Top 20 Professionals who can hire Virtual Assistants

In this article we have discussed about twenty professionals who can work as a virtual assistant. After going through the article in detail, we definitely hope that the reader, coming from diverse professions, will be able to get an idea as to how they can convert themselves as a virtual assistant.

1.  As Social Media Manager

We all feel that hanging out on the social media is just thrilling and awesome. And outsourcing this can indeed be an amazing idea. But social media stops being fun the moment it starts eating away a major portion of your business time. We all agree that remaining active in the social media means that you will get many advantages from it, but you need expertise to do it right. And to remain up-to-date on this always requires constant learning.

Here enters a social media virtual assistant like you who has specialization in social media management who saves the day of the user. If the social media presence of the business house is very close to nil, then the social media virtual assistant offers packages to upgrade their profiles and bring them on track. The assistant pitches up their profile by taking the following steps –

• Keep all their social profiles the same and inform the potential customers about them

• Update scheduling

• Creation of original contents like images, polls, etc.

• Scheduling the popular tools like Buffer and Hootsuite

• Communicating with the followers by retweeting, liking, etc

To do all this perfectly, you can begin by managing a few social media profiles, and do some value additions to those before you get a good grip on the work types. For instance, you can begin with Facebook and Instagram and after when these two profiles are up and running, you can include Pinterest, Twitter, etc. that suits your client’s business type.

2. Blog Manager

You may feel that there isn’t much scope of a blogger as a virtual assistant. But you are wrong! Blogging means serious business for a good blog manager. It begins by putting an editorial calendar together. When a client this kind of help, he or she doesn’t scramble for a post idea at the last moment. A blog management virtual assistant does the following:

• Uploads and formats posts;

• Adds links to posts – inbound and outbound;

• Sources photos;

• Creates and adds graphics to the posts;

• Does SEO optimization of the post as no viewer means, useless writing;

• Adds options and lead magnets to the blog posts. This is vital for enhancing the email list.

• Coordinates with the guest writers starting from choosing blog topics to following up on deadlines and deals with cross-promotion once the blog is posted.

You can always impress your client by leading yourself on researching the blog topics. First make out who the competitors for your client, and then study what their topics are. Try to write on those points which these competitors have not covered in their blog on behalf of your client.

3. Customer Care Professional

This task is very crucial one to outsource to a virtual assistant. This becomes all the more important if a good chunk of your solopreneurs’ time is being eaten away while doing this petty task. Both from a professional as well as a personal point of view, a virtual customer care professional assistant can take care of a lot of things in terms of customer service:

• New client generation through personalized welcome packet creation

• Attending to recurrent customer inquiries promptly via canned email responses creation or by creating an FAQ page with the answers to the most common queries;

• Constantly remaining in touch with the old clients so that they never feel dissatisfied with what they’re getting;

• Attending to customer complaints and refund requests

Take the help of the real time and keep in touch with the clients and let them talk it over. This is much easier process for system clarification rather than emails.

4.  Sales professional

If your client’s business involves sales, they will definitely need someone to carry out the task of lead generation effectively. Effective lead generation isn’t just a number game. As a lead generation virtual assistant, you can strategically list your contacts. Here are what these virtual assistants do for them:

• Sets up a system like Google alerts with specific keywords to generate leads;

• Sets up a system to gather the lead data

• Follows leads on social media and communicate with them;

• Reach out to leads via email or social media.

5.  Event Management Professional

Does event management only mean arranging for a fancy wedding for you? If the answer is no, then read on. In the online world, events actually come in the form of online conferences, classes and webinars actually. An event virtual assistant usually does the following:

• Researches on the leads for guest speakers

• Communicates and coordinates with the guest speakers

• Sets up event promotion that includes creation of promotional materials as well

• Sets up a tech platform like GoToWebinar or Join.me for the event.

• Remains available all through the event to counter any unwarranted problems

• Moderates the chat all through the event

• Manages after-event feedback via audience surveys, or following up with guest speakers

 According to Ready Talk survey, about 20% to 40% webinar attendees transform into qualified leads. As per the same survey, about three weeks of promotion before the webinar is the catch. Three often is seen as a magic number for email campaigns sent per webinar.

6. Ad Campaigner

While scrolling through Facebook, have you seen the ads that show up frequently? Those ads are written, designed and scheduled by a professional. That professional is usually an experienced content writer virtual assistant. These ad campaigns need specialized skills. As per Facebook, advertisements on these platforms have reached around four million three years back; think what the situation is now. That’s really stiff competition. So if you want to remain visible on these platforms, hire an ad management virtual assistant and get these services:

• Systematically segments the audience;

• Changes the demographic settings for ad optimization;

• Does a thorough research about the competitors, fans and followers;

• Designs and writes copy for ads;

• Calculates the cost per action or per lead;

• Evaluates the ROI of Facebook campaigns.

