What Do Virtual Assistants Do?

What can virtual assistants do?

It can actually do a lot more than you think. I listen to the book the 4-hour workweek years, and years ago. But the outsourcing thing just seems so foreign that I didn’t take that step but I heard from this guy, John Jonas, and he opened my eyes and within 36 hours, I had my first person hired. So today, John is going to teach us all about what VA’s can do. So what do virtual assistants do? or what can a virtual assistant do for you? So let me, let me, take a step back and make sure you understand what a virtual assistant is. For me, a virtual assistant is someone who works for you permanently. and you know obviously not permanently but long-term. Because, a lot of people think a virtual assistant could be someone who is just a contract worker, or a freelancer. Someone who’s working on a project and once that project is done they’re, they’re done. They’re, they’re, gone doing something else. The problem with that is, it just won’t be effective as a business tool long term. It’s okay as a one-off project one time but it doesn’t change the way that you’re able to work on your business. So, I want to see what my virtual assistants do and kind of what they are because for me, I prefer to call them a virtual worker. Because I have people that do all kinds of stuff and most people assume a virtual assistant is someone who does appointments, or it takes phone calls, or it takes notes, or something like that. So here’s a list of things that my virtual assistants do for me. They do programming, they do web master work, they do graphic design, they do new logo design, they do artwork, they do advertising Facebook ads, Google AdWords, Admiral, Bing, paid, any paid advertising, they do writing, they do customer support, customer chat, they do, they write my personal blog, because they’re talented enough that they can do that. Web master, work data analysis, project management. Now with project management, it requires your oversight and guidance. System admin work, servers, blogging, SEO, community outreach meaning, marketing online with like forums and stuff like that. Managing WordPress, building apps.

I have guys, a guy in the Philippines that builds, and builds, and maintains our app. Did an entry, copywriting, sales copywriting, or just general web copywriting. So these are some of the things that my team of virtual workers do for me. This isn’t even what other people’s virtual workers do. I mean other people’s virtual workers, they, they’re making phone calls for them, they’re setting appointments they’re doing lead generation, gathering data, or doing accounting bookkeeping, or real estate virtual assistants that in the Philippines they have the realtor brand so you have people that completely understand real estate who can be a virtual assistant for realtor. Amazon marketing, podcasting, editing podcast, editing video, editing transcription, ecommerce like Luke Omer stuff or Shopify, they’re very so much that virtual assistants can do. And here’s the thing, so often, people think an outsourced worker is just dumb. You know? it’s a robot they can only do they can only follow specific tasks and what you’ll find is if you hire a full-time person in the Philippines, they’re intelligent and they can think and they can learn and they can actually help your business grow. In order to get to that point you have to have gained their trust. So there and I’ve talked about this in another video, how to manage these people. But, you can get so much good work done if you hire correctly. Now, here’s something interesting often people will go in and find a virtual assistant and then want them to do programming. I want them to design work, I want you to hire someone who has specific skills for the task that you’re trying to that you’re trying to accomplish. So, having given kind of a list of things that they can do, let me tell you what they can’t do. At least, this is my experience with the Philippines.

Filipinos are super capable of doing all kinds of work. The one thing they don’t want to do is make decisions for your business. So if you give them a process to do and that process requires them making decisions about the business or about the direction of the business or making hard decisions that affect how the process is done, they don’t want to do it and they don’t do it because they’re afraid of making a mistake and making you upset. So, you can have them thinking through things and making small decisions but your job in this, in what a virtual assistant can do? is to do the thinking for them and then let them do the work. And if you’ll do the thinking and the guiding, and the helping, and the direction of the business and why it’s going that way, they’ll do the work for you. You just need to be the CEO. Be the one who does the thinking and makes the decisions and the hard decisions and then let them do the work so, in talk about what a virtual assistant to do, let me let me talk about kind of a difference in virtual assistants and who they are. I think often when people think of virtual assistant they think of a secretary.

You know, somebody who is a virtual secretary who does, who’s working in the same city maybe, or maybe in a different city in the US. But, I don’t think people often think that this person could be overseas in the Philippines so there is some really, there are some advantages both ways. There’s some really good advantages out of the Philippines that most people don’t know about. So, in the u.s. you’re going to get a really great worker most of the time. They’re going to be expensive. It’s going to, you know, it’s going to cost you 30 bucks an hour. Where in the Philippines, it’s going to cost you three bucks an hour and in the really big thing that people assume that is wrong is that, as soon as you go to the Philippines you’re going to sacrifice quality. Like you’re going to get crappy work done and that’s not the case. Very often, you’re going to get really good work done. I have a lot of people who come to me and say, “I have these US workers, I hired Filipinos and and the Filipinos are better than my US workers are.” So you don’t have to sacrifice quality. You can find really talented people in the Philippines for very affordable. Another interesting thing about it is there’s a time difference between the Philippines in the US and that time different ranges range between like 11 and 15 hours depending on seasons and timezone. And so, usually for me, and for most people, you do your work, you do your daytime hours and you send them their emails, their instructions, on whatever you’re going to have that personal assistant do and they’ll work overnight. And when you get up in the morning, work is done. And now, you get to send them feedback and instructions again. And so it’s really an interesting dynamic where my business runs while I sleep and it improves while I sleep and then during the day when I actually worked a little that I work, my business improves. And so, that, that virtual assistant bring on the other side of the world, it, yes it can create some issues if you want to communicate with them right now but, often people find it’s kind of an advantage where they’re working while you sleep so you get to be productive on your time they need to be productive on their time and you’re not interrupting each other like in an office. So, one more thing that they’re not, they’re not so good at and I found this through my, my own experience is they’re not super good at creating sales or marketing material for the u.s. audience. So they can do your marketing, your online marketing for you. They can do promotions they could drive traffic they can do SEO but when it comes to like creating sales material for a u.s. audience, they’re not great at it. You’re probably going to be better off doing that yourself or hiring a professional copywriter something like that. It is something they’ve done, they’ve done it for me and they done successfully generally though, it’s not something they’re great at.

So I certainly hope you found this video helpful and hopefully your paradigm is is changing about outsourcing and outsourcing to the Philippines. John assured me off camera, how many people this website online jobs has helped out. I think we helped over 50,000 Filipinos get jobs and we change the lives of about 20,000 employers around the world so it’s quite a bit. Check out the details below. Remember to subscribe. This is a daily show and live on purpose, make a difference, be the hero.