How to Make Money as a Virtual Assistant: Earn Full-Time Income With These Jobs

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to make money as a virtual assistant?

I mean being able to increase your earnings, while in your PJs, without stepping a foot outside.

I’m sure you have.

Working as a virtual assistant is a great way to work as a freelancer. Furthermore, being a VA helps you improve your skills while learning about the intricacies of online entrepreneurship.

In this article, I will highlight different ways to make money as a virtual assistant. It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or a pro. You can choose any of the methods and become better at what you do.

Let’s get started.

1. Customer service

One of the most popular ways through which people make money as virtual assistants is customer service. Making customers happy is important to any business that wants to grow. However, it requires investing a good amount of time.

Since business owners don’t have much time at their disposal, they hire experienced people and pay them to help make their lives better.

Here are some tasks that customer service personnel perform:

• Managing shipments
• Attending to customer inquiries
• Offering support to customers in real-time
• Chasing payments
• Updating records
• Processing orders

Since businesses receive lots of feedback, questions, and inquiries from their audience, they need to respond to all the correspondence and thus need detailed-oriented freelancers to help them out.

The first job that most virtual assistants did involve customer service-related tasks such as attending to emails. This is a great way for many people to get their foot in the freelancing world. This role pays virtual assistants between $15 and $30 per hour.

2. Finance management

Managing finances is something lots of people need help with (whether personal or business finance). If you are knowledgeable in this area, you can offer the following financial management services to clients:

• Retirement fund management
• Planning for taxes
• Profit and loss calculation
• Bookkeeping
• Creating, sending, and logging invoices
• Tracking of debt repayment
• Processing payment
• Documenting money matters
• Auditing financial documents
• Compiling entries about assets and liabilities
• Analysis of account information
• Offering financial management advice
• Detecting financial discrepancies

The ultimate goal of any business is to make money. However, some founders do not have the time to pay attention to their finances. As a result, they hire a financial assistant to manage their personal or company finances.

Read Also: Best Payroll Software for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses

3. Administrative support

Although a general administrative role may not be a highly specialized field, if you’ve worked as an office assistant, this is a great place to start as a virtual assistant. It may not be the most lucrative niche, but offering administrative support is important to businesses.

You can easily market yourself to small business owners that need your expertise.

Administrative tasks are straightforward and are associated with virtual assistant roles. As administrative support personnel, you are expected to perform the following tasks:

• Booking appointments and calls
• Monitoring voicemail
• Managing customer’s schedule or calendar
• Creating spreadsheet
• Managing Dropbox and Google Drive files
• Making travel arrangements
• Drafting emails and internal communication
• Creating reports
• Preparing PowerPoint slides
• Managing emails
• Booking appointments
• Data entry
• Making travel arrangements

You can do any task that an on-site office assistant would do.

4. Social media management

You are not restricted to only spreadsheets and creating shipping orders as a virtual assistant. If you are knowledgeable in managing social media accounts, there are many companies out there that can hire you.

Businesses need to be active on social media. However, having a strong and engaging social media presence requires investing a good amount of time and knowledge. This is why business owners hire knowledgeable virtual assistants that can help manage their social media platforms.

Some social media tasks include the following:

• Posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
• Responding to comments on social media platforms
• Updating profiles
• Knowing about social media SEO and optimizing posts
• Creating and launching social media campaign ideas
• Getting in touch with potential clients on social media
• Staying informed about the promotional regulations of each social media platform

Read Also: 17 Best Social Media Management Tools For Your Business Growth

5. Proofreading blog posts

Business owners understand the importance of traffic to their business. That is why they invest a lot into attracting people to their websites. A great way to achieve this is through blogging.

Running a successful blog involves a lot of work. Draft blog posts are usually written by paid writers, guest contributors, business owners, company staff, interns, and customers. Business owners need someone that will help them proofread and edit this content before publishing them.

You can earn between $15 and $25 per hour for this task.

6. Formatting posts in WordPress

After editing a blog post and ensuring it is error-free, the next line of action is to use a content management system (CMS) to format the content. The most popular CMS is WordPress. Luckily, it is easy to learn.

You don’t need any coding skills before you can format and optimize blog posts with WordPress. This can be learned within a week or less by using courses on WordPress 101 or Udemy.

Formatting posts in WordPress is a lucrative way to make money as a virtual assistant. You can earn between $20 and $40 per hour for formatting posts in WordPress.

Read Also: How To Start Blogging: Step-By-Step Beginner Guide

7. Managing blog editorial calendar

An editorial calendar refers to a plan and schedule of the upcoming blog posts the website intends to publish.

If you are working in this role, you will need to come up with topic ideas and headlines that will align with the interest of the business’s target audience and improve the website’s rankings in search engines. You will also need to space out the topic on a spreadsheet.

Managing a blog editorial calendar can help you make money as a virtual assistant and earn between $30 and $50 per hour.

