30 Things a Virtual Assistant Can Do For You
If you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, or even business owner, chances are you’ve had or been a Virtual Assistant (VA) at some point in your career. If that’s the case, I think we can all agree that VAs are an important and often underestimated part of the business world.
However, if you haven’t heard of the term, let me introduce it to you. Also, make sure you stick to the end of this post as I will list 30 different things that a VA might be able to take off your plate. Trust me, if you’re a fellow VA, a business owner, or even a blogger, it will be quite eye-opening.
So, what is a Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant is someone who provides various services to entrepreneurs or businesses from a remote location. They are a key ingredient to helping startups, and early stage entrepreneurs get off the ground, but a great asset to small business owners as they can help manage the never-ending tasks on their to-do lists.
Maybe you’re wondering, “But why should I delegate any of my tasks to a VA?” Well, first of all, VAs are independent contractors; therefore, saving you money on training and taxes. Secondly, you save time as you have someone to do your shallow, time-consuming tasks for you.
For example, if you’re a blogger, you can hire a VA to research topics, come up with blog post ideas, and support you with advertising and affiliate marketing. That way, you can focus on what’s really important to you - your blog content.
What Can a VA do to help your business grow?
Content
There’s a common myth that anyone can write content. But let’s not forget that, after all, content is a form of art. Also, in recent years, content writing has proved to be a crucial element in the digital marketing world. A lot of marketing projects fail because they’re unable to deliver quality content. That’s why it’s a good idea to outsource your posts to an experienced Virtual Assistant.
Here’s what you can delegate to your VA in terms of Content:
Writing Articles: If you’re an entrepreneur at heart but seem to lack the creative part, then you might want to consider hiring a VA to do you content writing. And there’s no shame in that. Many successful businesses outsource similar services to virtual assistants.
Editing Articles: Sometimes even if you write decent content, you need someone to take a second look at it. And in many cases, VAs can offer you their great editing skills. It takes less time than writing the piece itself, and you still ensure the quality of content.
Guest Posting: This is a popular outreaching technique where you write short pieces for other websites to increase exposure on your website. Usually, organizations prefer to hire VAs for that job since it’s something hat the more important employees shouldn't have to focus on.
Creating Newsletters: Newsletters are a great way to share the latest updates with your customers regularly. VAs are perfect for that. Newsletters are usually send out once a week, so why not hire a virtual assistant to give you a hand with that?
Content for Brochures: Brochures usually include short, straightforward messages that you want to communicate to your audience. Still, employees would invest time and energy into it while they can focus on more important tasks. This is where you VA comes in.
Translate short Pieces Into Other Languages: As we mentioned previously, virtual assistants are usually remote workers that can outsource tasks to from anywhere in the world. This means that many of them are bilingual. That gives you the perfect opportunity to translate your content into other languages without hiring an actual translator.
Digital Marketing
You might have an incredible vision of how you want to grow as an entrepreneur. And that’s great… if you have the right means to do so! Remember that as a leader, you can’t do everything on your own. Sometimes you need support from people with more expertise than you. And sometimes you need VAs to do all the work that you don’t have time for.
When it comes to marketing, countless mundane tasks are important for maintaining a stable market position. However, do you really want to spend your time on shallow work, or do you prefer getting a VA to do it for you?
Here’s what your virtual assistant can do while you focus on what’s important:
Community Management: This is a great way to care for your existing customers/readers. When it comes to digital marketing, your VA community manager will be responsible for the growth and maintenance of that community. This means they’ll have to respond to comments and complaints, gather feedback, and keep the conversation online going.
Social Media Management: Let’s say your have a great social media strategy and you have everything planned out, but you need someone to actually post, schedule, and monitor your platforms. Social media management is one of the most common things a virtual assistant can do. So why not involve your VA in that process?
Market Research: Let’s face it - we all hate research. We hated it in all of our college courses, and we still hate it now. And for those of you who actually enjoy it - I envy you! So have fun researching on your own, but for all the regular folks out there - just hire a VA to do the job.
Keyword Research: If you have an online business, changes are you know how SEO works. Therefore, you also know the importance of keywords for your Google rating. Usually, keyword lists consist of boring extensive excel sheets that take hours to create. That’s why hiring a VA is the way to go. You save time and energy while you still get your important keyword list.
Reporting: I don’t think I need to elaborate on the important of reflection, evaluation, and reporting when it comes to digital marketing. Performance, traffic, and ROI are all reporting processes that you can to your VA.
Web Development
As you can probably guess, website developer VAs have varying levels of expertise. Virtual assistants that help with web development usually focus on the front-end of the website. Most of them deal with style sheets such as HTML and CSS. there can create websites using WordPress, Six, or Squarespace but can’t code a website from scratch.
In any case, don’t expect anything too complex from your web dev VA. At the same time, they can still be handy for your website. Here’s how:
Technical Support: It’s completely normal to have technical issues with your website, especially if you’re new to supporting an online platform. But don’t think you have to know everything about maintaining it. You can simply hire a VA to do that for you.
Manage your WP plug-ins: Sometimes you have a grand vision of how your website wants to look, but you’re unsure which tools you need to make it happen. Installing, customizing, and updating your plug-ins are all things that your VA can do so you don’t have to worry about technicalities.
Analyze and Report User Interface (UI): It’s important to know how your website looks and feels to your visitors. But it’s often challenging to look at it from an objective point of view. After all, you’ve worked many hours on it, and you can’t imagine how it would look if you’ve never seen it. Your virtual assistant can help with that.
Designing Infographics: There’s no doubt that hiring a graphic designer is inevitable when you want to grow your brand. However, you don’t have to do that if all you need are a couple of infographics or banners. You can simply forward the task to your VA. With tools like Canva, so they can do the job faster and more efficiently.
Maintenance: Maintenance is annoying and time consuming. That’s why getting a VA to look after the functionality, security, and troubleshooting is probably the smartest way to go.
General
Here are some other, more common tasks to outsource to a Virtual Assistant:
Bookkeeping - If you need someone to deal with your payroll duties such as calculating hours, transferring funds, adding expenses, updating salaries, sending estimates or invoices, you might want to consider hiring a VA.
Cloud Computing - If you work in a team, chances are you use a shared cloud to keep your documents organized and up to date. Your virtual assistant can help you launch and maintain cloud computing accounts such as DropBox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.
Answering Service - Handling incoming phone calls, leaving voicemails, and checking messages or emails can all be done by your VA. Also you can give them the responsibility to establish, update, and manage events in terms of calendar management.
Customer Feedback - Except for doing community management, your virtual assistant can handle your reader/customer feedback in various ways. For example, they can create forms or surveys to gather more information about the user experience
Transcribing - If you’ve ever had an internship, you know that transcribing meetings or interviews is the most annoying and time-consuming task. However, as a business owner, you don’t have to deal with that, as you can hire a VA to do it for you.
Conclusion
I must say that a virtual assistant is a person who will do the little time-consuming things that eat up from your time, but you can’t skip doing them (like pin creation and social media scheduling). Also, a VA is a great option for when you want a quality job done but don’t want to learn the extra skills necessary.
And even if you don’t stick to having a VA for too long, testing how your business can evolve by using some extra help is a must.
Most people’s initial fear before hiring a VA is that no one will be able to do the job as well as I can. You know what? More times than not, that statement is inaccurate.
If your business can afford the extra help, you need a Virtual Assistant. That could be the turning point in your business where you expand more than you ever imagined.
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more about the services I offer as a virtual assistant, shoot me a message! I’ll be happy to chat!
