Should You Hire a Virtual Assistant to Help You Build an Online Course?

Building, launching and marketing an online course is a lot of work.

As a solopreneur, you need to wear many different hats from day one: not only are you creating the educational content for your online course, but you are also managing the marketing, sending out emails, learning how to use new software, handling customer support and analyzing your finances.

As your online course business grows, the amount of tasks you need to complete also grows and gets more and more complicated.

This is when many online course creators decide to hire a virtual assistant to help them with daily repetitive tasks in their business, so they can focus on what they truly love to do: creating course content and engaging with students!

Hiring a virtual assistant is also a way for creators to create leverage in their business, learn all about it here: Is Passive Income Real? How to Create Leveraged Income in Your Online Business

You might have heard about other business owners hiring a virtual assistant, so if you are interested in learning more about what a virtual assistant is and how to hire one in your business, keep reading below!

What is a Virtual Assistant?

Do I need a virtual assistant? If you are completely new to the role of virtual assistants, they are essentially a person who helps you with specific tasks in your business with a remote work structure.

As the business owner, you are the one deciding which tasks your virtual assistant will help you with: whether you need someone to handle administrative tasks like scheduling and organization or even more marketing-oriented tasks like, content creation, social media, email marketing, running paid ads, customer service and so on...

Technically the role of a virtual assistant is different from the one of an employee: the former is an independent contractor who typically works from a separate location (virtually), and might have multiple clients who they assist.

You can decide to hire a virtual assistant as an independent contractor on a project-based rate or hourly rate.

On the other hand, an employee works full-time or part-time under a contract of employment and is a permanent member of your team, with a specific range of duties to perform.

Should You Hire a Virtual Assistant for Your Online Course Business?

There are many benefits to hiring a virtual assistant to help you alleviate the workload in your business. However, a hiring decision should not be taken lightly, especially if you are a new entrepreneur and have limited resources at your disposal.

So let's see what the pros and cons of hiring a virtual assistant are and if this decision is the right one for you and your business.

Let's start with the benefits of hiring a personal assistant to help you with your online course business:

You can better focus on doing what you love

As a creator, your responsibility is to share your knowledge, create educational content for your online course and interact with your students.

If you enjoy working on your online course business, chances are that these tasks are the ones that bring you the most joy and fulfillment. You probably don't have a passion for admin work, repetitive marketing tasks and more operational responsibilities that come with running a business.

Hiring a virtual assistant can help you alleviate your workload from those more menial, repetitive tasks, while still making sure they get done. This way, you can make time to do the work you actually enjoy doing and focus on your passions.

Keeps you accountable

As a solopreneur, it can be challenging to stick to a schedule and avoid procrastination when you are the only person involved in the business.

An added benefit of hiring a virtual assistant is the accountability that comes from having another person depending on you and the success of your business.

Also, in your daily work, you'll have to train the new hire and do some virtual assistant training, schedule meetings with them, discuss future tasks and so on, which forces you to actively work on your business on a more structured schedule.

Helps you avoid burnout

Burnout is a condition caused by constantly feeling busy and stressed and a result of emotional, physical, or mental stress.

People who experience burnout tend to feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to keep up with daily tasks and even activities they otherwise enjoy doing. We talk more about this condition in this article from our blog: How to Avoid Burnout for Online Course Creators and Digital Entrepreneurs

When you hire a virtual assistant that helps you with your business, your workload decreases significantly, and you can more easily make space for focusing on your hobby and passions and feeling less stressed or overwhelmed.

Scale your business faster

When you don't have to spend hours and hours each day completing repetitive admin tasks, your time frees up to focus on improving your online course, getting new clients and scaling your business to the next level.

Brings in new skills

During the process of hiring your new virtual assistant, you'll look for candidates with certain qualifications, experience or knowledge.

Maybe your virtual assistant is really good at using certain software, knows a lot about Facebook ads, or has experience with a marketing strategy. This opens the door to fresh perspectives and new ideas that can help you improve your course or complete a task you could not have done alone.

Now that we have seen some of the benefits of hiring a personal assistant to help you with your online course business, let's see what are some potential drawbacks to this approach:

Not easy to find the right person

One of the biggest challenges to hiring the right personal assistant is actually finding the right person from a pool of candidates.

This is generally a long and time-consuming process where you have to screen potentially hundreds of applications, respond to the candidates, set up interviews and so on...

Not to mention that your virtual assistant can be based in almost any part of the world, so your pool of candidates will be larger compared to hiring a new employee locally.

If you do not have time to spare, you can always look for a hiring agency that will handle all of this process for you.

Do you have the resources?

Even though a virtual assistant is not an employee of your company, they still need to get paid an honest salary. The wage you agree upon will depend on many factors, including your job description, qualification, time, benefits and so on...

The hourly rate for virtual assistants in the US ranges from $7 and over $63 per hour. So if you are serious about hiring a virtual assistant, you need to make sure to have the monetary resources to support this decision in the future.

Do you have the time?

Yes, a virtual assistant will help you save time in your business. However, in the beginning, most new hires need to be trained, and this also takes time.

Depending on the job description and their qualifications, a new virtual assistant might need a couple of hours or a few weeks to take in everything they need to know about your business and their daily tasks.

Adding a virtual assistant to your Heights Platform account

Before you hire your new successful virtual assistant, check if the online course platform you are using allows you to bring in a new person that can edit your online course.

Heights Platform lets you add additional authors to your account: these are admins who can log into your account, make changes in your online course and interact with students.

You can even customize what an author can and cannot do from their profile. So maybe you want your virtual assistant to only help you with the lesson content, but you don't want them to publish or delete products, change the account settings, and more possibilities!

To conclude, hiring a virtual assistant is a great idea for online course creators who have the resources to invest: you will have more time to focus on work you enjoy, scale your business, avoid burnout and feel more accountable.

If you decide to hire a virtual assistant, Heights Platform has got you covered, and our author feature gives you the flexibility you need to easily set up your new virtual assistant's account!