Tasks You Can Outsource to A Virtual Assistant

Today, I’d like to share some tasks you can outsource to a virtual assistant. These tasks are really geared for bloggers, affiliate marketers and anyone growing an online business. However, some of the tips and ideas will also be relevant to traditional business owners.

Do you ever feel like you are running around like a chicken with its head cut off? Taking care of a home-based business has so many duties and responsibilities, and managing all of them as a lone soldier is nearly impossible.

What really does not make sense is when a business owner is doing menial tasks that are not necessarily bringing revenues in. Yes, these tasks do need to get done, but should you be the person doing those tasks? In my opinion, the answer is no. The wise business owner considers outsourcing many of those tasks so he/she can focus on the revenue building tasks.

Reasons You Should Outsource To A Virtual Assistant

Here are some simple reasons you should outsource to a virtual assistant.

# 1: To reduce your workload. There is only so much time in a day. The worst thing you can do is spend your $100 per hour time on $5 per hour tasks. Work smarter. Hiring a VA can help you do that.

# 2: Business growth is sure when you have help. If you want leverage, you need help. If you want to scale your business, you need help. You can’t do everything on your own, nor should you try to.

# 3: They may have skills in areas you don’t. What might take you three or four hours to do, you can hire an expert for a few dollars per hour to do, and they can do it in half the time it takes you to complete the task.

# 4: You do not have to pay employee benefits. Employees are expensive. When you hire a virtual assistant, they are an independent contractor. You do not have to pay payroll taxes or fringe benefits.

# 5: The ability to add other business functions. There are lots of things that need to be done in a business. When you have other people helping you, you can offer additional products or services and focus on important business functions, such as sales and marketing.

# 6: You can show more presence online. A good VA can help you grow your SEO, online presence and social media following, all while you focus on other tasks.

# 7: You don’t have to have extra office space. When you hire employees, you need additional office space, which is expensive. Not so with a virtual assistant.

# 8: More competent customer service. You can hire a VA to help you with customer service or to do other things so you can focus on providing the best customer service possible.

# 9: To provide you with more family and leisure time. Time is money. It is the only thing you can’t get back or get more of. The more you outsource, the more time you have for your leisure and family life.

These 9 reasons alone are excellent reasons to outsource to a virtual assistant.

Tasks You Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

I will be the first to admit that it can be difficult allowing someone else to do some of the things in your business. After all, you have built the business this far, but if you want to grow, you need to let go and allow another person to help.

Just a little tip here… You may have certain ways of doing things and you should tell your virtual assistant how you do it. But if he/she has another way, I suggest you give them the opportunity to use their way. The key is getting results; even if it means “taking a different road to do so.”

Some of the jobs you may give a virtual assistant…

Technical tasks you don’t know how to do and don’t have the time to learn.
Time consuming tasks.
Tasks you don’t enjoy or you really do not want to do.
Any tasks that don’t actually make the cash register ring.
Any $7, $8, or $10 per hour tasks that a CEO should never be doing.

Let’s go further and dig into some of the tasks I, or people I know have outsourced to a virtual assistant. I’ll break these tasks down by category, to make it easy to follow and comprehend.

Website Creation and Web Administration

This may be an area that you would want to hire a freelance IT expert, but I know there are many virtual assistants that are quite capable of covering some, or all of these tasks.

Updating your websites
Landing Page set up and/or creation
Create/edit content
Create/post images
Fixing or deleting broken links
Optimizing Your Database
Updating plugins

Email Marketing

Emailing newsletters and follow up messages are an important part of any business structure, but it is something you should have a virtual assistant doing.

Writing emails
Email formatting
Scheduling emails
Replying to emails
Scheduling broadcast emails
Auto-Responder setup
Deleting unsubscribes and inactive email subscribers

Social Media Management

One thing I have discovered is consistency is best on social media. By having a virtual assistant helping you with various social media accounts, you can ensure consistency.

Manage social media accounts
Research & creation of social media posts
Grow social media presence
Reply to comments and questions
Schedule social media posts
Share links on social media

Website Promotion & SEO

If trained properly, a virtual assistant can easily do this task. Web promotion entails many aspects and you can have your virtual assistant handle things like:

Solo Ad creation
Post Ads to Classified sites
Manage PPC campaigns
Create A/B Testing campaigns

SEO is short for search engine optimization. There are many things you can do to optimize your website pages so they will be discovered in search engines easier. While most things are really quite simple, they can be time consuming. That is why using a virtual assistant is your best choice.

Updating SEO on webpages
Link building
Keyword research
Promote blog posts in social networks, forums and comments on other blogs
Installing alt tags in images

Managing Your Blog

Your blog can be a huge piece in your business. But as a business owner, taking time to manage your blog could harm other important aspects of your business. Contracting a freelance virtual assistant who has blog management experience is wise.

Content / Blog post creation
Managing Blog post publishing
Proofreading
Manage/Moderate blog comments
Editing and posting your content
Fixing broken links
Adding images and/or videos
Evaluating Google Analytics
Disavowing bad links
Creating data spreadsheets

Web Research

A major part of any business is research. You may research information for content, research competitors or research target market data. Again, this can be quite time consuming and it is in your best interest to hire a virtual assistant to handle your web research.

Market research and reporting
Conduct surveys with your audience for ideas on future topics
Page insight reports
Article research
Analyze the competition and similar industries
Research ideas for new content
Identify affiliate opportunities
Research new software and other tools that could help you grow your business

Multi-Media

From images to videos and even podcasts, a virtual assistant can be the perfect answer. While you may actually “shoot” a video or take a picture, there is more to it than just download or upload and go. Your virtual assistant can help with…

Video and Audio transcriptions
Audio/Video Editor
Designing eBook-covers, graphics and banners and social media post images
Photo creation and editing
Webinar creation
Podcast creation

Customer Service/ Support

One thing I have learned in the world of business is, treat someone well and they will tell 2, 3 or 4 friends, but if you treat someone badly or they are unhappy with their purchase, they will tell the whole world.

Customer service is one of the most important aspects of your business. If trained right, your virtual assistant can be your “near perfect” answer to your customer service area. He/she can:

Make cold calls
Handle customer service tasks
Answer inbound calls
Making outbound calls
Managing live web chat
Email / ticket handling
Attending to existing customer’s inquiries and even complaints as a customer service representative.

Miscellaneous Tasks

There are also some other things your virtual assistant may be able to handle too…

Booking appointments
Sending invitations to meetings and events
Invoicing
Hotel, flight and rental car booking
Creating PowerPoint presentations
File conversion and merging
Comment on other blogs to create back-links

Final Thoughts

I do want to say that you may find that some virtual assistants are skillful in a few of these areas and not in others. What is great is, you are contracting them for what they do. You are not hiring them as a full time employee. So there is nothing wrong with having one virtual assistant covering some areas and another working where they are most skillful.

There are various sights where a person can contract and outsource to a virtual assistant. You may try:

Those are just a few places and I do suggest you interview and test out virtual assistants. There are many good ones but like anything, there are some bad ones too.

If you have any questions about what to outsource to virtual assistants, just ask below. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for visiting.

Sincerely,

Chuck Holmes
20+ Year Network Marketing Professional
Top Earner & Top Recruiter
Email: mrchuckholmes@gmail.com

P.S. Learn how to grow a successful network marketing business. Secret tips, training, and practical ideas. Free training delivered by email.