Running a business can get hectic.
Being organized can help.
Organization saves you time, saves you money, and saves your sanity. Whether responding to emails is taking several hours a day, your office is over-run with papers, you missed a press release deadline or your customer service is suffering a virtual personal assistant can help.
Here are just a few ways a virtual personal assistant can help:
1. Email management throughout the day
There are several ways that a Virtual Assistant can manage your email accounts. A VA can set it up to come directly to their inbox, they can log on to your computer or you can forward emails so your VA can handle them. No matter how you set it up, this service can save you hours a day. Plus you won’t miss another important email.
2. Mail management when you are away
While a virtual personal assistant can easily manage your email every day there are still all those pesky envelopes that make their way to your mailbox. If you are out of town, simply forward your mail to your VAs business address, they can toss the junk and scan the important items and email them to you as an attachment. Never be late on a bill again!
3. Manage passwords
With nearly every website these days requiring you to register an account you can easily lose track of all those passwords. Simply email your virtual assistant the new user name and password for a site and they’ll keep it in a database and can easily pull it up should you need a helping hand with recalling a password.
4. Keep track of your clients and customers
A personal virtual assistant can easily create a database that logs all the information about your client or customer. Your VA can easily update it to add or remove entries so you have the most up-to-date information ready for a mail out.
5. Maintain a birthday list for your clients or customers
Customer service goes a long ways these days. And what is better to keep in contact than slipping a birthday note, a business anniversary card or a “thank you” card in the mail to a client? Clients are thrilled to realize you are thinking of them and they appreciate the service. A virtual personal assistant can create and manage that list with daily reminders set so there is never another forgotten card.
6. Create holiday timelines
If part of your online marketing practices involve submitting articles, press releases or keeping up with a blog it can be very beneficial to write seasonally appropriate or holiday appropriate material. Yes, we all know when Christmas, New Years, Mother’s Day is, but what about all the other lesser-known holidays or events that can be taken advantage of? A virtual personal assistant can also keep track of the deadlines for magazines, newspapers, etc. to help you get your material in on time.
7. Appointment setting & reminder services
Seems simple enough. But the days can get very hectic very quickly as you run your business. A virtual assistant can easily place calls or accept calls and emails and schedule your calendar. Even better, they can email or call you to remind you what you have on said calendar.
8. Scan documents and put them on disks
If your office is overflowing with paper and you want to get control or go a little “green” then a virtual personal assistant can help. You can send your VA the papers and documents; they can scan them, save them to a CD and mail the CDs back to you to keep.
9. Manage your merchant account
A virtual assistant can easily log into your merchant account and see when someone needs to have a friendly reminder sent to them regarding a payment. You’ll no longer lose money over a time sensitive matter.
10. Set up color-coordinated filing system
Even though a virtual personal assistant could be miles away, they can set up a filing system for you. You send them your documents, papers, etc and your VA can create a color-coded system that works for you, file the papers appropriately and send the whole get-up back to you. You simply have to keep it up to day. Never lose another must-have piece of paper again.
These are just a few of the ways a virtual assistant can help keep you organized. When you are organized you save money, time and you can focus more on your business.
Stop by our network today and find that virtual personal assistant you’ve been looking for. They are waiting, ready to assist you with all your business needs.
***By VAnetworking member Kara Wierzbowski
A Virtual Assistant can also manage your social media accounts so you don’t have to take hours out of your week responding to messages and tweets.
Exactly! It allows us entrepreneurs to have the time to do what we do best, produce product, market, etc. 😉
Great advice. As virtual personal assistants dailyPA.co.uk takes complete care of our client’s social media requirements. This means that we tweet for them, build up their facebook fans, increase their Linkedin contacts, run their Linkedin groups, post images on Pinterest … as well as managing their email, or calling their clients and making appointments for them. A VA today needs to have EXCELLENT social media skills. In fact, we fill that space between paying specialist & very expensive SEO/Social media firms & clients doing the work themselves. Indeed, we’re saving some small business owners 2-4 hours a day in admin & marketing tasks. That’s time that our customers can now spend on their clients & on their business.
I really enjoyed these tips to keep myself and your virtual assistant organized.
Here is a tip on my own:
When you start your day, start with the most important task first. Since you have a virtual assistant to help you, he can help you clean out all those smaller less important tasks for you.
So as you started with your biggest task of the day, your virtual assistant cleans up the grunt work and small details.
This will clear up your mind and you will be able to work on your bigger tasks with more piece of mind.
Hope this tip helps.
Really enjoy your blog posts.
Great tip, thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi Tawnya
I am looking for a name where i am offering a personal assistant and a virtual administrative services. Any ideas. Check out my website i am up to suggestions as i am a new va
Janice I recommend joining our FREE VA Networking Forum to ask questions like this to others already in the VA industry. They’ll give you plenty of different ideas and suggestions to choose from. Plus all kinds of resources/posts in there for new VAs just starting out. And it is FREE to join at https://www.vanetworking.com/member ENJOY!