Hiring a virtual assistant can be helpful to grow your business. Growing your business is a lot like expanding your garden. You don’t want to neglect the plants you already have just because you’ll be growing new ones. That’s why hiring a virtual assistant can be helpful. While you’re focused on expanding, your VA will be quietly tending to your other plants.
A virtual assistant is an online service provider that can handle many common business tasks for you. She can do basic things like book appointments, moderate blog comments, and post content on your social media accounts. But that’s only the beginning. Here are some other ways that a VA can help you:
Launch Products
If you’ve ever launched your own product, you know how stressful it can be and how many small details go into it. You can do everything yourself but you’ll most likely feel exhausted once you’re done. But with a VA, you have a silent partner that can work behind the scenes to make your launch smoother.
You might want your VA to find and approve affiliates, prepare extra bonuses for your customers, write your launch emails, set up your sales page, or set up Facebook advertisements for you. You get to decide what tasks your VA will tackle during your launch and what tasks you’ll handle yourself. It’s smart to make a master checklist of everything to be done then divide it into two separate lists – one for you and one for your VA.
Answer Emails & Provide Customer Service
If you’re like most online business owners, you have an overflowing inbox. You answer customer questions, respond to affiliates, reach out to new joint venture partners, and stay up to date on the latest news in your industry.
But that doesn’t mean you’re the only one that can handle your inbox. This is a great task to assign your VA because it can free up hours of your time each week. For common customer questions, you can create ‘canned’ responses that your VA can copy and paste into emails. Your VA will sort and filter your emails so you only have to deal with the ones that need your personal touch.
Organize Your Events
If you’re planning an online summit, webinar, or in-person retreat, then a good VA will be a lifesaver. Your VA can research guest speakers for you, prepare a welcome packet for speakers, and follow up with them after the event.
A VA can also set up the software you’ll be using so you won’t have to worry about technical glitches. You may also want your VA to record your event and package the sessions so you can sell them and earn even more.
Hiring a virtual assistant and assigning her tasks may feel weird to you at first. Like other skills, it takes time to become good at outsourcing. But with practice, you and your VA will fall into a natural rhythm and you’ll watch as your business thrives.
