirely new, no matter how appealing that might seem. Digital marketing for local service businesses is a matter of copy and paste, since marketing for a plumber in Orange County is not much different than a plumber in Chicago or Dallas. But the ingredients for success must come from the plumber: their reviews, their proven experience fixing leaky valves and their reputation in their community. The job of anyone doing digital is to understand this. Then repurpose those ingredients into social media, the website, and everywhere else. Then boost it to make the phone ring more, whether LSA, Facebook ads, SEO, email/text campaigns, direct mail, etc. Yet some eager young adults armed with the latest AI tools, who don’t understand strategy, will create massive damage. Do you see why the marketing landscape is so full of hype and waste, and why marketers are still so confident? Strategy, again, is to deeply understand what the client does (goals, content, targeting) and to amplify what’s already working through the 6-phase Content Factory. How do you ensure that confidence in your skills doesn’t overshadow the importance of active listening and adapting to your client’s needs, so you can deliver measurable results that truly add value to their business?

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Improving Communication as a Pakistani VA: A Guide to Efficiency and Clarity

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Do you see the chat I had with a Pakistani VA above? This is a common theme when it comes to my communication with international VAs. In this post, I’m going to dive deeper into the chat you see above, and explain how Pakistani VAs can learn from the mistakes of others to improve their wages and build more trust with their team members and clients. I work with many people, including virtual assistants (VAs) from Pakistan. Our work together is crucial, but I’ve noticed a few communication hurdles that can hinder our efficiency and overall success. I want to share some insights and advice to help our Pakistani VAs communicate more effectively with American businesses and teammates. If you’re a VA from Pakistan, reading this blog post could mean the difference between getting paid standard wages, or getting paid American wages. The Challenge of “Hi” Messages Let me start with a common scenario: I often receive messages from my VAs that go something like this: “hi,” followed by another “hi,” and later, a “how are you?” These messages, while friendly, lack a clear purpose or urgency. This pattern highlights a misunderstanding between synchronous (instant messages or calls) and asynchronous (emails or task management updates) communication, and when to use each. Synchronous vs. Asynchronous: Knowing the Difference Synchronous communication is like knocking on someone’s door—you expect an immediate response. It’s great for urgent matters but can be disruptive for non-urgent issues. Asynchronous communication, on the other hand, is like leaving a note on the door. The person can respond at their convenience, making it perfect for updates or non-urgent questions. As VAs, distinguishing between these can significantly improve how we work together. Before sending a message, consider its urgency and choose the appropriate communication method. Applying RACI in Our Communications RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It’s a framework that helps clarify roles in communication, ensuring messages are directed appropriately, reducing confusion, and improving decision-making efficiency. Understanding and applying RACI ensures that you, as VAs, communicate with the right person at the right time, making our collaboration smoother and more productive. Communication Best Practices for VAs To make our work together as effective as possible, I recommend the following practices: In Conclusion Effective communication is the foundation of our success. By understanding the nuances of when and how to communicate, we can work together more seamlessly, respecting each other’s time and contributions. I’m committed to supporting our team’s growth and efficiency, and I believe that by applying these practices, we will achieve even greater success together. If you’re a business owner who employs a VA from Pakistan, you should consider having them go through the Level 1 Virtual Assistant course, where we teach how to communicate and operate effectively.

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Exposing the 4-Hour Workweek Myth: The Reality of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, Growth Mindset, Hustle, Personal Growth, Success, Virtual Assistant /

Let’s chat about this whole 4-hour workweek thing that’s been floating around. You know, that idea where you’re sipping a cocktail on a beach, working just a few hours a week, and everything magically falls into place? Well, reality check—it’s not as simple as it sounds, especially for those diving into your careers or hustling as entrepreneurs. Now, I’ve been around the globe as an entrepreneur, and let me tell you, success doesn’t just drop in your lap. Sure, there might be a few unicorns, but it takes serious grind and effort for most of us. Life throws curveballs, plans go sideways, and you work harder than you ever imagined. I’m not here to rain on anyone’s parade, but I’ve found that the 4-hour workweek vibe can send mixed signals, especially to those just starting. Working a few hours a week isn’t the magic formula, especially when pulling a fat paycheck. In my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve poured my heart and soul into my ventures. Success isn’t about clocking in minimal hours; it’s about putting in the sweat equity and dealing with the unexpected twists and turns. Even if you’ve got what seems like the perfect plan, the real world has a funny way of shaking things up, and suddenly, you’re putting in more time and effort than you bargained for. Let’s be real—success, whether in business or your career, is about grinding it out. It’s about facing challenges head-on, learning from your stumbles, and consistently putting in the work. Don’t get me wrong—flexibility and work-life balance are crucial. But it’s about finding a rhythm that matches your professional responsibilities while pushing you to grow personally. So, as you navigate your path, remember that the 4-hour workweek is a cool concept, but achieving your goals is a journey that demands hustle and dedication. Embrace the challenges, learn from the hiccups, and recognize that the real deal often takes more time and effort than the dreamy idea of a minimal workweek suggests.

