Sponsored by 247Assistants:
You run a growing business, but you’re so busy you can’t even enjoy your success. Sound familiar? Fortunately, you can get help so you can focus your valuable time on business development.
One of the most affordable and effective ways to recoup your productivity is to hire a virtual assistant from a company like 247Assistants. As the job title suggests, a virtual assistant works remotely, usually from his or her home. Schedules and fees are customizable to meet your needs. That means you don’t have to worry about having an employee working alongside of you every day, but you will get help when you need it.
Not sure how you’d use a virtual assistant? You’d be surprised by how many daily activities a virtual assistant can take off of your plate so you can focus your time on building your business. Following are 10 things a virtual assistant can typically do better, faster, and cheaper than you:
1. Answering Phones
A virtual assistant can answer your personal business line or your main office phone, so you don’t have to worry about continuous interruptions, wrong numbers, and sales calls. There are many affordable VOIP business phone providers today that offer call forwarding, individual extensions, and more. Even if you’re an office of one, you can look like a much larger operation when the phones are managed effectively.
2. Invoices
Perhaps the biggest time thief for small business owners are invoices—sending them and paying them. A virtual assistant can handle all of that for you. Imagine how much time you’d save each month!
3. Calendar Management
Every time a meeting changes, you have to edit your calendar and make sure it syncs to your desktop, mobile device, and anywhere else that you access it. If you have a lot of meetings each week, this time adds up very quickly. Let a virtual assistant manage your calendar, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.
4. Typing
Today, “typing” includes a lot more than just typing letters. A virtual assistant can create all of your correspondence, transcribe audio files, type meeting notes, and even handle complicated data entry. As long as the virtual assistant you work with can type quickly, they can save you massive amounts of time. Just create a shared folder in Dropbox where you can both access your documents, and you’re all set!
5. Email
How long does it take you to go through your email each day? A virtual assistant can be your email gatekeeper. He or she can screen your email and make sure you don’t waste time on irrelevant messages. Your virtual assistant can also make sure that you don’t miss the most important messages.
6. Email Marketing
A virtual assistant can manage a variety of tasks for your email marketing campaigns. Have your virtual assistant set up auto-responders, create and send your email newsletters, create subscription forms, and perform list maintenance for you while you focus on growing your email subscriber list.
7. Research
If you write a blog, ebooks, reports, presentations, sales pitches, or similar materials, then you need data and quotes from reliable sources. A virtual assistant can conduct all of the research for you so you can focus on creating content.
8. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a fantastic way to promote your small business, but it’s very time-consuming. A virtual assistant can handle posting, following, liking, and commenting on all of the social media profiles and pages your business has. In addition, he or she can monitor keywords and either jump into conversations on your behalf as they happen or notify you when you should do so.
9. Blogging
A business blog needs to have fresh content, but it’s hard to continually publish high quality content. The right virtual assistant can write your blog posts, publish them, and proofread the posts that you write. Have your virtual assistant find images, tag your posts, categorize them, and optimize them for search engines. He or she can even moderate and respond to comments on your blog. If your blog is popular, getting that task off of your plate could lead to hours of free time each week.
10. Content Marketing
Content marketing is extremely popular because it helps businesses develop their brand reputations among broad audiences. Any content that you write and publish online could lead to direct or indirect sales. To that end, a virtual assistant can write content for you. He or she can also repurpose existing content so it can be published in multiple places and in a variety of forms. For example, a research report could be repurposed as a blog post and an infographic. If you have someone helping you repurpose your content, you can extend its reach and lifespan exponentially.
Think about the tasks you perform frequently that cost more time and money for you to do yourself than it would for a virtual assistant to do them. Don’t become a victim of your own success. Instead, enjoy the ride by investing in a virtual assistant to make you more productive, more effective, and even more successful!
Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women on Business. She is a 30-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).
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This is an Excellent article. I’d Love to be able to have it emailed to me. So I can have the information at hand. I’m definitely interested in having one. I’ve joined your newsletter.!! Keep them coming for us Small Businesses.
Thank You
Hi Lydia,
You’ll get the article in today’s newsletter! Thank you for subscribing!
Amazing article Susan! Blogging really helps a start up business gets its name. VAs really are a good help for businessmen who are not familiar with these fields.
Thanks, William!