The best decision you can make as an online business owner is to delegate those tasks which really don't require your time and attention. A simple way to do that is by hiring a virtual assistant. Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for awhile, the thought of bringing on a support team member can be daunting and you wonder how you'll pay for it.
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The best decision you can make as an online business owner is to decide to get out of your own way and begin to delegate those tasks which really don't require your time and attention. A simple way to do that is by hiring a virtual assistant.
A virtual assistant is a business owner who specializes in handling the administrative details of your business from the comfort of her home office. Now that virtual assistance has been around for awhile, you'll find virtual assistants who specialize in different types of administrative services: real estate, Internet marketing, and event management, to name a few. You may actually discover that you could use several virtual assistants in your business, each with a different specialization.
I can hear you now. You're thinking, "There's no way anyone can do this as well as I can."
Are you guilty of "I'll-do-it-myself-itis? If so, you've got much in common with most other online business owners in the world. We never think that anyone else will give something the time, attention, and dedication that we will. And, you're right, to some degree. No one cares as much about your business as you do. However, if you don't choose to delegate those things that prevent you from engaging in business development, marketing, and sales activities, you won't be in business very long.
Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for awhile, the thought of bringing on a support team member can be daunting, and you wonder, "How can I bring in someone else when it's just going to increase my expenses?"
You need to make the shift to seeing this cost as an investment in your business, rather than as an expense, and let go of the need to be in control.
To help you evaluate what you might delegate to an assistant, take out a piece of paper and on the left side write, "What I Love to Do" and on the right side write. "What I Don't Like to Do".
Then, think about all of the functions you manage and roles you perform in your business, like planning and setting strategy, marketing, providing the service or product in which you specialize, dealing with financial issues, speaking, writing, networking, customer service, order fulfillment, etc. Most of my clients have three or four items on the "What I Love to Do" side -- speaking, coaching/consulting, training, and writing. The remainder of the other functions and roles fall on the other side. The items on the right hand side, the "What I Don't Like to Do" list, will serve as a great indicator of the types of things you need to be delegating in your business.
Based on my past experience as a virtual assistant and online business manager for a number of clients, here are 5 tasks should delegate to your Virtual Assistant right away to help you begin to generate additional income in your business:
1. Ezine. An email newsletter will help you get prospective clients into your marketing funnel. Your VA can format the plain text and HTML versions of your email newsletter. All you need to do is write your primary and filler articles each week and forward those to your VA to format and send the finished product out to your newsletter list.
2. Media. Have your VA research an industry-specific media list . This value of this list is in developing relationships with these media contacts so that you're the expert they immediately think of when they're doing a story on your area of expertise.
3. Article Marketing. Write once and have that article work for you again and again. Have your VA submit articles you've written to online article databases to increase the number of links back to your website and to send more visitors to your website.
4. Strategic Alliances. Once of the quickest ways to grow your business is by creating strategic alliance or joint venture relationships. Have your VA research potential strategic alliance or joint venture partners who provide a service to a similar audience or whose client base could benefit from your product or service.
5. Product Development. Got recorded interviews sitting around gathering dust on your hard drive? How about information you've created for presentations that you've never done anything with? Have your VA coordinate the transcript and audio editing of any recorded files you might have and help you polish those into saleable products. Your VA can also help your format printed material into an ebook, ecourse, special report, etc. and before you know you, you'll become an information marketer!
What operational aspects of your business could you delegate to someone else? If you had extra time, how could you increase the revenues of your business? Give these questions strong consideration--and use your Virtual Assistant to help you make more profit with less of your time today!
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