When it comes to building your business, your time matters more than anything. So instead of becoming the all-around-boss, it pays to devote your time doing the essential side of your entrepreneurial life and leave the rest to a virtual assistant or VA to do them for you.
It’s just simple and plain smart to find a competent and trusted virtual assistant, than try being the superhero. Not only you’ll find hiring a virtual assistant unbelievably affordable, they might prove to be a real life-saver for you too! And just to kickstart your foray in outsourcing, see what are these tasks you can outsource to a virtual staff.
Tasks that can be outsourced to a Virtual Assistant
Managing emails. If there is one thing that many entrepreneurs consider to be sucking a bunch of their time, it is this. Usually, emails come in unexpectedly and they know the right timing to disturb you: just when you’re too busy working hard on a particular task.
Time wasters truly they are, emails amount to luxuries that cost entrepreneurs their focused workflow. And getting interrupted by emails is never worth it. So what’s best to do is to get somebody like a remote executive assistant to handle all your emails.
Checking and responding to emails would be one of the things you can instruct your virtual assistant to perform. You may also tell them that you will attend to important or urgent email only.
Schedule management. Your virtual assistant can also be your secretary. Honestly, you need someone who’ll answer calls in your behalf. Don’t discount their importance because just consider that procrastrination can still keep you stuck.
Like a full-time secretary, you can count on your point-of-contact assistant to keep an eye on your schedule. He or she will be there to remind you if there are charity balls you need to go to and people that you need to call.
Client and partner relationship management. Here is another task that’s still connected to secretarial workflow that your virtual assistant can do for you. You can put your virtual assistant in charge of sending out gift cards, thank you cards or even holiday cards.
Showing gratitude or appreciation to your clients or partners is something you must pay attention to. But with your very little time, expressing your regards can take up time, some effort and dash of creativity to send a gift card to your clients on holidays and anniversaries.
Doing this chore requires little information from you and very so easy to do. But if your hands are full, you might consider letting your virtual assistant do these things for you.
Bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a more complex and time-consuming chore than say receiving calls for your client. If you hired a virtual staff to do this job for you, you would need to trust them take care of your bills, invoices, payments and the likes.
The trust factor is really important since you would need to give over passwords and other personal information to a virtual assistant. With that said, this task is probably the hardest to give up to someone else, especially to an assistant who is offshore.
Social media management. If you or your brand is present on any of the top social media webpages, you know for sure that managing the pages, and answering a few comments or questions can be very time-consuming.
Outsourcing the task to a virtual assistant can let you leverage the time you save from handling comments and questions, including posting updates about your business. Social media management is after all a perfect task that you can delegate to your virtual assistant.
Content creation for blogs. If there is any one component that is considered the most time consuming, it is blog writing and posting. Blog creation plays a vital role in your content marketing efforts but it also consumes a lot of time, from researching the given topic to writing and formatting the articles for your website’s blog section.
With a professional virtual assistant, expect your blog posting quantity to shoot up, say on a weekly basis. An expert knows the trade by heart and requires minimal supervision when you let them begin.
So just imagine how much more you can do with the four hours you saved from writing a blog and monitoring your website in order to make sure your content is updated.
Website management and maintenance. Even if you have degree in computer science or a diploma in web design, it isn’t really wroth it doing it all. The task of managing and maintaining your website require more than a few hours to perform.
Getting a virtual assistant for website maintenance can ease you the burden of always having to check the server or browse if your website is down. Then our outsourced virtual assistant can go over some bugs and spam messages to the inbox of your website email address.
Of course there are other tasks you can outsource to your virtual assistant but we’ll cut it here for the meantime. The next question is where to find your virtual assistant and how to determine if you’ve found the right one you can trust.
We’ll go over these issues in our next blog. For the meantime, share your experience about certain tasks that you specifically outsource to a virtual assistant that you find helpful in growing your business.
