LongerDays Review Reveals 8 Reasons I Hired Them (and Stick with Them)

LongerDays helped me take one niche blog from 400,000 monthly page views to 1.1 monthly page views in 4 months.

LongerDays Services

  • Quality of Service
  • Customer Service
  • Range of Services
  • Price
4.8

Summary

You get what you pay for. LongerDays isn’t cheap, but you still get excellent value for money because LongerDays hires talented people. Their project managers are outstanding (I’ve worked with 3).

On several occasions I’ve tested work from agency style writing services and they never measure up to the quality I get from LongerDays. No service I’ve ever worked with has provided such capable project managers.

If you truly want to be able to outsource some or all of your work worry-free, try LongerDays.

FYI: I’ve been with LongerDays approximately 18 months and have no plans to leave.

Once my niche authority blog hit more than $20,000 monthly profit, it was time to get some help.  I was spending an awful lot of time on recurring tasks that could easily be handled by other people.

However, I didn’t want to hand over tasks to just anyone.  After all, I’ve spent a lot of good money on bad help in the past.  If you’ve hired help online, you know the drill… you spend more time on training than the time it saves you.

I had used ODesk, Elance, GetFriday as well as hired many individual freelancers over the years.  While some of that help was okay, none of it would meet my needs this time around.

I spent 2 evenings reading as much as I could about higher-quality online outsourcing and virtual assistance services.  I also considered hiring a local college graduate full time to run the day-to-day stuff.

My outsourcing service criteria were as follows:

  • Native English speakers (USA, Canada, UK or Australia)
  • High-quality work
  • Preferably a full-service company (instead of hiring individual freelancers such as one writer, one social media expert, etc.)
  • Preferably all employees of the service would be in the same location
  • Capable of scaling up and down on a month-to-month basis.
  • Affordable.
  • Could do all the tasks I needed done (writing, social media and contacting people within the niche).

After 2 nights of reading and research, I narrowed it down to 2 companies: LongerDays and another service (which will remain nameless).  Both met every criteria above, except the service I didn’t hire had their employees work remotely all over the USA.

I actually hired both services in the beginning.

LongerDays was up and running within 48 hours.  The other service took 3 days to return my inquiry.  It took another 2 days to send in a task… by that time LongerDays had completed some articles for me.  The writing was on the wall.  LongerDays knew what it was doing.  The other service was totally inept.

Video Review:

=> Start a free LongerDays trial here.

Since hiring LongerDays I haven’t looked back…

I’ve scaled up big time with the virtual assistance of LongerDays.  When I hired them, I believe my niche blog was getting about 400,000 monthly page views.  Now it’s at 1.1 million monthly page views.  Increases in profit is equally impressive.  Not bad for $2,600 per month.

LongerDays handles 80 percent of my content generation and 95% of my social media posting.  I author a few blog posts each week and post a few things to social media when inclined; otherwise, they handle it all on a recurring basis.

This allows me to focus on media buying, monetization, email marketing, conversion testing and other non-recurring tasks that helps the bottom line.  More importantly, LongerDays gives me time to pursue other projects and have more time off.

How much is LongerDays?

They aren’t the cheapest virtual assistance service online… but then they’re 100% based in the USA.  You do get what you pay for.

They charge $26 to $40 USD per hour.  The more hours you use in a month, the lower the cost.

What do you get for $26 to $40 per hour?

This is the good part.

8 Reasons I Continue to Work with LongerDays

1.  Dedicated project manager

Having a dedicated project manager is the WAY to go when hiring help online.  My project manager supervises the various people involved  (i.e. writers, social media posters, outreach team, etc.).  This way I need only communicate with one person who knows every facet of the outsourced tasks.

Having a dedicated project manager saves me an enormous amount of time.  If I were dealing with 3 individuals, that would mean spending three times the amount of time giving instructions and delegating.

Moreover, the project manager’s time is billed at the same rate as the other work.  This is a very good deal.  If you were to hire an executive assistant in the real world, you’d pay a lot more.  My project manager is extremely capable, kind, proactive… she takes care of everything.

While I generally email back and forth with my project manager, I also have a direct telephone number in the event a telephone call is the best way to handle a task or situation.

2.  Specialized workforce

This is another great attribute of LongerDays.  The service employs quite a few people; each person specializes in a particular area.  This means when you have writing tasks, you get a great writer.  When you need social media tasks completed, you get people who know their way around social media channels.

