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Don’t ever underestimate the duties of a virtual personal assistant. Especially if you can find one who is really experienced, easy to orient, and is a certified go-getter, you will realize that the tasks he/she can accomplish becomes endless.

Dan Gooder Richard of Real Estate Rainmaker: Guide to Online Marketing gives us an overview of how virtual personal assistants can help you save time and money when you are in the crazy world of real estate business:

• Prepare virtual tours with photos and data you provide. • Maintain drip e-mail and follow-up campaigns. • Update e-mail lists and send monthly online newsletter. • Enhance online listings with additional photos. • Website maintenance or work with web designer. • Create electronic property flyers for e-mail. • Submit your website to search engines. • Create e-stationery for Outlook. • Research Internet on assigned topics, such as e-marketing tools. • Monitor website traffic, logs, reports, and more. • Mail a monthly printed newsletter. • Print and mail Just Listed/Just Sold postcards. • Produce custom CMAs, seller, and buyer laptop presentations. • Prepare presentation handouts, overheads, flipcharts, or Powerpoint slideshows. • Send post-closing and referral thank-you gifts and notes. • Develop relocation packages.

If you want to look into a more detailed perspective, here are the responsibilities that you can associate with a virtual personal assistant:

Administrative Support

This basically refers to the administrative tasks that would normally take up a huge chunk of your time. They are known to be routine but are very important to ensure that the business can run smoothly every day. Administrative jobs of virtual personal assistants can range in the following:

1. They can create as well as maintain database or directory. Organization is a very vital process, most especially when you’re talking about your list of customers and suppliers. It becomes very convenient for you to reach out to your customers for follow-up, product updates, and news information. Your VPA can develop a database or directory for you, and eventually manage it. Some are highly skilled with the use of a spreadsheet, while those that have basic background in database programming or the Microsoft Access can customize this directory or database for you.

2. They can keep track of your schedule. You don’t want to miss out a very important appointment, meeting, conference, workshops, or even the birthday of your son or daughter, or your wedding anniversary of your spouse. You can look for a VPA who can help you remember things clearly. You can hire them so you can have someone monitor your daily calendar schedule. They can take a note of important dates for you and remind you days or weeks before the actual event; so you will be able to prepare yourself, block off dates, or avoid coming up with conflicting schedules. Moreover, so it will be entirely no-hassle for you, search for a VPA who can do all these when it comes to calendar management.

3. They can function as your own personal customer service representative. Your customers will not only go for your products and services. More than anything else, they would like to deal with a company who can provide them with excellent customer service support. Your virtual personal assistant can become skilled in the customer service area. This means that you can reroute your call to them, so they will be the one to assist your customers when it comes to their inquiries, complaints, and feedbacks. Some of them have their own specialized areas. For instance, a virtual personal assistant who has been exposed greatly to information technology can be of great help if you are looking for someone who can do technical support. On the other hand, you may want to hire virtual personal assistants who are experts in talking out customers to staying in your company rather than look someplace else because they were initially not pleased with your services and products offered.

For example, CatchFriday.com has its own Customer Relations services. This means that you don’t need to always deal with your clients for most of the time. For complaints, feedback, and inquiries, you can redirect the call or e-mail to them. What does this mean to you? It implies that you can have more time to focus on far more important aspects of your business, such as marketing and administration.

4. They can conduct an Internet research for you. Research can have numerous purposes attached to it, and the best-rounded virtual personal assistant can definitely take every research job imaginable. Nevertheless, some of them tend to specialize in a particular area. There are virtual personal assistants who are so good when it comes to market research. They can scour over the Internet for the latest upcoming trends in your industry. This way, you will be able to continuously offer something fresh and new to your customers. Meanwhile, some of the VPAs that you can find in the market are so adept in customer surveys. They can monitor the satisfaction level of your customers through customer feedback and survey, which will then allow you to make modifications in your business models so you can fully satisfy the needs and demands of your customers. There are also a great number of them who are skillful in analyzing the performance of your competitors. They can clearly identify the positions they have taken in your chosen field and explore their respective strengths and weaknesses. All these information and research materials are then submitted to you for you to evaluate.

