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Start Your Own Home Business as a Virtual Assistant

Need to make extra income or want to finally start your home-based business?

Working from home is a great way to work around your family’s schedule or to avoid the ups and downs of the job market. Being a virtual assistant (VA) is a great way to earn money working from home because you can be involved in so many different niches. You can be a traditional VA doing administrative work or you can be an administrative virtual assistant who works with a team of virtual assistants for an agency.

You never run out of work as a virtual assistant. Many individual business owners hire VA’s because they need help with managing their own business. Many small and medium sized business also hire VA’s to help out temporarily with special projects. Below I’ve listed just some of the skills that are in high demand for VA’s; of course this is just a small list and there are specialties that VAs offer too.  Some specialize in building websites, graphic artists, and copywriters as an example.  There are general Administrative Assistant VAs that can help with your “backend office” such as bookkeeping, sending your newsletters, posting their blogs, etc.

Skills that are in high demand for Virtual Assistants 

  • WordPress – formatting and scheduling blog posts, as well as performing other simple updates using the WordPress content management system.
  • Email Customer Service – Check your client’s email for customer service issues and other issues that you can answer and only forwarding specific emails that need direct attention of your client.
  • Creating and Updating Spreadsheets – Many people need databases or spreadsheets updated, even Excel spreadsheets created to use for various purposes.
  • Posting YouTube Videos – Vloggers need people who can post YouTube videos to YouTube.com, as well as write keyword-rich descriptions so that the video will be found.
  • Set Up and Schedule Auto Responders – Using a system like AWeber.com or MailChimp.com to set up and schedule auto responders is another task that a VA can do.
  • Loading Products into a Shopping Cart System – People who sell digital or even physical products online need someone who can load up the information into various shopping cart systems.
  • Prepare Slideshows – A VA can prepare slideshows to use on a website, in a presentation, online on various presentation sites and more. Being able to take information and make decent slide shows takes creativity.
  • Social Media and Blog Management – Making sure that everything works together, and all content is posted is a great niche for any virtual assistant today, then add or schedule them to various social media platforms.
  • As you can see there are many different niches that you can get involved in if you want to start a VA business. The very best way to decide what tasks you want to perform is to first think about who your target audience will be. Your target audience determines what services you should offer. For instance, if you want to work for authors, consider what type of services an author might need you to perform for them. They may need help with Amazon self-publishing tools, so it’s good to know how to use tools that an author might need.

Perhaps they will need fact checking, posting of blogs, social media posts, setting up interviews and signing parties and so forth. Design your services around what that particular audience needs. Once you are sure of your audience and the services you can offer them, you’ll need to create a website in order to market your new virtual assistant business.

Remember that you don’t have to do everything the audience needs – only the tasks that you want to offer and enjoy doing within your skillset.

Then your virtual assistant business is not only profitable but you will enjoy doing the work as well. Making money as a virtual assistant from home can be very lucrative and is in high demand today. So, enjoy your new home-business journey. And…. good luck.  To your success!

Read this article: Benefits of Outsourcing to a VA  Where you can learn the benefits of helping business owners by offering your VA services.

 

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