Hiring a Virtual Assistant can be one of the best moves that you do to get your life back or to help you get busy on some of those tasks that have been on your to-do list for the past few months. Entrepreneurs seek VAs in order to either start to step away from their business to start living life again, or they start to work smarter not harder. I say it all the time, but the latter folks are seeing that the best way to grow and scale their business is to delegate so that they can work on their business, rather than in it. When you’re working in your business, you won’t have the time that is required to do the bigger picture projects that really come together to help grow your company.

One of the first steps to hiring a virtual assistant is determining what exactly you can outsource to them. You’re trying to free up your time to finally start working on your business, and here I am giving you a task to do. Well, my friend, you’re in luck. Here’s a huge list of 131 tasks that you can outsource to your VA. Some tasks will require a bit more specialization, while most will require little to no training at all.

General Skills

This section is dedicated to the tasks that you can easily outsource without putting in too much time to train. We do suggest that you take your time to set up processes, so that even the simplest tasks can be done the same way and the correct way every time. On each item, think about how long you spend each week and determine all of the other larger tasks that you could be doing instead. The cost of doing it yourself and not hiring a VA is other tasks that you have to put off. Opportunity cost at its finest…

Email & Schedule Management

Managing your daily email can oftentimes turn out to be a tedious task. These tasks are a very simple way to test the waters with your virtual assistant. Assign simple email and schedule management tasks to get a start at freeing up your time to start working on larger, more important projects to help grow your business.

1. Filtering Emails
2. Managing Spam
3. Creating & Building a Database
4. Updating contacts in CRM
5. Answering customer service emails
6. Responding to customer service tickets
7. Providing customer service chat support
8. Sending greeting cards
9. Sending event invitations
10. Sending hand written thank you cards to new customers
11. Appointment scheduling
12. Travel Arrangement & Planning
13. Reminder Services
14. Answering Calls
15. Making outbound calls to customers
16. Send out hiring ads
17. Screen hiring prospects
18. Set up interviews with prospects

Administrative & Blogging Tasks

Just like with the email tasks, these additional administrative tasks are a great way to just get started on delegating your tasks out to your virtual assistant.

1. Transcription of Video Files
2. Transcription of Audio Files
3. Formatting eBooks
4. Create reports
5. Create forms
6. Create Document Templates
7. Online Research
8. Data Mining & Development
9. Lead Generation
10. Blog Publishing Management
11. Moderating Blog Comments
12. Adding Tags & Images to Blog Posts
13. Voicemail Checking
14. Send Invoices
15. Basic Bookkeeping
16. Personal Errands
17. Simple Training Tasks
18. Project Management Tasks
19. Preparation of Training Materials
20. Training of New Virtual Staff
21. Deadline Tracking
22. Deliverables Tracking
23. Social Media Management
24. Creating Facebook Fan Pages
25. Creating Facebook Fan Groups
26. Posting and Scheduling Facebook Insights
27. Promoting Facebook Pages
28. Collating and Interpreting Facebook Insights
29. Creating a Twitter Account
30. Managing Twitter Account
31. Schedule Tweets
32. Tracking Mentions and Hashtags
33. Manage YouTube Accounts
34. Moderate YouTube Comments
35. Upload Videos
36. Answer Inquiries and Messages on Social Media
37. Live Chat Agent
38. Create Pinnable Images on Pinterest
39. Create a Pinterest
40. Scheduling Pins
41. Track Pins
42. Create Slideshare Presentations

File Storage & Organization Tasks

1. Cloud Storage Organization
2. Data Entry
3. Creating and managing spreadsheets
4. Preparing presentations
5. PDF Conversion, Splitting and merging

Specialized Assistant

In this section, we’ve outlined the tasks that require specialized knowledge. We’re not saying that you couldn’t hire a General Skills VA and train them to perform email marketing or video editing, but we do predict that the training would take significantly longer. Remember: you are hiring a VA to free up your time, after all. Therefore, it’s probably in your best interest to just go ahead and hire someone that has prior knowledge on these skills.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is by far the most effective form of marketing. By putting this off, you could potentially be missing out on a lot of revenue. Hire a VA to take care of this and watch the magic happen.

