[joelrunyon]

Data entry & research. Used to spend hours for lists, contact information, etc. Can be done automatically. Lead sourcing is another big use here.

Competitive research. Having your VA research these tasks & put together a database of information becomes a 1-day task that has immense value down the road.

Customer Service - haven't done this yet - but having them take messages, be my secretary, handle refunds & answer 80% of the support messages that come in (usually variants of the same problem with a fixed, simple solution).

Basic writing skills (non-native english is tough here, but if you want just a paragraph or so written, they can usually do a pretty good job here - after which I have an native-english editor / copywriter go back through & clean up any leftover artifacts).

[mgl]

True, we decided to outsource, at least partially, lead sourcing for http://codedose.com, as it was just way too much time consuming and steering away from other more strategic tasks, like e.g. "processing" these leads.