To be a big success in this, you will have to learn the nitty gritties of Facebook ads, and then you smoothly transit yourself as a successful ad campaigner for the popular social media platforms. Just a small tip, Instagram takes in the ads quite easily.

7.  Project Manager

The best thing about marketing services as a project management virtual assistant is that it becomes lot easier to convince clients who cannot commit to hiring a virtual assistant otherwise. A solopreneurs actually feels the music when he or she is in the middle of a long and scary project and then the project manager becomes a real stress buster. Here are how they do it:

• Product launch especially for digital products like e-books;

• Researches on industry best-practices;

• Recruits team members and contractors;

• Supervises and coordinates with the team members;

• Sets up systems and timelines;

• Does business audits.

You can start with project-based collaborations to firmly set your foot for dealing with larger projects. Do it dedicatedly, and you’ll become the most sought after professional for your client.

8.  Bookkeeper

Ahh!! This is probably something that almost all of the solopreneurs dread of. And that’s simply because it’s not a cakewalk for someone who has technical, strategic and creative capacities, but no capacity to enter numbers on a screen. Since this involves recording bills, invoices, payments, and tracking of the general financial well-being of a business, it’s something that NEEDS to be done, but is troubling. Here is how a bookkeeping virtual assistant can help:

• Generates invoices and follows up for non-payment;

• Makes sure bills are paid timely;

• Issues refunds;

• Prepares balance sheets;

• Pays employees and contractors;

• Reconciles bank and credit card statements;

• Helps in preparing your quarterly or annual taxes.

• Maintains the financial data in the client’s preferred software.

Build a solid trust of your client by showing recommendation letters from your past clients and jobs. Do a thorough background check to find out whether your client is apprehensive about sharing their confidential data with you and try to convince them.

9.  Self-publishing Assistance

Self-published authors comprise of about 34% to 40% percent of all e-book sales in U.S, the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But although self-publishing has become much easier now, a lot of nitty-gritty goes into a self-published book in order to make it successful. Here is what a self-publishing virtual assistant can do for these publishing houses:

• Applies for ISBN registration;

• Fetches and communicates with book reviewers;

• Organizes virtual book tours;

• Connects the author with the trade fairs or literary partners;

• Organizes giveaways;

• Liaisons with book clubs interested in the book;

• Builds social media platform for the author;

• Engages with fans on the author’s behalf;

• Books interviews and secures the guest posts.

10.  E-book Designer

In 2017, Amazon paid more than 200 million dollars to the self-published authors. The popularity of Kindle Unlimited has skyrocketed, and the use of Microsoft Word, Google Docs or Scrivener has also become a popular medium for the writers. The authors need to have their books professionally formatted so that their books can flow smoothly on the screen of an e-reader although the medium is not as old as paper and pen. A professional e-book designer virtual assistant who specializes in e-book formatting can exactly guide the writer about which layout out to choose from. They also guide you on what the best typeface that will work best and where to put in the footnotes and endnotes so that they don’t show up in odd places within the book.

11. Podcasting Professional

As per a popular study done by Edison Research, 26% of the American population listens to at least one podcast a month. And 17% of the marketers are contemplating to add podcasting to their marketing ventures in the coming year. This very prediction has opened up a large market for the virtual assistants who specialize in podcasting support. Their services include:

• Generates leads for the interviewer;

• Communicates with the guests before the show for coordinating the schedules;

• Goes through the guests’ websites and social media channels and briefs the clients regarding the guests’ businesses;

• Researches on the potential sponsors for the podcast;

• Researches on affiliate marketing and generates podcast income;

• Sources intros, outros and cover art;

• Uploads podcasts to platforms such as iTunes or Stitcher.

12. Website Maintenance Professional

You needn’t be a programmer or an expert in the game for developing websites to call yourself a WordPress virtual assistant. Websites usually look quite nice and shiny at the beginning, with limited content and perfectly streamlined pages. As time passes, the website evolves, and the clutters also increase. A clunky website becomes slow and unintuitive to use, and that’s when the need for a virtual assistant arises. For a tech-savvy virtual assistant, the areas that you regularly fix are:

• Updates the plugins;

• Cleans the themes by removing the unwanted elements;

• Integrates the social media;

• Sets up or refreshes the contact forms;

• Manages regular backups

• Manages security updates;

• Deletes unused media files;

• Deletes unpublished, unwanted pages and old drafts;

• Optimizes images;

• Checks on the privacy policy compliance.

13.  Website SEO professional

As per Hubspot, within a lifetime, one compounded blog post draws as much traffic as six dying posts put together. As an SEO virtual assistant, one ensures that his or her client’s online content is fulfilling the current SEO best-practices and is optimized accordingly. For clients with little or no knowledge of digital marketing, the virtual assistants create and implement an SEO strategy from the beginning. As a virtual assistant updates according to the search engines’ best practices, the client gets the following help:

• Researches on the best keywords as per the client’s industry;

• Researches on the competition to find out what their ranking are in searches;

• Optimizes the website content, includes meta descriptions and headlines;

• Optimizes images for SEO;

• Optimizes SEO for social media platforms like Pinterest;

• Increases website loading speed;

• Periodically conducts an SEO analysis to find out what strategy is working and what more needs to be done.

