I read a story recently of a man who outsourced his entire job to a virtual assistant and spent his whole time sitting in the office watching Cat Videos. This guy worked as a programmer for a large firm and reportedly was considered to be one of the company’s better workers. No one had anything bad to say about the guy, and to all appearances he was one of the company’s average Joes. And he got away with it for years too – getting paid a top salary to let someone else do all his work for him. It seemed like genius – it was just too bad that it was also unscrupulous, illegal and that he eventually got caught. ..

But the good news is that when you’re a webmaster, there’s actually nothing wrong with doing just that. You are working for yourself, so you’re not misleading anyone, and the complex and varied nature of what you do makes it perfectly suited to outsourcing and getting a little help.

Curious as to just what you could get a VA to do for you? Then read on…

What is a VA?

Essentially, a virtual assistant is someone who does all the things that a regular assistant would do, but over e-mail. This then means that they can handle pretty much any kind of task for you as long as it doesn’t require any specialist expertise. In other words, they’ll do market research and tell you which features people want to see on websites, but they won’t be able to program those new features in using PHP.

You can pay top dollar for a VA if you like, and get someone with an impressive CV and skillset fit to be an assistant to a top CEO. This will of course increase the range of things they can do for you, and the quality to which they will do it. At the same time though, they can just as easily find a VA for $100 a month or less who might not necessarily speak English as a first language even, but who is more than happy and conscientious enough to handle a range of tasks with enthusiasm.

Usually VAs will charge by the hour, which means that they’ll handle anything you ask of them up until the point that it starts taking them more than 20 hours for instance. That’s a pretty good rate when you think about it.

What Jobs Could You Leave Behind?

Many entrepreneurs and business men and women now recommend getting a VA, and there are many roles that they you could easily pass over to them if you want to spend longer on the parts of your job that you enjoy.

For instance, why not get your VA to:

  • Answer your e-mails and forward the ones that need to be dealt with by you personally?
  • Find and alert you to dead links
  • Research and contact websites that might potentially be willing to publish your guest posts
  • Send out your press releases to potentially interested parties
  • Moderate your forum
  • Find you writers and designers

Suddenly all the things you know you should be doing but don’t have time for will get done, and then it’s only a matter of time until your site starts to really excel.

 

Author Bio:-This post has been contributed by Nancy Baker, a freelance blogger who is currently writing for Pentech Consulting, a company specializing in managing and developing websites in Connecticut. She is a tech savvy person and she enjoys sharing her views on the latest gadgets and appliances online. You can also follow her on Twitter @Nancy Baker.