1. Creating a New List in Email Marketing Software
2. Adding Subscribers to Lists
3. Removing Subscribers to Lists
4. Creating Emails to Promote Content
5. Scheduling Emails to Promote Content
6. Editing Follow-up Emails and Auto Responders
7. Creating Email Newsletters
8. Editing Emails
9. Proofreading Emails

Audio/Video Editor

Hiring a VA to handle audio and video editing can save a ton of money. More importantly, outsourcing your audio work can create a professional image for your customers that can have a great effect on your marketing. Even if you are in the audio/video business, you could benefit from a VA here, too. Imagine how much time you could save, by simply outsourcing the very basics to an already skilled VA? Saving time and money without compromising quality? Sounds like a no brainer to me!

1. Basic Editing of Audio Files
2. Removing Background Noise from Audio and Video
3. Adding Intros and outros to videos
4. Basic Photo Shop Editing
5. Podcast Software Installation
6. Podcast Setup on iTunes
7. Podcast Setup on Spotify
8. Podcast Insertion on Blogpost

SEO/Content Writer

SEO firms can be a huge money pit. Sometimes, they are pretty shady and it can seem like you don’t know where your money is going. SEO firms that are not like that are charging exorbitant amounts. While it’s worth it (sometimes), it may be more valuable to you to have an in-house (not really in-house, but you get what I mean) SEO analyst working for you. This could be ideal for eCommerce sites, that are putting out a TON of content. Having an SEO virtual assistant can also save money from hiring a freelancer.

1. Blog Post Creation
2. Guest Blogging
3. SEO Writing
4. Technical SEO Audits
5. Manage Google Analytics
6. Set up Google Dashboards
7. Manage Google Search Console
8. Press Release Writing
9. Newsletter Writing
10. Copywriting
11. Directory Submission
12. Citation Submission
13. Article Spinning
14. Article Marketing
15. Site Analysis
16. Keyword Research
17. Competitor Analysis
18. Landing Page Set-up & Creation
19. Web Master Submission
20. Sitemap Updates
21. Sitemap Submissions
22. On-page Optimizations
23. Off-page optimization
24. Social Bookmarking
25. Blog Commenting
26. Forum Participation
27. Forum Moderation
28. Creating and Managing Backlinks
29. Weekly Google Analytics Reports
30. Monthly Google Analytics Reports
31. Monthly Keyword Ranking Reports

Graphic/Web Designer & Developers

Just like with the audio and video editor virtual assistant, hiring a graphic design and web design VA can save a lot of money from hiring a design company. A lot of VAs out there are very well adept to HTML/CSS and could be a great resource, especially if you are churning out a lot of different pages for your website. Additionally, you can find some VAs that have more advanced language skills, such as PHP, where they will be able to totally customize your WordPress site (or help with some of your customers).

1. Designing Logos
2. Designing Banners
3. Designing Icons
4. Designing eBook Covers & Headers
5. Designing Infographics Images
6. Designing Websites
7. Creating Mock-Ups
8. Support and Develop Websites
9. Manage Content Management Systems (CMS)
10. Install WordPress PlugIns
11. Manage WordPress PlugIns
12. Install WordPress Themes
13. Manage WordPress Themes
14. WordPress Functionality and PlugIn Enhancement
15. Site Maintenance
16. Site Security and Troubleshooting
17. CRM Integration
18. Social Media Integration
19. Payment Gateway Integration
20. Email Ticketing System Installation
21. Email Ticketing System Support

Conclusion

We know that this list can be a bit too much, but at the same time, it really isn’t complete. In fact, anything that you can think of that is specific to your business needs can more than likely be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Comment below if you have any questions or let us know how your business is planning on using your VA.