Over the past few years, the VA industry has been on the rise due to the increase in knowledge among business owners that hiring virtual assistants can help the growth of their business in a variety of ways. Apart from reducing staffing costs since VAs generally cost substantially less than regular staff, having a VA can also boost efficiency. In order to answer the question; “what do VAs do?” and to illustrate exactly how having a VA can boost your productivity and profitability, here are a few tasks that you can outsource to a virtual assistant:
Tasks You Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant
- Travel research and arrangements – Whether you’re going for a business meeting or on vacation, hiring a virtual assistant can save you the stress of having to do all the research, messaging and calling that are necessary to arrange your trip, thereby saving you up to 2 hours a week.
- Email management – Depending on your particular line of work, you might receive a completely over-the-top amount of email every single day. Your VA can save you around 5 hours every week by going through the mail and sorting them out by importance and topic.
- Inventory management – If you currently use an inventory supply spreadsheet, you can put your VA in charge of tracking their use as you update the spreadsheet daily, and ordering new supplies when you’re running low, freeing up to an hour every week.
- Social media account management – Social media is very important in today’s world, but you are likely loath at the idea of spending time tweeting or posting on Facebook, when you could be getting work done. Your VA can take that off your hands and save you one or two hours every day.
- Customer Service – Whether your business provides products or services, customer service is one aspect that can make or mar your reputation. In order to keep on top of customer feedback while being cost effective, you can hire a virtual assistant who will be dedicated to your business and handle customer service for you. This will definitely cut out up to 5 hours every week.
- Legal Research – While this is on a somewhat more advanced level, you can get legal research done by a VA, saving yourself legal fees or the 2 hours per week you would have spent poring over law reports otherwise.
- Hiring – Placing job ads, sorting through applications, checking references and running background checks can be very tedious and time consuming. Depending on the frequency with which you make new hires, giving the task of facilitating the hiring process to a VA will save you up to 2 hours per week that you can spend at much more important things.
- Website and blog management – With a well-designed and a regularly-updated blog having become staples of business, you could find yourself spending one or two hours managing your sites every day, depending on the traffic level. Apart from posting, you will have to moderate comments and apply some SEO techniques. Hire a virtual assistant to handle that aspect of things and you’ll have an extra couple of hours every day.
Why Hiring a Virtual Assistant is Important
Hiring a virtual assistant is no longer a luxury if you are looking to make extra time for yourself every day that you can use for important things.. By outsourcing the tasks listed above and others that are not, you will likely find that you have more than 20 hours extra every week. Get in touch with a VA company today and you’ll begin saving time in only a short while.
About the Author
Elizabeth Duffy is a content writer who works at http://myonlineassistant.net/. Her life credo is “Better late than never”. She specializes in writing for newspapers and blogs. Her dream is to become a world-known author and blogger.
