So, you’re a general virtual assistant, and you want to make more money. No problem!
As a virtual assistant, there are many administrative tasks that you can offer in order to increase your rates. These range from social media management to creating marketing materials for other small businesses in your area.
Who’s a General Virtual Assistant?
A general virtual assistant also referred to as an administrative assistant, is a VA responsible for organizing and managing the administrative tasks of an organization, a brand, or an individual.
As an administrative assistant, your tasks will often involve clerical work like answering phones, managing calendars or arranging meetings, but you may also be tasked with bigger responsibilities if you have the necessary skills.
General Virtual Assistant Tasks
With administrative work, you aren’t short of options. Choose the ones you’re comfortable with and bundle them together.
Some of the virtual assistance services that you can offer as a general VA include:
Email support
Responding to clients’ inquiry emails using their canned responses and answers to their frequently asked questions.
Inbox organization and Management
Clients can be overwhelmed with all the messages in their inboxes.
To avoid this, you will help organize and prioritize email communication by using features such as filters and folders to ensure that only the most important emails go through to their inboxes, and the rest are sent to the relevant folders for easier access.
For instance, you can sort all transactional emails such as receipts and invoices and send them to a dedicated folder named ‘Receipts’ while ensuring all the new service inquiries are sent directly to the inbox, or even better to a project management tool like Trello or Asana.
Email sanity management
Your clients tend to neglect their emails. As a VA, you can help them out by unsubscribing from newsletters they don’t read. You’ll also need to frequently check their spam folders to see if any important emails were missed.
Also, where clients are getting so many spammy emails, you can remove their addresses from all their online media, such as their websites, or reword them so that bots don’t recognize them as emails.
Finally, work with their designers to ensure that their contact forms are working properly so that people can use their inquiry forms instead.
Managing online surveys
From time to time, your client may want to run surveys to better understand their customer base and the market in general. You can help them set these up and manage the data they collect through programs like Survey Junkey, Survey Monkey, and Google Forms.
Maintaining a blog
Blogging is an excellent way for companies to establish thought leadership in their industry and communicate more intimately with customers, prospects, partners, employees, or investors. You can help your clients by creating authoritative content, fixing WordPress errors, approving/disapproving users, comments maintenance, etc.
Project management
Assist your clients with project management so they can focus on the fulfillment part. You might do this by assigning tasks to specific employees and then checking up with them as needed. Also, you will need to coordinate with other professionals and stakeholders involved in the project to ensure that everything goes smoothly and the project is completed properly and on time.
Planning and organizing events
As a virtual assistant, your client may bring you in the planning and running of their events. You might be involved in the planning stages from start to finish. This includes setting dates, choosing a venue, creating invitations, coordinating with speakers, and more. If you serve clients in the events industry, this may be the main task for you as their virtual assistant.
Documentation
Clients may also need you to maintain, organize, and archive process documents. Other employees will record their processes and forward them to you to combine, process, and beautifully present in a way that will make it easier for anyone to duplicate the results. Documentation helps future staff understand the company processes, thus cutting down the time required to train the new staff.
Media coverage
You can assist with media by pitching articles to reporters or editors of major publications in your client’s industry.
Market research
You can do market research for your clients by using various competitor analysis tools such as SpyFu and analyzing and monitoring trends in the industry with the help of Exploding Topics and Google Trends.
Financial filings
If you have Excel skills, then you can create charts or graphs with formulas and automate filing important reports like budgets, expenses, and quarterly and annual reports.
Managing travel arrangements
Being in charge of your client’s calendars means that you can also help them manage their travel arrangements to ensure they’re always on time and everything they need is sorted beforehand. For instance, booking flights, finding the best deals, sorting out car rentals, and organizing airport transfers, all albeit virtually.
Liaising with vendors
A client may want someone to be in charge of communication between their business and the vendors. As a VA tasked with this, you’ll be dealing with invoices from suppliers or publishing new adverts in major publications of your client’s choice.
Bookkeeping
If you have an accounting background or have worked with books before, you can offer this as a separate service to your client. You’ll help manage their books. However, keep in mind that you do need some great financial computational skills to be effective at bookkeeping.
Creating press releases
If you know how to craft powerful Press Releases, you can offer this to your clients. You’ll work with their marketing team, writing about the company’s latest product launches or any other pressing news to get exposure for them online.
Data entry
Data entry tasks may not sound very exciting, but if you have a knack for numbers, you can offer this service. Your tasks will include filling out sheets, sorting through inventory data, and inputting it into a database.
Create gallery archives:
If you can sort through old files or organize pictures from the last few years, you could offer this service to your client. You’ll go through their photos to find any important ones they’re looking for or just the ones that can be used in their messaging and put them in an organized folder with tags so they can find them easily.
Compiling Social Media Updates
If your client needs help updating their social media content or running a sweepstake, you could offer this service to make extra money. Tasks will include sorting through their social media content and updating it with new information and creating new posts.
Creating Reports
If you’re skilled at compiling data or pulling stats from various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for your client’s marketing campaigns, you could offer this service to make more money. You’ll compile the data into an attractive report that they can then use to show off their company’s work or to plan the next campaign.
Creating Videos
If you have video editing skills, you can create promotional videos for your client’s business.
