When I became an entrepreneur, I found outsourcing as a critical element to my business’ success. As a former virtual assistant now running multiple companies and a thriving accounting and legal practice, I know the benefits personally to expect from hiring virtual assistants.
When I founded my boutique law firm in the middle of the pandemic, I found myself replicating my work-from-home scheme that was already working with my other businesses to my legal and accounting practice. Practicing what I preach, I now oversee a 100% virtual team and saw massive savings on my overhead.
As a former virtual assistant, I was on the other receiving end of my employer’s or client’s list of tasks and instructions, with specified deadlines. With the table reversed, I applied my experience and communicated the tasks I want to outsource to my virtual assistants the way I want them to be — clear, detailed, and instructive.
So what are these tasks that you can assign to your virtual assistants? There are hundreds of different functions that your virtual assistant can do for you.
This article will list down all the popular tasks you can outsource to your virtual assistant to guide you with your outsourcing journey.
Table of Contents
1. Bookkeeping
Record-keeping of your transactions can be done safely and effectively by virtual assistants with experience in handling bookkeeping. You can outsource them to virtual assistants called virtual bookkeepers in the Philippines for a much more affordable rate. To know more about virtual bookkeeping, read our guide here.
2. Customer Service
Hiring an entire in-house customer support team can be very expensive. With the emergence of remote work, you can now build a reliable team of customer service virtual assistants working from their homes. Outsourcing customer service to your virtual assistants can be one of the most cost-effective things that you can do for your business.
3. Data entry
One of the simplest tasks but undeniably very time-consuming is data entry. Outsourcing data entry tasks to a virtual assistant are very doable, even for an outsourcing novice, as it requires a very low level of skill. Your focus for this is speed and accuracy, as most data entry tasks require tight deadlines.
As an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t be doing monotonous and repetitive tasks. Your time is more valuable than that, and hiring a virtual assistant to do that would free your time for more essential business tasks.
4. General research
Research is also very time-consuming. It takes several hours to gather the information that you need for your decision-making activities. Unlike technical research, you can easily outsource to your virtual assistant general research activities, and the range of topics can be limitless.
Examples that you can ask your virtual assistant to research are:
- Competitor research
- Gather market data and demographics
- Compile a list of competitors
5. Management of E-commerce business
If you’re running a successful and growing E-commerce business, you need to hire a virtual assistant. You can outsource to a rockstar virtual assistant to manage your E-commerce business from inventory management, product listings, website optimization, and overseeing your product orders and returns process.
Another important task that you can outsource is product sourcing. The virtual assistant will hunt for new popular products that you can add to the current inventory mix.
Virtual assistants work as Amazon virtual assistants, and obviously, the skills and experience center around businesses that sell on Amazon. Some virtual assistants specialize in other platforms like Shopify, eBay, and independent E-Commerce websites.
6. Social media management
You can also effectively outsource the scheduling posts for your business’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages. It requires a training period, though, to make sure that your virtual assistant understands the branding and your business’s theme and voice. Once your virtual assistant gets the hang of it, you can have your social media presence be wholly run by your VA, and you focus on running the business affairs.
The tasks you can outsource will include the following:
- Consistent social media updates and ensuring fresh content regularly;
- Replying on comments and posts from followers and online community;
- Repurposing existing content from your website or blogs for social media;
- Coordinating with graphic designers for social media posts and banners;
- Use of social media management software like Buffer and Hootsuite
7. Keyword research
If you’re a content creator, e.g., running a blog or a YouTube channel, or you want to optimize your website’s SEO, you’ll need comprehensive keyword research. We’re not only talking about listing a bunch of words here. Keyword research is so much more as it includes sorting competitiveness, volume, and ranking potential. But a skilled keyword research virtual assistant equipped with practical SEO tools can indeed deliver what you need.
8. Outreach for backlink
Backlink building is a tedious and lengthy process. An essential component for SEO and increasing your website’s traffic, backlink building can be a full-time position that you can’t do as you have to run other aspects of your business.
You can outsource backlink outreach to your virtual assistant. For example, you can assign tasks like hunting for backlink opportunities and sending e-mails to these potential backlink providers. Preferably, the backlink outreach virtual assistant must be knowledgeable in using tools like Ahref, SEMRush, UberSuggest, or NinjaOutreach.
9. Calendar management
One of the most common tasks you can outsource to your virtual assistant is handling your schedule. It is especially true as your business grows, so your schedule gets more hectic. A virtual assistant organizing and managing your calendar can set up important appointments, book calls and meetings on your free days, and creating reminders to avoid missing important events.
10. Inbox Management
Running a business means receiving hundreds of e-mails every single day. A skilled virtual assistant can ease the burden of filtering through your inbox and sorting the essential e-mails from the unnecessary ones. For example, an inbox management virtual assistant can be assigned to do the following tasks:
- Send template replies to ordinary e-mails received;
- Give a daily summary of the e-mails received at the start and before the end of the business day;
- Notify you of urgent matters that require your personal decision or discretion;
- Delete e-mails that are not important or purely promotional that is not relevant to your business
Things to remember
The tasks that you can outsource to your virtual assistant are not limited to the things I have listed above. Any job you find to be consuming so much of your time can be outsourced to your virtual assistant. But you need first to set up a system to operate with your virtual assistants, hire the right person for the job, and train according to the standards you expect them to follow.
My approach to working with virtual assistants was a combination of research and trial by experience. I have learned the DOs and DONTs in hiring virtual assistants through the many exemplary and several bad experiences.
Please feel free to send us a message via our contact page for any assistance on your outsourcing journey.
