Virtual Assistance: A step by step guide
Virtual Assistance is a group of Virtual Assistants providing busy people, businesses and entrepreneurs with an option to get done their personal and business tasks without hiring regular employees.
A Virtual Assistance can help attend to your various daily mundane tasks virtually from assisting in scheduling appointments, managing administration, handling technical aspects of a business, digital marketing, content writing to personal errands to administrative duties.
Hiring the services of a team of skilled virtual assistants can help in saving time that can be spent with your family without compromising on the quality of your work.
#Step 1 — Understanding the world of Virtual Assistance –
If you’re thinking of Virtual Assistance, then you need to know what they do and what kind of tasks you can outsource to them. Virtual Assistance is assisting Start-Ups, Entrepreneurs, Businesses with a variety of tasks from a remote location. Virtual assistance is made of a team that comprises of experienced personal assistants to take care bunch of your tasks.
It can help save you money as well because hiring remote workers is not as expensive compared to hiring local staff. You won’t need to provide tools like a computer, internet, etc. It is a form of expert outsourcing where your work is in capable hands of experts as these Virtual Assistants are delegated some key tasks that they’re adept at. If you hire a reliable and competent team of virtual assistance then that can improve and alleviate the quality of your work. There are several virtual assistance services that you should know about that can be delegated. They are listed below.
Here’s the list -
- Finding Travel Deals
- Travel Arrangements
- Vacation Planning
- Online Purchases
- Communicating with someone on your behalf for any purpose.
- Taking care of your to-do-lists.
- Update websites
- Writing blog articles
- Drafting documents for various needs
- Providing support to your customers over the phone and/or email.
- Developing and writing contents
- Creating and running social media ads
- Creating and running Google Adwords
- Communicating with your team to manage a project
- Communicating with your vendors
- Editing your podcast and publishing them
- Editing your videos and publishing them
- Managing your web server
- Internet Researches
- Administrative Tasks
- Web Technical Tasks
- 3rd Party Calling (Talking to Customer Service, etc.)
- Video Editing
- Landing Page Creation
- Online Bill Payments
- Flight Search and Booking
- Hotel Search and Booking
- Vacation Planning
- Website Designing
- Digital Marketing related tasks
- SEO related tasks
- Travel Arrangements
- Graphics Design
- Content Writing
- Customer Service
- Sales Management
- Online Purchases
- Social Media Management
- Email Management
- Google Adwords
#Step 2 — Getting started –
After understanding what Virtual Assistance is and how it works, to get started it is imperative to know what kinds of tasks you’ll typically need someone to handle. After deciding on that, you’ll want to contact a virtual assistance service provider that suits these needs of yours. You can start working with them once you’re happy with their service offers that suit your budget.
#Step 3 — Delegation –
To see how they work, you can delegate a task, something you think they’re good at. Give them a simple routine task to know their style of working and how effectively they perform it. Letting them do these tasks without supervision will help you decide whether you want to delegate more tasks to them and continue with their services.
#Step 4 — Analysing the Virtual assistance process –
Evaluate them in terms of the results they create. It is particularly important to assess the success of a new Virtual Assistance team regularly in the early stages. Analyse where their efforts are focused and how effective they are and whether they were productive, reliable and able to lessen your burden? If the answers to these questions are a yes then you’re good to go and that you’ve found a team to rely on.
#Step 5 — Building relationships with the team –
You must build a successful long-term business relationship with the team for your growth and a happy working environment. As you grow a relationship with your team, you’ll have increasing trust for their abilities and you’ll be able to delegate a greater number of tasks to them that can multiply your success and help you get your life back. It will take a huge amount of load off your shoulders. A fruitful working relationship also results in increased productivity and the fast growth of your organization. Once a comfort level is developed between each of the parties involved, there is room for sharing honest feedback that can lead to better performance and higher efficiency.
I am sure there is no doubt left after reading the above points as to why you should consider hiring Virtual Assistance services. It’s highly affordable, cost-effective and time-saving while letting you take the help of highly skilled and experienced people in lessening your workload and relieve you of your small backend jobs, so you have free time to focus on your clients, build your business or spend time with your family. This helps achieve work-life-balance.