Read Also: How To Create Content Calendar For Your Blog

8. Curating social media content

Unlike managing social media platforms, this focuses solely on developing content for social media platforms. You may research interesting article links, quote graphics, and upload images. The more important aspect of this role is to provide content that will offer the care and attention to detail that the business’ audience needs.

If you can put yourself in the shoes of those frequenting your client’s blog and determine the types of content (such as headlines and images) that resonate with them, then you can get paid for this skill. You can make money curating social media content and charge between $15 and $40 per hour.

Read Also: Best Social Media Automation Tools To Increase Engagement

9. Creating landing pages

Business owners always need high-converting landing pages so that they can build an audience and sell their products or services.

A landing page can encourage prospects to subscribe to an email list, sign up for a webinar, place an order for a product, or register for an upcoming launch.

This skill is also easy to learn as it requires no coding skills. You can use WordPress page templates to create landing pages. Leadpages and Unbounce can also be used for this purpose. A landing page that boosts conversions lays out a marketing message clearly and perfectly.

You can make money as a virtual assistant creating landing pages and earn between $40 and $60 per hour.

Read Also: Best WordPress Landing Page Plugins For Guaranteed Leads

10. E-Commerce

It can be tough to run a successful e-commerce store, especially if it’s on a small or mid-size scale. Business owners have lots of endless tasks that they need to manage every day. This is where the need for a virtual assistant comes in.

As a virtual assistant for an e-commerce store, you will have to:

• Track orders, including entry, shipment, and invoicing of orders.
• Manage customer service
• Manage inventory
• Maintain website
• Assist with marketing
• Handle returns/ exchanges

Read Also: A Complete Guide on How to Start a Successful Dropshipping Business

11. Email management

Everyone hates seeing tons of unanswered emails littering their inbox. But things can get busy at times and you may not have time to check your emails.

The best thing to do is to stay on top of your inbox by hiring someone. This is the main reason why busy business owners hire virtual assistants.

Some of the tasks that you will attend to in this role include:

• Replying to questions
• Unsubscribing from unwanted campaigns
• Flagging unimportant emails
• Archiving emails
• Following up on emails
• Creating junk mail filters to manage spam

Read Also: Effective Strategies on How to Make Money with An Email List

12. Boosting brand exposure

Every business needs to build relationships and boost exposure. These are essential tasks for businesses that want to be profitable. There are lots of ways that businesses can use to increase their visibility, but they are time-consuming.

This is why business owners hire virtual assistants to help with their outreach.

You can offer many outreach virtual assistant services such as:

• Generating leads
• Starting conversations with influencers and discussing collaboration
• Writing and distributing press releases
• Participating in targeted forums
• Reaching out to sponsors and advertisers
• Contacting bloggers
• Managing affiliate programs

Read Also: Surefire Tips on How to Write Irresistible Outreach Emails

FAQs

Who will you be assisting as a virtual assistant?

You can assist anyone; small business owners, busy professionals, and entrepreneurs. There are lots of businesses that need virtual assistants that they can outsource to free up time.

Some companies prefer hiring independent contractors to be virtual assistants since it is cost-effective; they don’t need to worry about office supplies, health insurance, and other expenses that on-site employees need.

How much money can you make as a virtual assistant?

Your earning potential is unlimited as a virtual assistant. The earning potential also varies. Virtual assistants charge between $8 and $100 per hour. The actual rate you charge will depend on how skilled you are, your experience, areas of expertise, how frequent the work is, and your niche.

A report published by Indeed revealed that the average salary of virtual assistants that have one year of experience is between $15 and $16 per hour. According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary of a virtual assistant is approximately $60,000.

You need to have very specialized skills to earn $60,000 per year; you may not earn this right away. As you keep growing your experience, you will earn a higher income.

What key skills do you need to become a virtual assistant?

Virtual assistance has a wide range of backgrounds and skills. Although the specific skills will vary depending on the type of job, here are some of the essential skills that you need to be a virtual assistant.

You must be:

• Personable
• Honest
• Organized
• Discreet
• Detail-oriented
• Patient

You must also have good communication skills. If you have these skills, you can work as a virtual assistant.

How do you start working as a virtual assistant?

If you are ready to work as a virtual assistant, here are five steps that you need to follow:

• Focus on what you have to offer.
• Set up your business properly.
• Create an online presence by creating a website and social media platforms.
• Find clients in your niche.
• Offer excellent work and ask for feedback.

Conclusion

The hard part of being a virtual assistant is learning how to be one. Once you are familiar with the learning process, you will discover that all the tools you need to succeed are within your disposal. You just need to take the first step to start.

Once you find the right opportunities, you will enjoy the freedom associated with working from home. You will also enjoy the flexibility of being your boss as a freelancer.

Although you may need to work on some low-paying entry projects when you are just starting, you will end up making a decent income as a virtual assistant if you don’t give up.

Tosinajy teaches you how to make money online, the software you’ll need, and guides on how to deal with common issues you may encounter.

Thanks for reading.