Eek! If you're here, you either have an assistant already, or you are probably thinking about getting one. This is SUCH AN EXCITING move for your business! Truly, when people ask me what the best investment I've made in my business has been, an assistant is #1. Hands down.
Here are 50 things an assistant can do for you... and this isn't even everything! First I will share 25 general tasks, then I will share 25 specialized tasks. If you haven't already read my blog post about
Common Myths About Virtual Assistants, you may want to check that out first.
Pro tip: If you still don't know what to have an assistant do for you, write down EVERY SINGLE THING you do for your business, no matter how simple or detailed. Many experts will tell you that you can delegate 80% of your business. Imagine that!
25 General Tasks a VA Can Do For You
Email Marketing
- Create newsletters for those on your email list with your direction.
- Create email campaigns that nurture your email list and educate them on your products/services.
Schedule Meetings & Send Recordings
- Schedule all your Zoom meetings, remind registrants prior to the event, and send the recording to attendees/registrants.
Create E-Books & Images
- You can purchase inexpensive Canva templates and have your assistant create social media images, e-books, lead magnets, and more. Remember graphic design is a 2.0 skill that not all VA's have. So if you have specific design needs, consider hiring a graphic designer.
Calendar Management
- Manage your schedule. Remind you of important tasks and events. Have your customers book appointments with you through your assistant. Send you text reminders before meetings.
Organize Your Personal Life
- Schedule doctor appointments, fill out paperwork, remind you when school pictures are happening or when someone has a birthday.
Meeting Notes
- Take detailed notes of your meetings and things you’ve committed to doing.
- Send follow-up emails to attendees with the highlights of that meeting.
Webinar Chat Monitoring
- While you are on a virtual meeting, webinar, or class, your VA could monitor the chat and respond to questions or even keep you updated as you are presenting so you know what questions have not been answered.
Bookkeeping
- Monitor your Quickbooks and assign expenses as business or personal expenses.
- Track your monthly income and expenses.
- Send invoices.
- Track outstanding payments and follow up with customers.
Note: While an assistant can definitely help ease the load in this area, they should never replace a professional bookkeeper or accountant.
Prepare Presentations
- Create PowerPoints or a slide deck for your next class or presentation.
Event Planning
- Organize luncheons, parties, and business retreats.
- Coordinate with all vendors.
- Manage the agenda.
- Prepare all presentations, handouts, and menus.
- Manage event registration and attendee communication.
Message & Inbox Management
- Manage your email. Respond to all messages via email, social media, and text message.
- Create a customer support email for your VA to manage so all messages get funneled to him/her.
Set Up Processes
- Set up workflows, systems, and funnels that you follow to help your business run efficiently.
Customer Onboarding
- Set up a step by step process of what your VA should do when you bring on a new customer or business partner so they are completely nurtured and taken care of.
- Send welcome emails or packages to new customers or business partners.
Travel Planning
- Schedule flights, hotels, car rentals, meal reservations, and meetings.
- A VA can even plan events out of state/country. I know because I used to do that as a VA. Even though I wasn't always on site, I would coordinate with local leaders, businesses, and vendors to organize events.
Schedule Dinner Reservations
- A VA could call the schedule the reservation, make sure they can accommodate your needs (say you need a private area for 16 people), and even work with the restaurant to set up a specialized menu (if you want your guests to only choose meals within a certain price range for example).
Shipping
- Manage your product inventory and ship product to your customers.
- Ship prizes to customers who won different incentives.
- Send recognition gifts to business partners for meeting certain goals.
Postcard Campaigns or Holiday Cards
- Use a service like Postable, Send Out Cards, or Banner Season to send snail mail campaigns about your products and services to your customers.
Data Entry & Research
- Import data to spreadsheets.
- Research different programs, partner possibilities, social media trends, tools, speaker engagement opportunities, products, services, or anything else pertinent to your business so you don’t have to.
Affiliate Program Maintenance
- Research places you can become an affiliate to earn residual income.
- Check all affiliate links in blog posts to make sure they work.
- Conducting analysis to see which affiliate links are performing the best.
- Plug links into social media posts, and ensure you are sharing your links where appropriate.
- Follow-up with your affiliates are paying out per the contract.
Minor Website Updates
- Update your existing website with events, promotions, and other minor things.
Social Media Monitoring
- Browse the posts/comments in your groups to ensure group rules are being followed and people are being responded to.
- Respond to comments they can answer. Keep track of questions they need your eyes on.
Social Media Scheduling
- Use third-party apps like Later, Tailwind, Hootsuite, and Planoly to schedule out your posts for the week or even the month.
Proofread Your Emails and Other Correspondence
- Having a second set of eyes on your writing before it is sent eliminates embarrassing typos and makes you appear more professional.
- A VA with knowledge of basic writing skills could apply edits that make your writing flow better or add creative language.
- Transcription or Translation
- Transcribe your podcasts or YouTube videos
- If your assistant is bilingual, they can translate written content. If they are really good, they can do live translation for meetings, but that usually requires someone with extensive experience.
General Admin Tasks
- You should write out ALL of the things you do for your business - even the littlest of tasks. 80% of it can be delegated! You should be focusing on bringing in new customers, content creation, and sales. Everything else can be given to someone else. Relinquishing control is the hardest part, but once you do, you will be so glad you did.
25 Specialized Tasks You Could Hire a Virtual Assistant to Do
Sometimes you need a virtual assistant with specific skills and expertise. Below is a list of 25 specialized niche tasks a virtual assistant could help you with.
Brand Strategy
- Help you narrow down your ideal audience. Help you create a brand that resonates with that audience.
