If you’ve hired a virtual assistant, or you’re considering hiring one, let your VA help you with more than just your business. Delegate many of your personal calls to her.
Here’s an example.
When my local Pick ‘n Save supermarket stopped carrying Jennie-O turkey sausage links, one of my favorite breakfast foods, they told me that if I wanted to continue buying them, I’d have to call the meat department and place a special order for an entire case.
So every few months, I do. But making calls like that chips away at time I should be spending on my business.
Now, I turn over calls like this one to my virtual assistant, Christine Buffaloe. Yesterday, she hunted for the cheapest 16-foot USB cord she could find online and ordered it. She orders my books from Amazon.com and researches where I can get the most inexpensive office supplies.
This afternoon, she’s calling the sewing machine repair shop to see if my sewing machine is ready to be picked up. When that’s done, she’ll make a doctor’s appointment for me.
I can’t tell you the number of hours she’s saved me, not only doing business tasks, but making personal phone calls that eat up my precious time.
Last year, I hosted a teleseminar on “How to Find a Virtual Assistant to Help with Your Publicity Campaign.” My guests, virtual assistants Diana Ennen and Cindy Greenway, explained that VAs often relieve their clients of personal calls like the ones I’ve mentioned. Once I started delegating many of my personal these calls to Chris, it suddenly dawned on me how time-consuming these calls can be.
VAs, by the way, can help with many aspects of your publicity campaign such as:
—Writing and distributing your press releases.
—Updating your online media room
—Updating your profile on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.
—Calling newspapers and asking for permission to reprint articles they’ve written about you
—Researching media outlets and bloggers you want to target with your pitches.
The training program I conducted last year for VAs, interns and assistants on “How to Help Your Boss or Client with a Publicity Campaign” discussed hundreds of ways you can use VAs or assistants. Many VAs signed up for the course, have added publicity tasks to their services and, as a result, have been able to raise their hourly rates.