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I’m Hiring a Full-Time “Website Expert” for my Friend Roger Wakefield

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Roger Wakefield (Google him and see his YouTube livestream with me a few days ago on SEO agencies) is well known among plumbers. Based on what we discussed in the livestream above, we need multiple landing pages for home service businesses to sign up for an audit. For now, collect their email and website url, but in a few days collect a bit more information via our SPP (service provider pro) white-label. Since this is a two-sided network, we are also training up digital marketers to be certified Googleists– to then be able to implement the broken items that our tool finds for the home service businesses that get scored. Think of it like providing a MRI to patients who are in pain– so we can diagnose what’s wrong, then recommend particular specialists to treat. We use LearnDash (a WordPress plugin) to house our courses– so in a future phase beyond this one, you can help us tune these courses, too. We also use Infusionsoft (now Keap) to do order pages, allowing people to pay. While we already have our dashboard, learning management system, and two-sided marketplace mostly built, we still need someone to understand this well enough to be able to build compelling landing pages. So while you may be great at Elementor, ClickFunnels, or general front-end dev, the most important part is understanding the business model here. Since the ROI of these landing pages, not the beauty or technical sophistication, is what matters. This project is a first phase only to build landing pages for home service businesses and digital marketers to enroll, of which I can see 10 more phases to performance tune (optimize copy and workflow to improve the user experience) and integrate better with what we have. While ChatGPT is great at writing persuasive copy and even generating creatives, I expect you to reply thoughtfully here without using AI tools– to demonstrate you actually understand. We encourage you to use AI tools in this project (we even have courses on this, if you Google for it with my name), but to respond to this job post, we want to know what you actually think. We are not hiring agencies— since I want to work individually with the person doing the work. I expect excellent email responsiveness (no weekends or evenings) and the ability for you to work in a team environment (with the folks building the tools and providing the examples we sprinkle into landing pages). You do not have to be an engineer or a marketing expert, but you should clearly demonstrate understanding of our specific strategy here, as well as how we like to keep tuning based on what the data tells us. Please include a video of yourself up to five minutes long giving a recap of the livestream mentioned at the top of this post, and explain how you can help Roger achieve his goals. Looking forward to selecting someone awesome, which I hope is you! If you really want to stand out, spend some time looking me up (Dennis Yu), especially on Google and Facebook, so you have more context into what we’re doing. It’s all on the web and easy to see– as we honor what we teach about “Are You Googleable”.

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You Can Make $10,000 as a Virtual Assistant Regardless of Your Origin

