Wearing too many hats as an entrepreneur is one of the major reasons why you are struggling to grow your business. You do everything! You work from the sun up to the sundown and even through the night just to get all things done. It’s exhausting and uses a lot of your time. If you want to stay competitive in your industry, then be smart and hire a virtual assistant. There are so many important tasks a virtual assistant can handle or assist you with and they are the following:
1. Personal Assistance
A personal virtual assistant can book for flights and accommodations for you, manage your calendar, make personal purchases, and send out invitations and details requested by customers. They can take phone calls, answer emails, document minutes, and handle your personal accounts.
2. Social Media
Social media assistants can help keep a strong social presence and perform other tasks that are vital to your business. They can carry out the audit of your social media profiles and analyze traffic, mentions, and shares. Virtual assistants can research, create and schedule content for your social media pages that link back to your website. They can also monitor audience engagement, create ad campaigns, and analyze competitors’ campaigns.
3. Content Writing
Outsourcing content writing can relieve you of a huge burden and can make you focus on the other aspects of your business. The right virtual assistant can create articles, blog posts, case studies, market report, brochures, e-Books, guides, and other content material for you. They can interact with commenters on your blog and make guest posts to boost traffic to your site.
4. E-Commerce
A qualified virtual assistant can help grow your E-Commerce business by performing various tasks that include product research, product listing, writing descriptions, editing images, updating inventory, and processing orders. An E-Commerce VA can also do customer service and support; manage suppliers and account receivables, and perform market research and competitor analysis.
5. Digital Marketing
VAs can help you get more visibility, traffic, and leads through the following: audience targeting; developing web marketing strategy; email marketing; conducting competitor analysis; promoting website content; designing banner ads; and creating autoresponders and follow-up emails. Digital marketing is essential to your business because according to Smart Insights “If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!”
6. Accounting and Bookkeeping Services
Free yourself from doing administrative work that eats up a lot of time like accounting and bookkeeping. You can hire a virtual assistant for your accounting needs such as inventory management, auditing, record keeping, budgeting, year-end accounting, and projecting cash flow. The right VA can also handle bookkeeping, bank and credit reconciliation, balance sheet management, cash flow maintenance, process payrolls, and manage trial balance and accounting.
7. Financial Services
You can outsource cash management, account reconciliation, revenue and expenditure management, financial management, management of sales and purchase orders, and development of the business plan.
8. Spreadsheet Services
The services include the creation of various reports, charts, and graphics using spreadsheets as well as importing, exporting, and sorting of data. You can just focus on revenue generation because a VA will handle the data management aspect.
9. Audio and Video Editing
This covers video editing; adding music and graphics trimming footage segments; background noise removal; editing and uploading podcasts; and uploading files to YouTube, Vimeo, and social media platforms.
10. Email and Chat Support
Skilled VAs can analyze, record, and refer complaints about the resolution to concern departments. They can reply to queries by phone or email and register new customers. According to Kissmetrics, 44 percent of online customers said that one of the most important features a website can offer is having a live person to attend to their questions and concerns.
11. Web Design and Development
Virtual assistants nowadays can design WordPress websites and make them mobile responsive. They can also provide technical support; install security and payment protection for websites; web app integration; troubleshooting; writing tags; regular checkups and more.
12. Real Estate Services
A real estate assistant can perform data scraping from different websites; post real estate listings, send messages to leads; compile reports, schedule appointments, and follow-up by phone or email to parties involved.
13. SEO
Qualified VAs can provide various SEO needs such as backlink analysis, blog analysis for SEO optimization, and using tools to measure web ranking. An SEO knowledgeable VA can help you rank higher on search engines.
14. Administrative Assistance
A virtual administrative assistant can set-up to-do-list reminders; handle or direct calls; handle basic HR tasks; schedule appointments, manage your email inbox; send newsletters, and set up meetings for you. You can also leave the management of your team to your VA as well as the payment of suppliers.
15. Data Entry
The Data Entry Assistant takes care of the preparation, compilation, sorting out, and actual data entry. The duties cover checking data for accuracy, maintaining records of activities, and presenting data in needed formats.
16. Research Work
A virtual assistant is perfect to handle marketing research, email research, keyword search, product search, image and chart search, competitor research, web research, and more. Anything that you want to research, a VA can do them all.
17. Human Resources
VAs can do the human resource functions such as recruitment, hiring, and onboarding new employees. They could develop an employee handbook; set up and manage payrolls and time tracking; and manage documents related to employee benefits, company insurance, provident funds, and termination of employees.
Tasks that involve the use of online tools require training as not all virtual assistants can perfectly do them all. In fact, you may have to hire more than one virtual assistant if you have many things to outsource so that they can be attended to promptly and efficiently. However, there are general virtual assistants that can handle all types of tasks with confidence and ease after some training and a little patience and understanding from virtual bosses.
Hiring a virtual assistant is cost-effective because you can save money and still get the best services that you want. First, you pay them by the hours they work on your task. Second, you won’t cover the cost of electricity, computer, and food, unlike when you hire an in-house assistant. They need a little training and they are packed with skills from graphic design, accounting to data entry as well as excellent communicators. Third, there is no need to pay for benefits like health insurance, wage deductions, or vacation pay. And last but not the least, work can be completed even during the worst weather condition because the VA does not need to commute to work and get stuck on traffic or road problems.
With all on your plate as solo-entrepreneur, it’s important to get the help you need without going broke to do it. Hire a virtual assistant to perform most of the tasks most business owners don’t have the time of doing and get more time to pursue other things that you want to do.
