Last updated - July 8, 2021
Running a website isn’t as fun-loving or as glamorous as you people think. It takes one hell of a time, energy, and effort. Even creating an amazing post requires accomplishing a wide array of small tasks. In addition to this, you need to ensure that your website will be in top shape, respond to comments, schedule content, and more.
Speaking of the real world, people, especially businesses, often tend to hire assistants or professionals to take care of tasks they don’t find significant. Fortunately, with the severe advancement in technology, you can do something similar to your website. With little to no effort, you can find virtual assistant at your service who can handle tasks, especially the ones you don’t feel important or don’t wish to handle yourself.
Define Virtual Assistants?
In a layman’s language, Virtual Assistants (VAs) are meant to help people with nearly all type of tasks that humans can except bringing a cup of hot coffee for you. Most of the time, people tend to hire a VA so that they can manage a multitude of online tasks, such as answering emails, making phone calls, keeping track of their schedule, and more.
For example, if you are someone who always forgets to take back up of your website or respond to comments; your VA is to the rescue. You get more free time to focus, especially in regards to the content. Dedicating full time to create content is no more a big deal. In addition to this, it’s way cheaper than hiring an in-person assistant.
Virtual Assistant for a WordPress Website
Running a website can be more tedious or frustrating than you might have imagined in your wildest dreams. After all, it involves a plethora of repetitive tasks, especially one with maintenance. A professional needs to be hired to keep a close eye on it just to ensure that everything is running in a smooth manner. Of course, there is no doubt in the fact that managing your website can be fulfilling work, but do you really think it is the best use of your time.
In case, if you have just started creating one, we would recommend to take care of your site; keep working on optimizing images, creating backups, responding to comments, scheduling content and the list goes on for a while. This is the only way you will get a feel for how everything needs to be done, and you’ll be able to supervise a VA when the time comes to hire one. In addition to this, VA can be overkill for a small website that’s just starting out and since there’s less work to handle at that point.
As your site grows and you start earning money, you can consider bringing VA on board. What a virtual assistant can do?
#1 Content Backup
According to statistics, 70 percent of WordPress websites are vulnerable to some other form of attack. At the end of the day, no one can prevent all forms of online malice. So what you can do is prepare yourself for such an attack by keeping the latest backup copy of the website. For example, if your blog and your content are backed up, then chances are there, without taking a significant hit to SEO, your website can quickly be restored.
The drawback here is most people don’t back their content up at regular intervals. No matter how tedious this task can be, and it’s one that’s easy to push aside. Unfortunately, many of you adopt an “It won’t happen to me” mentality.
#2 Researching Data
You may find it quite amazing to know how many tasks your virtual assistant is capable of. Good news is that most of them are highly capable when it comes to research, analytics, and gathering severe amounts of data. Of course, you will encounter fairly time-consuming tasks as well. So, try to free up your schedule by letting your VA handle the data gathering and research.
#3 Keeps your site updated
Most of the WordPress installations are vulnerable to attack? Most of them are because they are running outdated versions of WordPress. And that’s the reason why I keep telling you guys to update it on a regular basis as it is one of the most important things to do these days, yet many people procrastinate and eventually forget until the next installation rolls around. If you let a VA handle the job, then procrastination isn’t an issue. It’s a scheduled task, and you can rest assured that it will be handled properly.
So, how to build up?
The moment you have recognized the need to grow your WordPress business with a virtual team, the next question is you will inevitably have to revolve around where to recruit contractors and how much you should expect to pay for help.
Let me introduce you to your team members:
- Upwork: Being one of the largest freelancing platforms online, here you will be able to find workers for any type of online tasks who are changing everything from bottom-of-the-barrel to top rates. Of course, one shouldn’t hire the first VA what comes around, but Upwork is definitely an exception. Basically, it is a decent general freelance market that tends to represent people from all over the world.
- Fiverr: A project-based freelance market with many offerings starting a just $5.
- Onlinejob.ph: A job board for hiring Filipino virtual assistants. Moreover, Onlinejobs.ph offers relevant guidance for setting full-time rates to add virtual assistants to your team, depending on specific service offerings and specialties.
Consider the budget
Now while choosing one, budget is one of the most significant consideration as there will be a point when you need to realize that after an extent you won’t be able to scale your business without spending money on your team. So when it is said to be effective, it’s more selling more projects and retainers so that you can support the members of your team without taking away from your ability to make decent money.
Lastly, if you think you can get away with paying the bare minimum, it likely won’t spark a sense of loyalty in your virtual assistant. So what you can do is, pay a few dollars above the minimum rate per hour so that you can build a team that lasts. Bear in mind, that trial and error is the only way out you can delegate tasks without creating extra work for yourself.
