Small Business Strategies: Virtual Assistants

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Welcome to September's Small Business Strategies! This month we sit down with Beth Ann of Beth Anne's Best; she is a virtual assistant, and shares the value that a virtual assistant can bring to your small business.

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Most creative business owners are really good at the creative part of running their business. They are great at making their products and coming up with new ideas.

But, where most creative business owners struggle is staying organized. They struggle with the paperwork, keeping their website up to date, anything techy, promoting their business and the bookkeeping.

There is an age old saying in business that is so true, “You have to spend money to make money.” Even though many people don’t like that saying, it’s true. And that is where I come in. For the past two years, I have been a Virtual Assistant for bloggers and online business owners.

bethanne2

A Virtual Assistant is someone that works from anywhere in the world. They usually work from their home in a different state than their clients, but not always. I have known of virtual assistants that are local to their clients. I’ve also known virtual assistants that are in totally different countries. I even know virtual assistants that travel often and keep on working for their clients. I have a friend that will work on client work while on airplanes. As you can see, the position is very versatile to many different lifestyles.

As a Virtual Assistant, I do everything from

Social Media Management
Online Marketing (including your email list)
Social Media result tracking
Sponsored Posts
Blog Cleanup
Twitter Chats
Email Management
Technical Help
Bookkeeping
...much much more!

If you have a task you need completed you can find someone to help you get it done.

As you can see there are many different tasks you can have a virtual assistant do. The main goal of hiring a virtual assistant is to get those boring tasks you don’t have time to do off your plate and onto someone else's’ so you can work on doing things to grow your business.

So here is an example of how a Virtual Assistant can help get you more organized.

Say starting out you hire a virtual assistant to schedule all your social media for you for 20 hours a month. You might pay them anywhere from $200-$500 a month, depending on their experience and rate.

Yes that can be a big expense but that is 20 hours you just got back to yourself. With those 20 hours you could write an ebook, or create 5 more crocheted hats to sell in your Etsy shop.

Say you sell your ebook for $5. If at least 100 people buy the ebook you will earn your money back. And that is just for one month. You will keep earning money for that ebook every month for many years as long as the content is evergreen and not time sensitive.

Also if you have a virtual assistant handling your social media and marketing your social media presence will grow. Like most bloggers and online businesses just starting out you aren’t sure what to post or at what time to post. And the different things you should post on Facebook vs Twitter vs Instagram. If you hire an expert they will keep up with all your different social media networks and track to see how well each site is doing and help you improve your online presence.