A specialized workforce means better quality work in less time.

3.  All under the same roof

I love the fact that everyone at LongerDays is in the same office.  This makes communication and getting things done much faster.  I can email or telephone my project manager and she can walk over to a person and get an answer or get something completed ASAP.  It’s much better than dealing with people in different time-zones waiting for responses, etc.

4.  Scaling up (or down) is a breeze

Because LongerDays is a full virtual assistance company, scaling up or down is easy.  I just have to give a few weeks notice.  I”m not locked into a contract; I can adjust my monthly hour package month-to-month.  If I need to ramp up production, it’s not a problem – I just pay for more hours and it’s taken care of.

Moreover, if someone quits, I don’t have to train someone.  My project manager trains them; there’s pretty much no hiccup in production.

If I hired freelancers and they quit, I have to halt everything and find and train a replacement.  With LongerDays, I don’t worry about this.  FYI – I have nothing against freelancers; there are no doubt many outstanding freelance workers out there.  My point is I simply prefer a more full service virtual assistance company to handle my many recurring tasks.

5.  High quality work

This is very important.  I require excellent work.  LongerDays delivers.  Their writers are better writers than me.  Their social media folks are efficient and handle a very heavy social media posting workload (10 times per day for 7 days per week).  The project managers (at least mine) are very capable people who get  the job done (I can’t imagine juggling all that they do).

I’ll illustrate with an example.  One day my Project Manager was checking over one of my sites on which LongerDays works and she found a broken link.  She immediately called me to let me know about it.  I didn’t ask her to do this.  She just noticed a problem with the site and proactively told me about.

6.  Easy-to-use task submission form

When you sign up, you get access to the backend where all your tasks are tracked.  There’s also a simple task-submission form to fill out for each task.  This is a great feature because everything is tracked in one place (instead of filing dozens and hundreds of emails if you typically email tasks with other services… which I’ve done).

Here’s a screenshot of the back-end:

LongerDays Task Submission and Backend User Interface

7.  Client security

This was another feature that I was keen to have.  LongerDays uses LastPass for client passwords.  This means people accessing my various accounts such as social media accounts never get access to my passwords.  Only upper management has access to my passwords.

Also, every employee signs a non-disclosure agreement.

8.   Pleasant to work with

My project manager is a pleasure to work with.  She’s friendly and energetic.  She loves her job and it shows.  She’s proactive and actually thinks about what my online business is about.  She makes suggestions and takes care of problems when they arise (which is pretty rare).

Could LongerDays be improved?

Yeah, I know, this LongerDays review is turning into a bit of a love-fest article.  It’s warranted though.

Nevertheless, there are 2 changes that may benefit me (they’re selfish suggestions):

1.  Slightly lower hourly rates for high volume use  

I currently pay for about 100 hours per month; yet my hourly rate is the same as a 40 hour per month plan.  I’m not suggesting I pay $12 per hour, but perhaps slightly less.  That said, I do believe you get what you pay for, so I’d prefer paying higher rates for the same quality of work I get now.  I actually like the fact the people at LongerDays earn a decent wage… which is becoming rare in the online freelance world.

2.  Weekend service

I know that the people at LongerDays are people with real lives and families.  It’s actually great to be hiring a company that pays decent wages and is open regular business hours instead of the growing 24/7 trend.

However, there have been instances where weekend service would have been nice.  It’s not a necessity for my line of work, but it would have been nice.  Overall, I’ve adapted to their schedule (Mon – Fri. 9 to 5:30 Eastern Time) and plan accordingly.

I’ve voiced these suggestions to LongerDays.  I doubt they’ll do anything with these suggestions.  In fact, a big part of me hopes they don’t embrace my suggestions because it would be compromising their business model which is in-part creating a great place to work, which contributes to happier employees, lower turnover and better work in the long run.

Is LongerDays right for you?

If you have recurring tasks, are tired of hiring inept people and services and would like a project manager handle everything for you, LongerDays is for you.

If you’re looking to hire someone for $3 per hour, don’t bother.  However, if you’re serious about getting great help and have the budget, I recommend them.

Does LongerDays offer a free trial?

Yes, they do.  You can use up to 2.5 hours over a 7 day period for free.

=> Click here for a free LongerDays trial.

 

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