What a Photographer Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant
"Oh being a photographer must be such a fun and cool job!". Sure, but when you get too immersed in doing boring tasks like meticulous post-editing or writing those marketing e-mails, a virtual assistant might just be the way for you to make life easier.
Try this – make a list of the boring tasks you have to do on a daily basis and calculate how much time that takes away from you. Remember, that's time taken away from hanging out with friends and family or shooting new photos, meeting clients, making money and growing your business.
Being a professional photographer requires you to do a lot of things besides taking pictures. Things like blogging, online marketing and sending out invoices are all things that you can outsource to a virtual assistant and free up your time for more creative work.
Here 9 areas of work a photographer can outsource to a virtual assistant and focus on more important work:
1. Post-editing
If you're okay with handing a part of the creative control to someone else or explaining to them your style of doing things, you could save yourself a lot of time. Just creating a few template filters and sending them to your virtual assistant and having them do the task for you can take a lot off your back. A VA can also help with putting watermarks on your photos, another boring and time-consuming task.
2. E-mail
A large part of your communication with clients is probably done through e-mail. Responding to every single e-mail and maintaining that warm tone can sometimes be exhausting. Imagine if someone could respond to all of your clients with a personalized e-mail. It's important to make your clients feel special and important. A virtual assistant can keep track of your communication for you and ensure that everything runs smoothly.
3. Blogging
A blog is a great way of showcasing your work, helping clients find you more easily and establishing a strong online presence. Hiring a professional content writer for your blog can help you grow your business. It can take a lot of time to upload multiple photos into a blog post, tag them and add descriptions – a virtual assistant can do all of that for you, all while keeping everything SEO-friendly and helping your blog come up at the top of the search results.
For more information read this post: Using a VA to Manage your Blog.
4. Accounting
Keeping track of all of your contracts and invoices while your business grows can be stressful and it's generally a repetitive process. Virtual assistants often have very good accounting skills and you can have them doing your bookkeeping based on a template that you only have to provide once for them. Imagine if you could go out for a beer or coffee with a friend instead of staying home and going through piles of invoices, entering data into a spreadsheet or accounting program.
5. E-mail newsletters
A monthly newsletter to your client list can serve as a great reminder that you have a new blog post or a fantastic new photo. Everyone knows that a badly put together newsletter is not something many people look at, so hiring a person who take a little time to maintain your database of clients and email them regularly, scheduling a regular, and eye-catching, newsletter through Mailchimp can ensure that you get the exposure (get it?) you need.
6. Social media marketing
Having a strong presence on social media can make a huge difference. A good social media strategy can make you stand out from the crowd and attract new clients. Creating content and posting it to multiple social media platforms can be boring and extremely time-consuming.
A skilled virtual assistant can put together your schedule and post across multiple platforms with the correct sized images and vary the content to match the social media channel.
7. PR & Marketing
Long term strategies like Search Engine Optimisation are important to your business, but you can also get your name “out there” through some clever PR work. Whilst you wait for longer term strategies to work there are ways to get your brand known which can bring you more traffic but can also enhance your reputation within your industry, bring you exposure across social media and actively affect your longer term strategies positively.
For more information read these other posts:
8. Scheduling
Arranging meetups and sessions with your clients can be one of the biggest drains on your time. Handing this task over to a VA will have you focusing on more important things rather than checking what time you can fit one of your clients into your schedule. A VA can also set up a calendar or booking system for you which automates the whole process and saves you even more time.
Check out Calendly for example.
9. Research
If you are honest with yourself online research can be the most onerous of tasks, whether you are putting together a database if leads or you need to research suppliers and vendors in order to find the most suitable (or economic) to cover your needs as a photographer. You might even want to look to get your work on more sites and need someone to do some backlink research.
A virtual assistant is the perfect person to spend the hours finding what you need, saving you time and money in the process.
Author: Thomas Smallwood is an outsourcing specialist. Having worked in companies around Europe, from the support desk to the boardroom, he founded bizee.co to help small businesses grow through efficient delegation to skilled virtual assistants. He is an award-winning blogger and a passionate advocate for mental health awareness.
Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.