Collecting and organizing data
When your client is running a campaign, you’ll take the data that they’ve collected and organize it for them in an Excel spreadsheet.
Researching keywords
To help your clients know what topics they should focus on when doing content marketing, keyword research is necessary. With the help of SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush, you can easily find lucrative keywords with medium search volume and low competition.
Proofreading
It’s always a good idea to have someone double-check the spelling in any type of content that will go out digitally or on paper. You’ll be ensuring that the copy is accurate and free of typos.
Cleaning up messy data
If your client has a database that’s gone haywire, it can be difficult to find anything without spending hours combing through the database. Create an efficient system that will help you or your client to sort through the information by adding new tabs in Excel or creating tables with easy-to-read headers.
Webinar presentations
Hosting a Webinar is a great way for your clients to share their knowledge and expertise with an audience of potential leads, customers, investors, etc. As an administrative assistant who’s tech-savvy, you can help create and schedule webinar events, proof, and design presentation decks, or draft the scripts if you understand the subject.
Employee onboarding
Your client might need a new administrative assistant or two to help them with their workload. You can provide this service by creating an onboarding process that helps the candidate become familiarized with the company culture, and benefits package since you are in a better position to know the ins and outs of their company.
Reviewing contract bids
Before signing off on a bid, your boss may require you to review it for discrepancies or improper wording. You can make sure that they’re getting a fair deal by reading between the lines, as the details are always in the fine print.
Graphics design
If you have experience in graphics design, you can help your clients create engaging content that they can use in social media marketing
Writing proposals
If you have experience writing marketing proposals, you can help your clients create compelling proposals to submit their bids.
Setting up Google Apps
If you are familiar with the use of apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meets, Calendar, and Drive, then you can configure these settings for your client so that they can get the most out of them.
Setting up Microsoft Apps
If you’re familiar with the Microsoft apps such as Outlook, Microsoft To-Do, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive, you can configure these settings, so your client has all the tools they need to be productive.
Setting up social media pages
You can help your clients create and maintain their company’s social media presence, including Facebook Pages, Twitter Feeds, Instagram Profiles, and more!
Setting up WordPress
If you are experienced with using a content management system like WordPress, then you could set it up for your client so that they have a website to help promote their business online. Some clients, though having a business website, don’t have a blog. You can set up a blog for them using WordPress in their subdomains to start publishing blog posts.
Planning social media marketing campaigns
You may be able to assist clients in developing and implementing successful social media marketing campaigns.
Monitoring mentions of the company
You can monitor social media channels and other places where a client may be mentioned. This enables you to evaluate comments or reviews and identify those that need addressing or even spot link-building opportunities. There are several social listening tools that you can configure to be alerted each time your client’s business is mentioned.
Maintaining calendars
This administrative task has two main objectives: to make sure the schedules are updated as necessary to avoid any conflicts or inconveniences and coordinate meetings.
Chat support
You can provide chat support services and offer the same level of customer service that you would in a brick-and-mortar store. To do this, you will need tools such as a screen sharing program, a chat program like Tidio, and a customer service platform that allows you to message customers.
Data analysis
Help your clients to better understand collected data so as to make better business decisions
Creating asset libraries
Create an archive of all the forms, logos, media kits, and other resources that your clients may need to use -This makes it easier to retrieve and share important resources.
CRM Data Management
Review your clients’ contact info, update customer profiles to include important details such as birthdays and anniversaries, as well as ensure that the data is up to date and accurate as people often change details such as physical and email addresses
Invoice Creation
Create a template to make it easier for your clients to save time and have professional invoices that you can then customize and sent to their clients when due
Tracking payments
Ensure that you’ve set up your clients with a payment reminder system. Ideally, this will be automated, and they can just download the template or
Scheduling Bill Payments
Your client has several subscriptions to different tools that power their businesses. You can help them set up automatic payments with a payment solution service, so they don’t have to worry about possible cancellations and service interruptions.
Finding leads to cold pitch on LinkedIn
With LinkedIn Premium, you can see the contact information and profiles of people who have shown an interest in your clients’ skills or business. You can then devise a way to enable your client to reach out to the prospects with a personalized message in an effort to spark conversations that may lead to closing the sales.
Finding email addresses (or other contact info) for prospects
You can use tools like Rapportive, which will show you the social media profiles of people in your Gmail account. It also shows their email address if they have one listed on those accounts – and as a virtual assistant, it’s up to you how far outside of LinkedIn you want to go for collecting contact information. The goal is to improve prospects’ data in your client’s CRM so that it’s easy to reach them.
Following-up with prospects
After making the first contact, you may want to send a follow-up to your client’s prospects if you don’t hear from them like in a week. There are tools that can automate this, but you need to ensure that the follow-up sequences are really personalized if you want to pique interest.
Automating stuff
If you are an automation guru, you can prove really worthwhile to your client by ensuring that mundane tasks such as sending an email from Gmail to a project management tool are taken off the to-do lists. With tools like Zapier, you can integrate apps, and allow seamless communication and data transfer so that you and your client only have a few places to visit to visualize everything that’s happening in their business.
Conclusion
The best thing about working as a general virtual assistant is that you can change businesses right from the comfort of your living room. You will, however, need to put in some time upfront as you learn how to do these tasks like scheduling appointments or emailing clients but once you know what needs to be done, it’s easy enough.
