30 Things a Virtual Assistant Can Do For You

If you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer, 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. 

However, if you haven’t heard of the term, let me introduce you to it. Also, make sure you stick to the end as I will list all of the things my VA does for me, and trust me, if you are a blogger, it will be very interesting and eye-opening.

What is a Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is a person who provides various services to entrepreneurs or businesses from a remote location.

VAs are a key ingredient to helping startups, and early-stage entrepreneurs get off the ground.  

At this point, you might be wondering, “But why should I delegate any of my tasks to a VA?”. Well, firstly, VAs are usually freelancers; therefore, you save money on training and taxes. Secondly, you save time as you have someone to do your shallow work 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 – your blog content.

Keep reading to find out what things a virtual assistant can 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 an art form. Also, in recent years content writing has proved to be a crucial element of digital marketing. 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 a 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 your 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 the content.

Guest posting 

Guest posting is a popular outreaching technique where you write short pieces for other websites to increase the exposure on your website. Usually, organizations prefer to hire VAs for that job since it’s something that the more important employees shouldn’t 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 sent 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 your VA comes in. 

Translate short pieces into other languages

As we already mentioned, virtual assistants are usually remote workers that you can outsource to. This means that many of them are bilingual as they can be located anywhere in the world. 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 virtual assistants to do all the work 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 

Community management 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 you 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 doing market research. And for those of you who actually enjoy it – I envy you so bad. So have fun researching on your own. But for all the regular folks out there – just hire a VA to do your research. 

Keyword research 

If you have an online business, chances 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 importance of reflection, evaluation, and reporting when it comes to digital marketing. Performance, traffic, and ROI are all reporting processes that you can give 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. Others can create websites using WordPress, Wix, 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 like 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, they can do the job faster and more efficiently.

Maintenence 

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 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, and updating salaries, 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 up to date. Your virtual assistant can help you launch and maintain cloud computing accounts such as DropBox, OneDrive, and Google Drive.

Answering service

Handling incoming phone calls, leaving voicemails, checking messages 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 virtual assistant to do it for you.

What Does My VA Do For Me?

I’m glad you asked!

Here is a list of all the tasks I outsource to my full-time hired virtual assistant:

• Pins creation in Canva – I’ve got the pin templates for her and all she needs to do is customize them for the type of pin I need.
• Pin scheduling – I use Pinterest scheduler as part of my Pinterest strategy (I get over 200 000 pageviews in 2021 from Pinterest)
• Interlinking and Photos on blog posts – Her task is to do proper interlinking and insert any type of photos and pins into the content.
• Quotes reasearch – Searching for quotes could be great to do myself, but it takes a while, and if my VA is doing it, I am able to squeeze in some propper additional work.
• E-Books creation in Canva – I’ve got the text, her task is to insert it in the pre-made templates and edit it to look great.
• FB scheduling of the posts.
• Updating old posts by improving interlinking, changing photos and so on.
• Creating content Mastersheets for me as I haven’t done it in four years. I think she hates me because of that one.
• Anything else that isn’t content creation – I am quite picky when it comes to content creation and I usually create my posts myself or use only trusted writers.

Conclusion on Things You Can Outsource To a VA

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 when you want a quality job done but don’t want to learn extra skills (Web development and Marketing research as examples).

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.

My initial fear before hiring my first VA was that no one would be able to do the job as well as I would. And you know what? I was wrong. I was lucky with my first VA as she was creative and was the person who was looking at things with fresh eyes, suggesting improvements, and giving feedback (even if it was negative sometimes).

If your business can afford the extra help, you need a virtual. That is the moment when your side hustle turns into a business.

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30 Things a Virtual Assistant Can Do For You