Is Hiring a VA (Virtual Assistant) safe? What sort of tasks can you actually outsource to VAs?
A recently came to my office. I was just finishing my reach out campaign to influencers wherein I try to get in touch with influencers across different platforms! She said, "You know you could delegate this work to a VA for 400 a week!"
I definitely started thinking about it as it's a time saver haven! I have also seen some people yous VAs but I am not sure.
What kind of tasks can I delegate?
How hard is it to train them to do the advanced tasks?
Can I trust them with my social media handles?
Are there things I should keep in mind?
TIA
Owning a business has many perks that come along with it. Virtual Assistants come as a gift to business owners, who are in dire need to double the efforts to delve into the business world.
Business owners can now spend time on high-priority tasks as VA’s ease up your responsibilities by scraping up cumbersome tasks off your plate.
Below are top 10 tasks that you can outsource to a Virtual Assistant:
Research is an essential part ofa business. It looks out for the trends, competitor figures, and updates in the target market. Research needs a thorough investigation, which consumes hours of time a day. A VA can conduct research in a better way. They review and find ways to use data in a lucrative manner.
File organization, storage, and sharing involve a menial task. Filing documents consumes much amount of efficient time. But files play an integral part in the business, to ensure fluidity. Hence, it is better off outsourcing this responsibility to a virtual assistant.
From the start of the organization, as it gets expands further, a company collects a lump-sum amount of data each day. It includes customer’s information, contact details, market trends and much more. Outsourcing data entry to a VA ensures all the information is securely collected and stored in a place.
While executing the concerning business, there might sometimes be the continuous ringing of the phone. You must admit that every call has a substantial significance. You neither can stay connected to your phone all the time, nor you can miss that important call from your client or prospect. Virtual Assistants are always open to receive the important calls and take care of your business.
Financial reporting and accounting needs are the other tasks you can outsource to a VA. They double check and look out for the individual details in a more comprehensive manner.
Developing and customizing the website requires better coding experience and imagination. An efficient VA handles website functionality, themes, plugins, to integrate it well into your business.
Prospects are everywhere in the digital world, but obtaining them takes time and energy. VA can take care of customers on social media, and bring prompt responses. They even conduct all the relevant keyword research to obtain valuable links and increase the ranking of your company, virtually.
Content plays a crucial role in enhancing business presence. Writing content and blogs takes relevant research skills and collection of information. A content writer can take care of all your blogging tasks, in enhancing website ranking.
Many customers use email as a medium to interact with business, efficiently. The volume of incoming emails can be overwhelming, hence, assigning email management to a VA can come as a great relief to business owners. VA’s take up the responsibility to better organize your emails and answer them in a prompt manner.
Audio/video production, website designing, and graphics involve laborious work. It is better working off these tasks to a virtual assistant, who take care of practicalities in designing and come up better with the graphics.
If you're thinking of hiring from a relatively cheap location, my best advice is to just find someone you like and start delegating some tasks. Hire them on an hourly basis to begin with, perhaps with a low minimum number of hours per week that you guarantee (I started with 5 hours per week), so that you don't feel too much pressure to find a lot of stuff for them to do right away.
It can be repetitive stuff you're doing, like report generation. You need to recruit someone you think you'll be able to trust, and then build trust over time.
If your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that as time progresses, you find more and more things you can have your VA take care of, especially as you start trusting them with access to some of the online systems you access. But it doesn't happen overnight.
I run a productized service which is a sort of "VA" for design. I would suggest that it is all about communication / expectations.
Make sure you know exactly why you want it, what you want exactly (results), and how you get there (steps).
After that, try to see yourself how you do the task and see what could go wrong with each step.
I think a LOT is possible nowadays with technology but it is about really providing clear expectations / how to's and let the VA execute your system.
Data mining, data entry, formatting, research, scheduling
How long is a piece of rope? It depends on the VA.
Depends on the VA
If you notice you do something repeatedly write up instructions to do it and outsource it hourly to start. No need to hire someone full time until you can fill their time.
You can also use LastPass to share your passwords to any platform you give to your VAs without them seeing the password, it's a powerful feature :)
Sorry to disappoint you but that is just wrong expectations. It's trivial to see shared lastpass password with a one line of javascript and opened developer tools. Always change your password when stop sharing with people.
Wow, really?! I'm so disappointed...
Not that a data entry VA will have the skills to write code that would disclose an encrypted password, but still that is a big issue against all those password sharing tools...
Well to be fair it's not possible from technical point of view to perfectly hide it. Lastpass extension still need to actually fill that password to real website and the moment it does that - you can read it with a little bit of javascript knowledge.
The main problem here is that people imagine that it's secure so from that point of view it's far better just to share plaintext site-unique password via secure channel to your VA so you would be 100% forced to change it later.
For context, what is a VA?
Virtual assistant.