Where To Start When You Are New To The VA World
The Wonderful World of Virtual Assistants
So, let’s talk about the wonderful world of virtual assistant-dom. It truly is a wonderful thing to be a virtual assistant, to be able to have the flexibility you need, for whatever reason, and get paid a fairly decent wage and then to top it all off you get a vast amount of experience and learn new things every day.
However, one is not simply going to fall down the proverbial ‘virtual assistant rabbit hole’, it is something which requires some effort on your part and in this blog I will attempt to give you some tips and tricks in order to find your tribe!
I Want to be a Virtual Assistant, What Now?
Okay, so you have decided that you want to try your hand at virtual assistance as a career but you haven’t the foggiest where to start – let’s start with these things:
- What is your experience? – So anything that you have done previously in terms of work, or even what you may have studied and so forth
- What are your strengths? – Now, just because you may have done something as a job previously that does not automatically make it a strength. A strength would be something you do really well but also enjoy doing well. This article by Gary Vaynerchuk about how to find your strengths may be beneficial and helpful.
- What are you hoping to achieve from becoming a virtual assistant? – When you make that decision to become a VA there must be a reason you are deciding to go down this path. What is it? Do you want flexibility? Are you perhaps unable to go out to work due to illness and so forth? Do you want to work around your kids?
These, amongst others, are all factors to look at when you first decide on this journey.
This video is also a great resource with some very interesting insight.
The next step would then be to look at either marketing your specialities to a client base. Once you know what you are good at and what you enjoy doing you can then research business owners and the like to whom you could market your services.
LindkedIn is a great source for this – if you do not have a LinkedIn profile, why not? And if not, go get one.
Now marketing is not everyone’s forte, which is fine, then what you can do is look out for subcontracting positions. Apply to virtual assistant companies and market yourself to them with what you know and what you can offer them.
Never be too greedy when it comes to the moola either, make sure you are open about what you would like as a salary but also make sure you are flexible and happy to negotiate, after all you are trying to get your foot in the door not take over the whole company straight away!
I Have Done The Leg Work – What More Do I Need?
What you need now is to do the work and do it to your very best ability. Whatever you do not know you need to go and find out and teach yourself. Google is a wonderful thing, you literally have the world at your fingertips.
Use your spare time to upskill yourself, learn new ways to do things, communicate effectively with your clients.
Learn from your mistakes and do not be afraid to admit when you do not know something.
Besides the emotional and human things you need once you secure your client/s you will also do well to get yourself familiarized with various resources such as the below:
- Trello – An excellent task manager where you can keep track of tasks allocated and completed as well as communicate with the client/s.
- Slack – A brilliant communication tool
- Udemy – For upskilling at a very reasonable rate
These are just some of the resources you can look at using and getting to know which will help you and your client work more efficiently together and also allow you to gain some knowledge.
Conclusion
In conclusion I can say this – The world of VA is an exciting and rewarding one. If you are willing to put in the time and effort to learn and even start at the bottom with things like basic data entry and research projects you can grow so much, and your skill set will develop exponentially as every client is different and what they need from you on a daily, weekly and monthly basis is ever changing and diverse.
For me personally I find VA work challenging and that is what I love about it. The bigger the challenge the more exciting it is for me!
So, write a list, be honest with yourself about what you want, what you can and can’t do and when you are going to start – jump in at the deep end!
Happy VA’ing and good luck in your search!