5. They can act as your own marketing partners. Your virtual personal assistant can also function as your own PR department. They can create a variety of marketing materials for you, such as press releases, information articles for article directories, magazine-type documents, newsletters, and e-mails for your customers. They can also devise their own schedules for their launches and releases to ensure that your targeted audiences are constantly reminded of your existence.

6. They can pay your bills. You should not take bill payments for granted. Normally, if you’re going to miss out even just one payment, you’re in danger of placing your credit rating in jeopardy. It will then boomerang to your mortgage and loan applications. When you have a bad credit score, it will be very difficult for you to apply for a credit line with low interest rate or longer payment term. Just so you don’t miss out with your payments, you can get your own virtual personal assistant to do the payment himself/herself. Usually, a number of the companies you’re indebted to can accept online payment processing, so all they need to do is to input all payment information. It’s also part of their job to keep documents and other payment references just in case there will be disputes and issues related to your bill payments. Furthermore, they can already plot out the next payment schedules and even monitor the amount of cash that you can use for payment. This way, whenever the need arises, you can look for possible solutions on how to come up with the money and avoid being the one on default.

7. They can arrange travel for you. Do you constantly need to visit one region to another? Definitely, dealing with different airlines and even travel agencies can be quite a headache for you (which would then make you cringe on the thought of traveling). Well, a virtual personal assistant can relieve you with this burden. They will not only look for the best airlines and travel agencies to deal with, but they can also strike with the most lucrative travel offers at the least possible price, allowing you to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year in your travel expenses. Their responsibilities also include hotel reservations and airport transfers.

8. They can monitor your collections. Your business cannot survive with just accounts receivables alone. You need to have them collected; otherwise, you’re only giving your services or products pro bono. But then again, monitoring the collection schedules will take a lot of your time, jeopardizing other important aspects of your business such as marketing. Your virtual personal assistant can save you a great deal of money and time by doing the collection schedule themselves. They will be the ones to remind your clients of their bills and eventually collect the money from them. They can take care of credit card processing.

9. They can post payroll of your employees. Most of the time, you cannot even keep track on how much you owe the government in terms of employment taxes (just in case you have a number of employees working in your office). The sad thing is ignorance or even negligence can cost you the ire of the IRS. So you will always be on the safe side, and so employees will always receive their salaries on time, you can pass on the payroll posting to your virtual personal assistant. Every payroll schedule, they will be the ones to coordinate with your human resources personnel or even to your employees in relation to attendance and overtimes, which could affect the amount of their salary. They can then calculate for the amount of taxes to be paid to the government as well as performance bonuses of your employees, if there are any.

10. They can produce financial reports. The backbone of your business will eventually be your financial position. Thus, you need to always have your financial reports generated. Through these documents, you will know if your company is earning or not, if marketing efforts are working very well for you, which areas in your business are not performing as expected, how much money goes in and out of your business, if you are definitely financially stable, or if you have been making wise investments with your cash. Yet even when you’re an accounting graduate, you will lose the time needed just to come up with these reports. There are a number of virtual personal assistants who can create accounting reports at your desired fiscal period. All you need to do is to give them all the information they need, and they will be the ones to organize them into different categories and assess which of the materials given will have significant weight to the financial reports.

Of course there is a wide choice of virtual assistance companies, that Timothy Ferris opened up in his book, the 4 Hour Week. Timothy identified Get Friday in India, as a source, but Perry goes further and beyond, and recognizes Ask Sunday as a rival, but Catch Friday always will be his favorite, will it I wonder be yours too?

I use Catch Friday for secretarial, writing and admin tasks. I also use them for SEO Search Engine Optimization and web design. Sometimes I use them for Quick Books.