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I want to raise our minimum wage for virtual assistants to $10 an hour. That’s $1,760 per month– which is 10 times what most VA companies pay their people. This is not a slam at virtual assistant agencies, who bill $15/hour but pay their people $3/hour. Just because you live in the Philippines or Pakistan doesn’t mean you should be paid less. I don’t care if you’re 15 years old or 55– if you can do the work, you should be paid what that task is worth. If you’re black, Muslim, short, or whatever– doesn’t matter to me. We can measure the exact business impact you generate for local service companies. How many more calls come from our SEO efforts, Google Local Service Ads, regular Google ads, and social media? In the 4-stage Content Factory framework, we trace content efforts to customer revenue in ServiceTitan or CRM. So, when you have analytics that ties traffic to revenue, it’s not about how many articles were posted or videos edited. In the last 5 days, I’ve met with some incredibly talented digital marketers who happen to be from Pakistan. Some of them are making $5,000 or even $20,000 a month— not because they know how to “sell”, but because plumbing/HVAC and pest control companies can see the increase in calls. Why would you still pay people based on how much content they can pump out when ChatGPT can beat us at that game? If you’re in a developing country- perhaps living in a remote village with weak wifi- this is your opportunity to make a great income and support your family. But you must qualify via the standards in our group (Digital Marketing With Dennis Yu)– active listening, team skills, and all 4 stages of the Content Factory. The training for all this is free for you. If you’re a local service business in the United States, it’s time to own your marketing— whether with an in-house or an agency. To have ownership and control of your accounts and a clear audit path– via the 5 steps we outline here: People fear AI will eliminate jobs, which is not exactly true. What will happen is that the most competent players will be more effective with an arsenal of AI tools. Since these AI tools help advise us, process existing content, and optimize campaigns…. Not to generate new content out of thin air, but to help us leverage what customers say about us– especially our existing photos, videos, and reviews. The quality of the digital marketers necessary to operate this AI machinery (AI tools across all 4 stages of the Content Factory process) requires empathetic understanding, not technical skills in a single tool. The people who edit videos, build websites or just run ads– no matter how expert at their favorite tool– will be replaced by generalists using AI tools, who understand the industry– like what plumbers do. I can see a day when millions of virtual assistants in developing countries make $10,000 a month– after having gone through our training, qualifying to enter our program at $10/hour. I’ve been meeting with leaders of the top universities and NGOs to put our Content Factory training in the curriculum. We are excited for the virtual assistants and US-based young adults growing their niche agencies by managing these teams.

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Everything I Do is Content Production

Virtual Assistant, Dollar a Day, Strategy /

I just came to a weird realization. Everything I do is content production. Attend a meeting, respond to an email, write a few lines of code, build a landing page, film a course, negotiate a contract, speak on stage, run an ad campaign, and even make this post. It’s just content production. Contrast that with someone that builds physical products or renders a physical service, where you have physical raw materials, equipment, and inventory. Because I don’t render a physical product or service (except those clever face socks), I’m a VA. A few friends have stated that I’m the world’s most prominent VA since we have hired an army of them and helped others employ many more. But if you are a coach, consultant, speaker, author, counselor, or service provider, are you not a VA too? Why Content Production is Impactful Most of your job is content production, even if you are technically an attorney or a doctor. If so, the maximum leverage of your time is to produce “content” instead of processing it, posting it across many channels, or promoting it. I want to redefine VA as the latter three stages while we, as practitioners, are in the first stage. If you agree, perhaps we should all be staffing our Content Factories with VAs to handle those three other stages. My life mission is to create a million jobs for international workers to serve us in this way. I have explained “how”; it has an embedded video explaining the people, processes, and platforms to enable this for us all. How to have a significant impact on small ad budgets? It’s just such an intelligent way to manage risk for people that are risk-averse and hate losing money on ads. Do a dollar-a-day strategy against your top content that has worked with organic; also have 1-minute video ads that drive eyeballs to the top content. What do you think?

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Warning: We Immediately Reject VA Applicants Who Make These 3 Mistakes