14. Business Analytics Professional

Keeping a constant track on analytics is vitally important for measuring the ROI of any effort that a business puts into marketing their business. But keeping track of these analytics is quite time-consuming task, which is why a business analytics virtual assistant makes its entry. As a virtual assistant who specializes in analytics, he or she is highly skilled at seeing at the broader picture and to synthesize the correct information to put forward to your client. It is not needed for them to make future recommendation; they should have a thorough understanding about the client’s business goals. The tasks they do include:

• Tracks website analytics;

• Tracks insights of the audience for the client’s social media channels. These insights involves keeping tracking about the average viewership, as well as the demographic segmentation of each channel;

• Generates monthly, quarterly and yearly reports.

15. Graphic Designer

When we’re talking about creation of an entire visual strategy for a brand, then yes, that kind of specialized work should be outsourced to someone who went to graphic design school. But often the small businesses don’t have the adequate budget or the necessity for such a big investment. As a graphic design virtual assistant, one can help clients in logo, business card, brochure, flyer, banner, letterhead, blog post graphics, gift certificate, invitation, postcard creations. This kind of services requires lots of learning and practice to offer appealing visual elements. If you have a good eye for details, and an innate sense of color and typography, you will never have a shortfall for clients.

16.  Presentation Creator

According to a 2018 survey on 400 different speakers, 47% of respondents said that they spent around eight or more hours on presentation creation. That’s more than a full day’s work on creating slides alone, apart from writing and structuring the content. This is the reason why it is a great opportunity for a presentation virtual assistant to step in and help out:

• They design the slide templates according to brand guidelines;

• Sources the stock images to be used in the presentation;

• Creates graphs and chart designs;

• Formats the content in an engaging way;

• Prepares the presentation on client specific softwares like the Powerpoint, Google Slides, Keynote Prezi, etc.

17. Social Media Elements Designer

Maximum number of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. And 32% of them say that visual images are the most vital aspect on which they base their contents for their businesses. But it becomes too tough for a business owner to keep up with the changing world of the latest best practices. This involves the right sizes and layout for social media elements like cover photos, header photos, shared images, album banners, channel covers, posts, and many more. That’s when social media designer virtual assistant steps in and takes in all the responsibilities upon themselves to keep the visual content fresh and up-to-date according to the latest changes.

18.  Online Store Manager

As per the United States Department of Commerce, around 53% of the internet users globally make online purchases. We have the common notion that the lion’s share is taken up by the retail giants such as the Amazon. But in reality, more than half of the items sold by Amazon come from the small business retailers. That’s an amazing opportunity if you want to remain in the business. Here one can pitch in the services of a virtual assistant specializing in online retail management. They’ll process the following:

• Periodically lists or removes products from the directory;

• Optimizes product SEO;

• Manages product category;

• Processes and fulfills the orders;

• Enters coupon data;

• Processes returns and exchanges;

• Issues refunds;

• Manages inventory;

• Manages the payment systems;

• Liaisons with the suppliers and other contractors.

• Replies to customer service questions.

19.  Travel Assistant

Businesses owners who travel a lot, for work or personal reasons, might need a virtual travel assistant to take away the burden of logistics off their client’s to-do list. This category of clients comprises of the conference speakers, book authors, and sales representatives of small businesses. As a virtual travel assistant, they do the following:

• Researches on the best offers on airfare and additional expenses such as baggage;

• Researches on the best options for car rental and hotel accommodation;

• Compiles travel schedules for specific itineraries requested for budgetary purposes;

• Researches on visa requirements;

• Contacts the airlines and hotels for making reservations and negotiate on fares;

• Arranges for airport pick-ups and drop-offs;

• Arranges for secondary plans in case there is changes or cancellations;

• Gets the tickets reissued and arranges for reimbursements in case of cancellations;

• Purchases travel insurance;

• Fetches the locations to host the client’s meetings at the place of destination;

• Researches on the local attractions and book for guided tours.

The virtual assistant does not require finding a client who travels a lot all year round. He or she just has to specialize on conference travel arrangements, where they will be their client’s hands who can help them to attend trade fairs. And that indirectly guarantees that they will get you work every year around the same time.

20.  Conversion copywriter

Three fourths of the companies agree that the emails offer excellent to good ROI. A professional conversion copywriter takes charge of wording the client’s email sequence, but the virtual conversion copywriter actually uploads, formats, and schedules the emails. They can also track the opening rates, click through rates and unsubscribe rates, and prepare email analytics reports as well.