The following is an extract from my book; The Fast Guide to Hiring (and Keeping) a Virtual Assistant, available on Amazon Kindle and in Paperback. 

Here are ten practical examples of work a Virtual Assistant can do with a quick and easy illustration of how to go about doing it. 

I should point out, in this day and age of Top 10 lists, that these are in no particular order and represent a fraction of what a VA can do. Right, no point waffling let's dive straight in:

1. Getting You More Exposure

You know you need to do it. You know you need to reach out to hundreds of influencers or journalists to try to pick up your product through a story but you are too busy refining your product to do this kind of repetitive outbound PR.

You know you should send a personal message when connecting on LinkedIn or attempting to engage with an influential journalist.

Hand it over to your VA!
Prepare your one hundred word pitch, perhaps refine it for different sectors and instruct your VA to find the right contacts and add a personal touch when contacting them.

2. Backlinking

This is a repetitive task. You need to contact hundreds of sites to ask them to add a link to your great article on the Fast Guide to Recruiting a VA but you just don’t have the time.

Hand it over to your VA!
Format the message you want to send. Research the articles yourself if need be, but hand over the repetitive task of outbound marketing to your VA.

3. Booking Travel

You want to save every penny you can on your travel costs that can mount up over the course of the year. So you end up spending half a day changing dates, trying a different carrier, trawling through a huge list of hotels to save a few bucks. But consider this - how much do you pay yourself and shouldn’t your time be spent on bigger things that may bring some bigger ROI?

Hand it over to your VA!
Be clear in your criteria: “I want a 4 star hotel for 3 nights and I don’t want to fly after 7 pm - please find me the 3 cheapest options? Done. How easy was that? Now you can concentrate on building your business!

4. Social Media Scheduling

You want to post at the right time for the right timezone, with the right content and the right images, mentioning the right people.

But you then need to spend the time scheduling the Facebook and Twitter posts and matching each with the right image. It’s mind-numbingly boring, and although you know it’s important it risks getting neglected as you look to concentrate on the “bigger things”.

Hand it over to your VA!
Technically it’s not difficult, you just need a clear excel sheet which displays the when what and where.

5. Customer Support

Say what? Yes, you heard right! A lot of what might be deemed first level customer support is about replying to standard queries with a standard resolution or response.

Right off the bat a knowledge base or FAQ section could probably answer most queries so why not have a real human being talk to your customers and give them an experience they value.

Hand it over to your VA!
Prepare some canned responses, based on the major issues you repeatedly encounter and arm your VA with these, escalating any that don’t fit the criteria.

6. Finding an Apartment

You need to move. But it takes time to go through the listings and contact each one, ask a few questions and set up viewings that fit into your schedule.

Some may answer, others may not be available and will require a call back later on. Don’t miss out on the one you want.

Hand it over to your VA!
Your VA can call or email the landlords, ask a series of pre-defined questions, schedule the appointments that fit in with your diary.

7. Researching and Editing Images

You are producing the content, reams of lengthy, well studied, keyword-rich articles it to skyrocket your business up the Google search results, but your audience wants images.

Attractive, relevant and well-researched images can make a huge difference to how sticky your content is and very importantly, how shareable it is. Tools like canva.com mean you can now also produce beautiful banners for your site, but it is extremely time-consuming.

There is a number of royalty free image stock web sites you need to look through before you upload the chosen image and then play around with composition and fonts.

It is also an avenue that you can wander down and quickly get lost, forever tinkering. You are your harshest critic - you should be it’s your business - but it also means that sometimes you are never quite satisfied with what you produce. And so time flies.

Hand it over to your VA!
Produce a short document with guidelines, such as image types, minimum sizes to assure quality, banner proportions, fonts you like and let them get on with it.

8. Transcribing Audio

Stop, start. Stop, start, rewind. How long does it take you to transcribe your podcast, interviews or note down meeting minutes? And how much of that time could be better used in some more gainful employment?

Hand it over to your VA!
A job of a few hours that does not allow you to simultaneously build your business and operate in productive areas in which you excel should be given to a VA to perform for you.

9. Recruitment

As strange as it may seem if you are at the point of considering hiring a VA it is fair to say that once you have been working with one for some time, and once your VA understands your business, there are a number of elements of recruitment that you can pass on.

Wading through CVs and online profiles, checking portfolios and language skills is very time consuming.

Hand it over to your VA!
If you need to add more outsourced labour, or simply want someone who understands you and your business to narrow down a large pool of CVs, then get your VA to do it!

10. Marketplace Listing

I recently spoke to a VA who comes from a background in Amazon sales. I mean how amazing is that? Moving your stock to an online marketplace is a chore, a time-consuming and utterly necessary chore and yet there may even be a VA out there for you with the ability to list on Amazon better than you.

Hand it over to your VA!
At the very least you can list a few yourself, to provide examples. And remember to meticulously record what you do for those all-important systems and processes that make the handover so much easier.

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.