Virtual Assistant, Training /

The journey to getting a $2,000 a month job and beyond is not a single step. You must diligently put in the time to learn communication skills, technical skills, and build connections. Once you have these 3 components solidly– to be qualified enough to work with the clients who expect excellence– then and only then can you begin at this level. It may seem unfair that we (our agencies and those businesses who follow us) won’t hire people who aren’t qualified or won’t start paying on your first day of training. But this is what causes so many young adults, who are otherwise bright and hard-working, to be stuck where they are. They might have great technical SEO skills, but lack communication skills or lack the network. You need to have all 3 components— and this is what we teach. Over the years, I’ve hired hundreds of freelancers, VAs, and team members and I’ve noticed three common mistakes that candidates keep making. We want to help you improve your chances of getting a job with us by highlighting these mistakes and how to avoid them. Mistake #1: Reaching Out to Me Directly One common mistake applicants make is reaching out directly to me or other team members without any preparation. If you send a generic message that says, ‘Dear Sir, please hire me,’ it shows you haven’t taken the time to research our company. It becomes clear that you’re not following us on social media or understanding the types of projects we’re involved in. This lack of effort makes you blend in with the thousands of others who are just blasting out their resumes. Before you post or message with “hi sir” or “hire me” watch this video: We have a structured hiring process in place, so it’s crucial to follow the instructions and personalize your approach. Doing so will help you stand out and put you ahead of 95% of other candidates. Mistake #2: Lack of Personalization If your potential client already knows who you are, they are 10 times more likely to hire you and they will pay 10 times more. Why? Because hiring someone halfway across the planet is all about trust. The best way to build trust is to engage professionally. Personalize your message and mention something specific you’ve learned about our company. This will set you apart from most other candidates. For example, look at this guy. He has no idea what we do, but expects us to hire him to manage our team. Before you reach to a potential client, spend 5 minutes looking up what they do. This is the most common mistake freelancers and agencies make. They believe if they message enough people, they will get clients. Build a relationship before asking for business. Mistake #3: Not Checking Your Message for Grammatical Errors Always pay attention to grammatical errors, capitalization, and punctuation. We assess your ability to communicate clearly, and mistakes in your message can hurt your chances, even if English isn’t your first language. While you don’t need to be a professional writer, it’s important to avoid sloppy errors. Clear communication is crucial, so make sure your message is well-polished before sending it. A Players Only – No Exceptions We have an A Player only rule. The key is that competent people should rarely ever need correcting. And they are fast– not because they hurry or are sloppy, but because they are competent. Anyone coming into the company needs to be qualified before they can start charging us. We want everyone to become excellent at processing content– these are paid positions where we expect excellent work. In the case of clients who pay us to provide support and training, we render services. We’ve made our training 100% free to anyone who wants to learn and demonstrate the necessary competency to be hired at Level 1, the lowest acceptable level of quality. And then we expect them to progress up through the levels. It usually takes a few iterations to get something of decent quality, since there is a learning phase– and hopefully not too much QA or personal support to get there. With any task or skill, there is a clear pattern to follow which anyone can publicly and openly learn from for free, though many prefer private one-on-one mentoring for grammar and such. Most people will take 10-20 iterations to get something of barely usable quality, if they can even get to that point. And if they’re not reliable, this can drag on for weeks and months– taking up a lot of my time and other people’s time to chase– which is a multiple of the minutes it would take a competent and reliable person to do it. Understanding the GCT (Goals, Content, Targeting) Being capable of adding critical context requires understanding the GCT (goals, content, targeting) of the original video/article. When VAs disregard GCT, for many reasons that appear valid to them, they make the #1 VA mistake. The result is vandalism of our assets, the need for someone senior to come repair, and also providing one-on-one coaching to the VA about why skipping GCT isn’t a good thing.  Trying to convince a vandal usually results in failure– because they are unwilling or unable to see the problem. They insist on how they’re well-meaning and are competent. And when that fails (it always does), we attempt to ask them to practice active listening (which sometimes works). Anyone who works on ANY content must understand the GCT of that particular piece of content, which also means understanding how it fits into the related topics– not just the tangential topics, but the ones upstream (larger topics) that fit into the bigger picture. The “expert” in video editing, copywriting, Google Ads, or whatever technical skill is most likely to make the #1 VA mistake– because they blindly believe their one functional expertise exempts them from having to understand the content they’re working on. And, thus, the reason why the #1 VA mistake is so powerfully

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Do you live in Pakistan? We have advice for you on how to make yourself more hirable to American agencies.

