Do you enjoy wasting time?
Get a kick out of doing the same tasks over and over again?
Crave spending endless hours chained to your desk, plowing through repetitive work that generates $0 yet must get done?
Of course you don’t. (Or if you do … call me, girl, we need to talk.)
So why are you still managing your business and marketing systems yourself! This pool of work is essential to keeping your business alive and kicking, but that doesn’t mean YOU have to handle it personally.
Many of these tasks can be delegated to a talented virtual assistant so you can focus your time and energy on client work, strategy, and activities that are direct generators of revenue.
Outsource Your Business & Marketing Systems to Earn MORE
Yep, you read that right! When you spend money on a kick-ass VA who can take over this work, you set yourself up to grow your business and earn more.
Consider your current project backlog. How much more could you earn if you could make a serious dent in that list? Or even better, how much more could you earn if some of those projects could be delegated to a VA so YOU could focus on your highest-earning work?
Yes, you’ll have to pay out money up front to hire a great assistant, but doing so will enable you to bring in more revenue.
You won’t have to spend as much time “in the weeds” fretting over details and can dedicate yourself to big-picture, big-earning tasks. That means growth, income, and progress toward building the business of your dreams.
Which Aspects of Your Business & Marketing Systems Should You Outsource?
I would never push you to outsource work that you love, and would never ask you to stop doing work that truly requires your personal touch. But when it comes to your business and marketing systems, there are four HUGE buckets of work that can typically be entrusted to your virtual assistant.
If you’re wondering which tasks you could delegate, here’s a master list to get you started:
PLANNING & SCHEDULING SYSTEMS:
- Product + marketing planning: You’ll need to handle new strategies yourself, but if you’re recycling existing plans or using templates, enlist your VA’s help.
- Booking appointments: A perfect fit for a great VA!
- Promo calendars: Once you’ve got a promo plan or system established, your VA can populate calendars for you. No need to handle this on your own.
- Content publishing calendars: Again, you’ll handle the idea-generation, but your VA can swoop in when it’s time to do the actual scheduling.
MARKETING SYSTEMS:
- Sending out newsletters: If your VA has writing chops, she can cook up the copy for you! But even if she’s not a writing whiz, she can certainly work on scheduling and sending the newsletters on a regular basis.
- Autoresponder emails: Every online business needs these, and whenever you launch a new product you’ll need a new set. Have you VA generate them based on past iterations.
- Sales funnels: Work together on the content and strategy, but ask your VA to handle the setup and oversight.
- Social media posts: Depending on specialization and experience, some virtual assistants can handle everything from writing, to SEO-optimizing, to proofing, to scheduling, to comment moderation.
- Blogging: Even if you’re working with a ghostwriter to get posts generated, your VA can proof the writing, add graphics, and post the content to your site!
- Advertising: Facebook Ads are huge for so many of us. Get your VA to help research the best ways to reach your ideal clients, write killer copy, and monitor ad performance.
- Affiliate marketing: The more passive income, the better! Your VA can make sure your affiliate programs are smoothly run and in constant recruitment mode
SALES & DELIVERY SYSTEMS:
- New client research: How do people become new clients? Your sales pages, in-person, webinars? A savvy VA can help you determine your most effective client-capture tools.
- Follow-up process: Put your VA in charge of answering client questions, replying to requests, and tying up any loose ends.
- Welcome process: Once you make a sale, what happens? Is there any reason you need to handle the welcome process personally? No? Get your VA to help!
- Automated product delivery: Put your VA in charge of overseeing the systems that get your offerings to your clients. Any hiccups? She should coordinate directly with the software company.
- Membership programs: A great VA can handle onboarding new members, answering questions, promoting the program, collecting fees, and more.
MANAGEMENT & TECH SYSTEMS:
- Customer service: Train your VA to keep tabs on email, phone, Skype, and social media contact requests, and answer as many on her own as she can. If you utilize a help desk, she can also be your point person for those requests.
- Tracking + Metrics: Digging up numbers for your list, sales, promo stats, and web traffic is time-consuming but necessary. Ask your VA to assemble reports, and review them together!
- Team management: If you use a system like Asana or Basecamp, you know that it takes a bit of monitoring and populating. Have your VA oversee assignment of projects, following up on deadlines, and the daily work of online team interactions.
- Automated website backups: Your site needs to be tended, but your VA can handle it. Put her in charge of monitoring backups so you never need to worry.
Best Practices for Outsourcing Business & Marketing Systems
That’s a whopper of a list, isn’t it? Just imagine how much time you’ll save by outsourcing even a handful of those tasks to a trusted VA.
BUT!
Before you move forward, remember that the best way to make this plan a worthwhile long-term investment for your business is to ensure every component is repeatable.
So as you and your VA tackle each set of tasks, document everything that works (and note anything that doesn’t.) That way, when you switch project management software or need to build a new funnel, you won’t waste time or duplicate work.
Documenting everything also helps you course-correct when things don’t go as planned. If you set up a system for getting your social media posts live and it fails spectacularly, you can look back at your notes, see exactly where things went wrong, and make the necessary changes. Easy peasy!
