Hiring a Virtual Assistant For Small Businesses

Virtual Assistants (VA), also known as Virtual Assistant Service Providers (VASP) provide an invaluable service for small businesses, home-based businesses, solo practitioners and organizations. As an independent contractor, a VA may perform tasks related to accounting, data entry, bookkeeping, customer service, web design or any other clerical work. They generally perform these tasks on a per contract basis and charge for these tasks according to the agreed upon rate. The cost is then shared by both parties to save both time and money.

Many small businesses hire VA’s to handle some or all of their telephone answering. Many businesses prefer to hire a virtual assistant because it saves them time and money, as well as reduces the risk of having an employee return to the workplace sick or vacationing, which is common when employees call in sick. Businesses that rely heavily on telephone answering are especially vulnerable to a high volume of calls. Using a VA to take over many of these telephone answering duties allows the business owner to focus on running their business and eliminates the need for additional staff. By using a virtual assistant, businesses are able to keep costs down while still meeting all of their telephone answering needs.

Some small businesses choose to use a VA to perform specific tasks related to certain aspects of their operations. Some common tasks include bill collection and filing, scheduling appointments and more. Other tasks may include travel, accounting or marketing assistance. Many virtual assistants offer training services to new clients or provide on-the-job training for existing clients. They are usually available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to meet with business owners to complete specific tasks or help with one-on-one consulting.

Some of the other services include web design, search engine optimization (SEO), graphic design, video editing and more. Businesses may also hire a virtual assistant to manage their payroll, benefits and social media accounts. These types of services include managing employee hours, implementing employee rewards programs and managing company blogs. Virtual assistants can even manage company website content such as creating web pages and maintaining customer contact information.

A virtual assistant services range from small business owners to large corporations. Some larger companies hire multiple virtual assistants to perform a variety of personal assistant services for their company. A small business owner may use a virtual assistant service to provide simple administrative tasks, such as managing contacts and sending out routine emails. Large companies may use virtual assistant services to take on more complex tasks, including web design, search engine optimization and social media management.

Hiring virtual assistants has become quite popular due to the high cost of hiring in-house staff and obtaining full-time staff in the form of an employee. Virtual receptionists, bookkeepers and accountants can cost a company thousands of dollars per month just to hire an employee, on top of training and benefits. In addition, hiring full-time employees can be difficult for businesses to accomplish. The idea behind hiring virtual assistants is that you can save money while still getting the type of employee you need.

VA’s offer many different kinds of virtual assistant services, such as editing video and photos, writing SEO-rich content, conducting research and more. One particular type of service that most small businesses seek out is content writing. Content writing involves writing articles, blogs or web content for websites and publishing them online. It is a task that requires a good amount of skill, but a great deal of time can be spent on preparing a client’s message and making sure that the piece will be interesting to a broad audience. This can help to increase a business’s reputation and generate traffic to the site. Content writers can also make recommendations for specific products or services that a small business owners may want to take advantage of.

While these tasks aren’t considered to be glamorous, they do make a difference in the effectiveness of a website. If you want to hire virtual assistants to take care of data entry tasks, you should check out the companies that offer this kind of assistance. Many of these VA’s are members of Hiresort and can be found on the site’s home page.