- Help you create a plan to target your audience through your brand messaging.
Business Strategy
- Analyze your current business goals and practices, they look for areas of strength and areas for improvement.
- Set goals for the business and create a plan to meet those goals.
- Periodically check to make sure the business is on track to meet the goal and sometimes make adjustments based on feedback and trends within the business.
Growth Analyst and Strategist
- Look at market trends as they relate to your business and target audience.
- Make predictions and create plans to grow the business based on the needs of your target audience. This helps you to make decisions on how to adjust your marketing and what you need to improve in your business in order to meet your growth goals.
Pinterest Strategist
- Pinterest is one of the top ways to promote organic growth on your social media accounts. A Pinterest Strategist will conduct an audit of your pinterest account if you already have one. If you do not have one they will help you create one based on Pinterest “Best Practices.” If you are not already using a scheduling app like Tailwind they may suggest that or something similar. They will then help you develop a strategy to grow your following on Pinterest, how to repurpose content from other social media platforms, and hacks to appeal to your niche market.
Pinterest Manager
- Manage your Pinterest account, schedule pins, schedule re-pins, find Pinterest Tribes for you to join, analyze what pins are doing the best with your market , and can even create your Pinterest graphics.
Social Media Manager
- A social media manager is similar to a Pinterest manager except they will manage all your social media accounts.
Social Media Content Manager
- Take charge of creating your content for social media. This includes writing blog posts, writing calls to action, including affiliate links in your content, proofreading content, and periodically analyzing which content is being interacted with the most.
Graphic Design
- If you only need simple graphics I recommend hiring a virtual assistant with Canva experience. A graphic designer will cost more because they will have specialized skills in Adobe programs and will be able to create graphics from scratch, create vector images, and maybe even logos. Reserve hiring a graphic designer for more intricate design needs or if you are really particular in what you want.
- You can also use the many ready made templates out there like this one or this one.
Update Your Website
- You will want to hire a VA with experience working within the platform your website uses. If you use Wordpress your website will require more periodic updates and monitoring of plugins.
Video Editing
- Someone who has experience with uploading and editing videos for YouTube will be able to cut down on the time you spend doing this task. It may even give you the motivation to create more content for YouTube.
- A general video editor could also add intros to your videos, natural transitions, music, subtitles, and more.
Audio Editing
- If you have a podcast or other audio recordings that need to be edited, you will need to hire a professional to manage that for you.
Set Up and Run Giveaways on Your Social Media
- Giveaways are an excellent way to grow your social media following, but they can be overwhelming to keep up with, so it may be a good idea to hand this task over to a virtual assistant.
Create Opt-in Freebies (aka Lead Magnets) for Your Website
- Opt-in freebies are an excellent way to grow your email list, but it needs to be an opt-in that people are actually interested in.
- You can also use the many ready made templates out there like this one or this one.
Assist You With a Product Launch or Launch Events
- Product launch events are excellent for generating traffic around your business and new product, but you may need an assistant with experience in this to make sure it is done effectively.
Edit & Proofread Your Ebooks
- eBooks require a little more skill when it comes to proofreading, so I recommend hiring an editor with experience in proofreading eBooks.
Book Launches
- Again it really is best to hire someone who has experience doing these tasks so that your book launch runs smoothly and builds trust with your audience.
Write Your Blog Posts
- Almost anyone can write blog posts, but if you have the budget for it, I recommend hiring a creative writer to do this for you or working with your VA to repurpose existing content. Writing is a skill that can be developed, but it definitely takes time. I suggest downloading a tool like Grammarly to catch grammatical errors.
Website Analytics Reporting
- Run the analytics from your website and then write a report in a way that you can use that information to make decisions about your business and website. Numbers are great, but if you don’t know how to interpret those numbers or what to do with them they are pointless.
Setting up LinkedIn Groups
- LinkedIn can be an excellent way to network, look for talent, or build relationships with customers, but it needs to be implemented effectively, so it's best to hire a VA with LinkedIn experience.
Running Ads on Google and Facebook
- Running Ads on Google can be complicated, you are going to want to hire someone who is experienced to do this for you.
Generating New Leads
- Depending on your business there are many ways to do this. Social media is a great way to find new leads, but there needs to be a strategic approach in order to do this effectively. A general VA is not a business coach, so hiring one is a great idea.
Customer Relations Management
- A customer relations manager could assist you with building relationships with your customers and maintaining customer relationships. Some general responsibilities can be given to a standard VA for this, but a strategic approach might need to come elsewhere.
Creating Courses
- You would still need to provide the information that would be included in the courses, but a virtual assistant could help with organizing and drafting the course content on a platform like Teachable, Podia, Wavoto, Kajabi, or Thinkific.
- Podcast Launching
- This is similar to any product launch. Hire someone you can consult with to get yours up and running who has experience.
Website Building
- While a general VA might be able to create a very basic standard site on an easy to use platform like Wix or Wavoto, you will be better served in hiring a professional website builder to do this for you. Someone who knows best practices will be able to optimize your site in a way that not everyone else knows how to.
You can find specialty people on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. Or I can find someone for you.
I hope this helps you when assessing the needs of your business and where you could use the most improvement. My business is dedicated to matching you with the perfect virtual assistant to meet your top needs. I vet all the virtual assistants for you and gather information on their skills, experience, and strengths. So you can be at ease knowing I have done all the groundwork. If you would like to know more about how I can help you, click the button below to send me a message.
Don’t forget: This article should not replace professional tax, legal, financial, or HR advice. Consult with a lawyer, accountant, or other expert for advice specific to your location, business type, and other needs.