As a freelancer, pursuing your passion and doing what you love while being your own boss (and getting paid for it) can seem like a dream come true.
However, as you become more successful and in demand and your freelance business grows, you may find you need some extra help to avoid getting overwhelmed and ensure important tasks don’t get missed.
That’s where a Virtual Assistant (VA) can greatly benefit your freelance business.
Here are 4 benefits of hiring a VA and just some of the areas where they can help.
1. You can hire an expert (without the training costs)
In other words, you don’t need to train yourself on tasks you don’t enjoy or don’t have time to learn or carry out.
While some VAs are generalists, meaning they can turn their hand to most tasks given a proper brief and direction, conversely, some VAs focus on a specific skill set or area of expertise.
Hiring a VA means you can focus on your core skills that make you money.
2. VAs can save you time (and therefore money)
Hiring someone to do the tasks you haven’t got time to do saves you time and money in the long run.
When deciding on whether to hire a VA, a good metric to ask yourself is how much is an hour of your time worth to you. What would you have earned performing billable client work if it wasn’t for the time-consuming task (that you can outsource to a VA)?
Then, work out how many hours it will take you compared to the cost of a VA.
3. Important admin tasks get done
Sounds obvious, but important admin tasks that you might otherwise put off get done, such as invoicing clients, emailing payment reminders and tracking expenses and inventory.
Invoice Ninja, the leading free invoicing software for small business invoicing, online payments, tracking expenses and billable tasks, can facilitate all the above and much more.
Furthermore, with the paid Enterprise Plan, you can create up to 20 additional account users, set permissions of what additional account users can view/create/edit, and receive notifications for actions taken by users.
Perfect if you are hiring a VA to do this type of admin work for your business.
Try it for free here.
4. You don’t need deep pockets
Contrary to popular belief, hiring a VA doesn’t need a huge budget.
You can buy their services in blocks of time, for example, a set number of hours per week. Or hire them per project (or task) and rehire them accordingly. VAs are remote workers; they are not on your payroll, so you are in control of how much you spend.
You can also hire them from anywhere in the world, which can reduce costs.
You can hire VAs via a VA company/service provider to give you access to a wide range of skills and talent pool instead of hiring just one person. In this scenario, you are usually assigned a project manager who you deal with – although this way of working will generally cost more to cover the company’s overheads.
What route you go down will depend on your needs, budget and the tasks you want to be carried out.
Here are just some areas of your freelance business where a VA can help:
Email Management
Everyone dreams of Inbox Zero, but unless you have the time to wade through all the emails you get on a daily basis – this can prove challenging.
Hiring a VA to ensure your inbox is in order and important notifications and client communications get seen and actioned can boost productivity and efficiency and improve client relations.
VAs can also help with cold emailing potential prospects – to help ensure your sales pipeline is full, and you don’t get caught out with the dreaded freelancer feast and famine cycle.
Financial Admin Tasks
These tasks range from financial record keeping (think tax deductible expenses and receipts) to invoicing clients, data input, and inventory tracking.
Anything important that needs to be done, especially when it comes to keeping business finances in order and managing freelancer cash flow, but is time-consuming, can benefit from VA help.
Social Media Management & Content Creation
Managing social media accounts and creating content can take up a large chunk of any freelancer’s time.
It also requires a deft touch, creativity, and knowledge of the individual social media platforms and how they work. Unless you work in this field yourself, getting a skilled VA to help with some or all of this makes sense.
While they typically won’t be involved in the strategy like a professional Social Media Manager would be, their help in this area can also extend to video editing, podcast transcripts and re-purposing content for the different social media and video sharing platforms.
Website/Blog Management
Ensuring your website’s plug-ins and themes are up to date, blog comments are moderated, and content is fresh, relevant, and SEO optimized can all take time.
As well as creating the content for your blog, resourcing images and helping with SEO keyword and keyphrase research and best practice, all of these tasks can be within a VA’s wheelhouse.
Of course, many more tasks can be outsourced to a VA depending on your line of business, and we’re sure you can think of some that can apply to your own business.
We hope this conveys just some of the many benefits hiring a good VA can bring to your freelance business.
If you know anyone else who might benefit from reading this post, please share. Thank you!