You’re thinking it might be time to hire some help for your business and you’ve been researching Virtual Assistants that you may wish to work with.
But one thing is stopping you…
…you have no idea what to actually outsource to a VA. You know you need help handling things in your biz but what types of things can VAs even do?
Every VA has their own unique skill set and range of services that they offer so you’ll definitely need to do your research and chat to any potential VAs before you go ahead and hire them.
Here are 5 tasks you may want to outsource to a VA:
1. EMAIL SUPPORT
Email support is often one of those things that is overlooked.
Replying to customer emails and handling inquiries can feel like one of those tasks that isn’t worth outsourcing - it doesn’t take a huge amount of time and it’s not particularly difficult.
But that hour or so each day replying to emails soon adds up over the course of the month and it’s not something that needs to be done by you. Your time and energy will be much better spent serving your clients or creating new products/programmes…you know, the kind of tasks that need to be done by you!
2. FORMATTING AND SCHEDULING BLOG POSTS
If you create regular blog content for your website, you’ll know how time-consuming it is to get your blog post live.
Writing the post itself is only about 50% of the process. After the post has been written, it needs to be proofread and edited, added to your website, and formatted. You need to create graphics, pins, social media content and, if you have a content upgrade, the tech needs to be set up to deliver the freebie and the form embedded into the blog post.
A VA can handle all of this for you! My clients simply share their blog post with me in a Google Doc and I take care of everything else, right through to scheduling the post to go live on their site.
NOTE: Some VA’s may even do content creation and write the blog posts for you too!
3. CREATING CLOSED CAPTIONS AND NOTES FOR YOUR VIDEOS
We all know how important accessibility is and, if you create any sort of video content in your business, that means having closed captions and written notes to accompany your videos.
Whilst there are lots of tools out there that can do this for you, they are never quite right.
Hire a VA to run your videos through a tool like Otter.ai, edit the auto-generated captions so that they are accurate and then upload the .srt file to your videos.
They can then take those closed captions to create written content - whether that’s an exact transcript or summarised notes - and your content suddenly becomes a lot more accessible!
4. SETTING UP EMAIL SEQUENCES
Whether you write your email sequences yourself or hire a copywriter, they still need to be set up in your email marketing software.
Once the content is ready, hand it over to your VA who can plug the content into the sequence, format the emails, and set up any automations that may be needed, for example, if the sequence is triggered by a purchase and there are 5 emails, 1 to be sent every week.
Again, try to think about things in your business that don’t need to be done by you.
5. TRACKING STATS
If you’re anything like me “Stats Tracking” is on your to-do list or in your calendar to do every single week but somehow it never actually seems to get done!
Assign this task to your VA to complete once a week to make sure that it actually happens.
Create a simple tracking sheet that lists out all of the information and stats you want to track and make sure that your VA has access to the tools they need to find the relevant information/stats.
Depending on how familiar your VA is with business strategy, they may be able to give you advice based on the stats they are recording. At the very least, they should be able to flag anything that looks a little strange.
The list of tasks that you can outsource to a VA really is endless. Hopefully, this list has started those cogs turning and given you some ideas to start with. If you’re wondering what else you can outsource, download this list of 100 Tasks to Outsource to Your VA here.
