Note: I learned this from the Virtual Assistant Seminar and I have decided to share this interesting information with you. If you're considering working from home as a VA or if you're thinking about hiring one, this article is definitely worth reading. It sums up in detail the most important things you need to know about VA's.
36 Things You Can Get Your Virtual Assistants To Do For you To Make Your Life Easier
What Busy Thing Can Virtual Assistants Do For You Personally Or For Your Business?
1. Tell your compelling message to thousands of members of social networks and receive happy messages in return from the recipients.
2. Enable you to open, maintain 30 or more social network identities while still getting messages from each and return messages to those who require a reply.
3. And since you’re a member of lots of networks, any message you bring out can be propagated to each one, while checking if the message was correctly posted in each.
4. Say you went on vacation or an event and took lots of pictures and videos. VAs can take all the photos, erase the blurred ones, rotate the ones that need it, and give you the result – all renamed with the correct keywords and even watermarked with your “brand”.
5. After “fixing” the photos, they can upload it to your social networks
with the album name you specify.
6. When I say maintain social network accounts, I mean “approve all friends, reply to all emails and messages using your FAQ or standard reply or cut and paste from your “reply” message collection.
7. If you have an event, they can put the event details into both social
networks AND event calendars, thus creating links to your event website or blog.
8. They can blog hop according to your specifications, leave a personal comment to the blog owner (they can read the blog if you want them to).
9. They can spice up your presentations using “interesting” graphics from either online creative commons sources or your paid graphics source.
Of course, you must train them on the quality of graphics you’re thinking of and what constitutes beauty for your PowerPoint.
10. If you can type the step by step, they can create whole PowerPoint presentations based on your instructions. I once asked my VAs to create the entire process (each step, literally) in signing up for onlywire.com and ALL it’s supporting websites. I then used that presentation as a bonus to a product I was selling.
11. I had a long list of emails that were not separated by commas. I had the VA “clean it up” so that the emails were separated by commas.
12. Check your website if the links actually opens the right website that it says it opens. Link checkers can only check if the link works, but not if it’s the right link (what the words say opens to the correct link).
13. Using SMS, I asked my VA to find me the nearest ATM in my location (I was outside) and have no internet connection.
14. Call up major hotels and event venues in Bangkok to see if they have facilities for an internet-connected workshop for 40 people.
15. Manually inspect my client’s forums for people who are spamming or advertising and delete the user and posts - do this daily.
16. Edit blog posts that are outdated.
17. Do keyword research using the Adwords tool.
18. Create a blog based on the keyword research.
19. Populate the blog based on a strategy of creating original posts.
20. Replicate daily videos using TubeMogul and other video syndicating sites.
21. Change the text links unto a graphic link, many, many times.
22. Welcome people into your membership site, using whatever process is necessary.
23. Locate 10 online greeting card sites and show you screenshots of each.
24. After you’ve decided which greeting card site to use, they can create greeting ecards for your clients – so you get to greet them ALL – even if it’s just online.
25. While they’re at it, they can send a special offer message to the birthday celebrator, asking to buy a birthday discounted (available only to him!) offer or maybe even a free one.
26. Check your other VA’s work.
27. Go to a website, download everything there – that you need. For example, dolectures.com or ted.com
28. Create a list of forums where you can promote in, based on number of members, response to previous promotions and answer direct questions as well as behave like a human being in the forum to maintain the accounts in the forums.
29. Take a long 4 column html table and convert it into a single column text file. As it turns out this is a list of keywords, so they create a website for each.
30. Link websites based on rules you specify, like words surrounding the link, link text and direction of the links.
31. Cross refer an excel file containing PayPal payments, another one with Bank Deposits and a membership list they extracted them your membership site to determine who paid using which payment method. Do this at each month end and email you the result.
32. Watch a video daily, determine what the video is talking about, upload the video to multiple sites while entering the correct keywords.
33. Edit a poorly constructed sales letter using a correctly created sales letter as template.
34. Locate the lyrics of all the songs of a CD and insert the lyrics onto each MP3 file that you supply. (So you can sing to it while playing on your iPod or iTunes).
35. Open your Facebook account, get your real friends birthdays, send them a greeting using an email scheduling service WHILE sending you a note one day before it happens.
36. Funny thing is, my VAs have done all of the above one time or the other and some of them aren’t even university graduates. Not even high school graduates.
GOOD STORY
If your VA knows your ultimate goal, example: “I need to fill up this seminar hall with 60 people each paying the regular high fee.” You can get concerned messages asking you if their efforts last weekend were able to bring in more people. If not, they’ll keep working on promoting to get more people in. Maybe even suggest what else to do.
One of my VAs belongs to a company. After a major typhoon (that’s hurricane for you), the electricity was expected to be out for days. The VA company boss purchased a generator to keep the service up.
Look for more forums to promote in, websites you don’t even know exists.
If you ask for more people to work for you and your VA is a part of a VA company or a VA family (yes, there’s such a thing, they work in one house, they’re all related by blood) – you can ask for extra hands to work on your rush project – with very little advance notice.
Again, if your VA belongs to a VA company, if you think your present VA is not giving you a good performance, you can have the person sent out for retraining and be assigned a new much more experienced VA.
NOT SO GOOD STORY
Asking for advance payment. Usually a school related issue is given (their kids) or a hospital emergency (parents?) when they ask for 2-3 days’ advance on their pay.
Disappearance. They don’t report for three days in a row. Even after getting an SMS message from you (all Filipinos have SMS capability or access to someone who can lend them a phone if they truly want to be reached).
It turns out someone or they have been hospitalized and are just afraid to say it.
I asked them to create 3 posters based on a single one taking creative commons images. They selected not very creative images and overlaid the detailed filled images with the text. Result is the text can’t be read.
Really need to train them about “creative image selection” and “positioning of text for posters for better readability.”
From Jomar Hilario, Internet Marketing Guru
http://www.jomarhilario.com/
