Assuming you’ve ever dreamt about living your life lying down on sunny beaches and drinking margaritas instead of working in your office cubicle, or if you are interested in internet marketing, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of a little book called “The 4-Hour Workweek” written by Tim Ferriss.

The book has been an inspiration to thousands of people who wanted to take the leap and turn 9 to 5 workweeks into four hours per week of simple managerial tasks done with a laptop at the beach. It focuses on outsourcing your way to that super short dreamlike workweek, but what exactly can you outsource as a blogger or an internet marketer? We’ve put together a list of tasks you could outsource to make your life easier.

Research

If you don’t want to spend hours researching what your competitors are blogging about, or what is the hottest niche to enter right now, outsourcing your research to a virtual assistant is one of the best, if not the best, tasks to outsource. You can leave the creative thinking to play the major role in your work, and let the others do the legwork.

Email

If you are one of those marketers or bloggers who receives tons of email, this is the perfect task to outsource. Use your own time better than checking your inbox for hours on end. The task is a super simple one, and usually outsourced in a manner where the virtual assistant takes care of answering and deleting emails they are capable of, and forwarding the important and personal ones to you to handle.

SEO

You can find competent search engine optimizers among the virtual assistants found from Odesk, Elance and the likes. Be very careful of who you hire though, make sure they are using purely white-hat techniques and are concentrating on evergreen link building techniques and go for editorial links through guest blogging and creating really cool content.

Data Entry

Excel spreadsheet after excel spreadsheet… Nobody likes that sight. Repetitive tasks such as calculating simple finances from receipts and invoices, or simply managing customer information is a horrendous process when trying to be creative at the same time for the sake of writing that blog post later. Outsource your basic data entry tasks and feel the freedom of an easier life flow through you.

Moderating Blogs and Websites

Approving and removing comments is probably the single most boring thing a blogger could do. Sure, answering to the fun and creative comments is enjoyable, but the endless queue of spammers trying to break through your anti-spam measures is tiresome at best. Outsource this simple and repetitive task to someone else and you’ll definitely feel the benefit.

What we can see from this list is the type of normally outsourced tasks. Simple, repetitive and flat out boring is the trademark of virtual assistant tasks. Why tease yourself with such simple and boring things when you could be writing that next hit book of yours of sipping those cool margaritas at a beach in Thailand. It’s your choice of course, but I definitely know which one I’ll choose.