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I recently sat down with my buddy Gavin Lira to chat about hiring VAs from Pakistan. He shared some great insight. Starting his business from a young age, Gavin Lira always wanted to lead an innovative PR firm centered around client delight. The Empathy firm is the realization of this dream. Gavin has been featured in high profile publications like Forbes and has a TEDx talk forthcoming. He also runs a podcast that has interviewed great people like the founder of Make-A-Wish, Frank Shankwitz. The Empathy Firm continues to secure 5-star reviews, and Gavin is committed to building on the company’s success by elevating client experience through humanity-driven PR. Gavin: A lot of times it’s graphic design related. Or, and this is one that I don’t see talks about a lot, get contributor access to different publications, like Net News Ledger, Influencive, The American reporter, etc.  If you put in the work to get a few good articles out there and you can get contributed access to these publications, you become very valuable for a PR firm. You can be seen as an asset, because that means now when you write stories, you can work the clients that we get into those stories as well, which is clearly better for our clients, which is something we’d be looking to do. Dennis: Getting contributor status is tough because you have to have a good network, and great English. You have to have love articles out. But, one thing that I like to do, and we have friends in Pakistan that work on our team that do this, is they’ll take videos of interview, like of me and Gavin, where he’s interviewing somebody, I’ve interviewed somebody, and help us turn them into articles.  I’m a contributor on a lot of the sites that Gavin mentioned. If you can work on these articles, mainly these videos that we have, and that’s why I’ve been posting about things like Descript, then you could help us get these done and that’s easily worth $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month to be able to do stuff like this.  Learn the skills with Descript and learn how to process these kinds of articles. The software’s free to use, and you can follow Gavin and me and you could see the content that we put out there.  Gavin: How can you take these different assets, pieces of content, a podcast, or whatever somebody is going on, and make that go further, too? If you can make someone’s life better without taking more of their time, that’s going to be a good path to you having more success with what you’re doing. If you can take a podcast that someone’s already spent their time to go on and help them repurpose that without needing anything else from them, that’s will make you more employable. Dennis: You should be able to edit one of these podcasts within a day. And when you take that raw video, let’s say it’s an hour long, chop it into pieces, turn it into an article, post it on YouTube, create the little social snippets that go on Facebook and Instagram and the other sorts of social networks, and cut up 15 second snippets for TikTok, which we can turn into ads. If you can do that, you’re looking at $50 in one day. If you work 20 days in a month, that’s a $1,000. That’s pretty good income.  And the beauty is all that training’s out there. If you follow us and see what we’re doing. So in the group, what I don’t want you to do is to message me or reply back saying that you need a job. I want you to put in the effort to actually research these different tools. Look up what Gavin does. Look up what I’m doing. And show that you actually have these skills. Put in the effort to be proactive, learn these skills, and then post in the comments, showing something that you’ve done. And we’re going to hire a bunch of folks. Rehan hit me up earlier this morning, talking about how he’s built his whole facility for a bunch of you guys to even live at, and spend six months living on the campus. What a fantastic opportunity! I’m going to come out and see you guys as well. We just have to arrange the logistics.  Gavin: The best way to get a job is to show don’t tell. So if you can make a piece of content, say it’s fro ma podcast Dennis was on, and you tag Dennis and you use Descript to repurpose everything – and you did a great job – then tag Dennis in the group. Say, Hey, you know, I absolutely would love to talk further about this. I made this piece would love to hear your feedback on it. Whatever it is, if it’s good, then now you have opened up the door for an interview to explore further or potentially even getting hired on the spot. Dennis: The best way to qualify is to look at the videos that Rohan and I have made and show that you can cut out different pieces using Descript. Just demonstrate that you can turn them into an article. You can pull out the different cut lists. If you don’t know what a cut list is, or the other things we’re talking about, do the research to look at what that is, and then think about how just doing that kind of project, even though you’re working for free to demonstrate you have the capability is a difference between where you are right now and making $500. Gavin: It’s about doing things differently, right? Everyone wants to go and get the interview and then they want to learn after they get the job; you gotta do things differently. If you want different results, you have to learn before. And then you have to show that in order to get

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Today, it’s No Longer a Question of Whether You Should Hire a Virtual Assistant.

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Rather, which VAs will you hire from what networks for what tasks do you need to be done? We love using Fiverr, onlinejobs.ph, and allstaroutsourcing.com. Fiverr is for general creative gigs. Onlinejobs.ph is for full-time VAs that manage a process for you. And All-Star Outsourcing is for busy service professionals that want to grow their brand without getting mired in trying to do the work themselves. Glenn just launched this service, so go try it out by getting a task done.

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Most of our VAs start at Level 1, but they don’t stop there.

Virtual Assistant, 9 Triangles /

It’s a restatement of #LDT in the 9 Triangles— that we must actually earn our level up, instead of believing we should “negotiate” for it. We have had dozens of prospective VAs insist they should start at a higher level than they’ve demonstrated competence. And each time, we explain why we cannot award prizes ahead of them earning it– a gold medal before they begin training since they are certainly capable of it and the prize would motivate them. The beauty of the leveling system is that it’s clear and fair.Anyone can level up, so long as they are willing to learn and capable of completing the work. Despite this, we’ll see people routinely come in and say they can run our entire company when they’ve not demonstrated they can manage a team, nor demonstrate world-class expertise in digital marketing– to be able to earn the respect of people who would be under them.

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