How To Become a Virtual Business Assistant – Do you Have the Edge?
Wouldn’t you love to have a high-paying and rewarding career where you can use your own creativity to provide personal assistant services to different people or companies located around the world? This is how the virtual assistant business works!
Working as a virtual business assistant gives you the opportunity to be your own boss as you can begin your own business of providing personal assistant or office assistants to various companies. However, the great thing about this business is that instead of the need to go to the place of work or office of the employer, you can work from the comfort of your home or anywhere else ‘virtually’. Being a virtual business assistant gives you the freedom to be flexible and still earn great rewards.
Why Become a Virtual Assistant?
Ask any successful business owner or CEO how they reached the heights where they are today. If they are honest, they would tell you that they couldn’t have made it this far without a wonderful and efficient business assistant and other support staff. Unfortunately, most of the administrative assistants work for long hours everyday for several years without getting any appreciation or worthy financial rewards. Apart from working tirelessly, they also have to spend innumerable hours commuting to and from their office deal with office politics and hardly get any recognition for their valuable contribution.
Being a virtual assistant helps to eliminate most of the cons and instead help you earn the appreciation as well as financial rewards for the work that you love the most.
What Does A Virtual Assistant Do?
The kind of work you choose as a virtual assistant depends totally on your individual interest as well as the clients you pick out to work with. For instance, you may work for a prestigious corporation that has an increasing requirement for virtual assistants, due to the outsourcing and downsizing of job which were earlier carried out by in-house employees. Alternatively, you may choose to take up creative and interesting job of providing virtual business assistant service to busy professionals like doctors, lawyers, authors, entrepreneurs, or real estate agents. You can even choose to work as a virtual assistant for non-profit organizations.
Besides this, you can also choose to offer variety of services at once or specialize in one particular area of the virtual assistant services.
Here is a list of some of the most common services that a virtual business assistant is expected to perform. You can choose to specialize in any of these services if you like.
- Customer Service
- Appointment Settings
- Desktop Publishing
- Database Management
- Data entry
- Proofreading and editing
- Executive assistant
- Meeting and event planning
- Graphic design
- Legal assistant services
- Financial services like bookkeeping or billing
- Human resource services
- Project management
- Legal assistant services
- Medical transcriptions
- Public relations
- Newsletters
- Research
- Writing
- Website design
- Travel arrangements
- Word processing
- Real estate virtual assistance
And anything else the client might require help with.
How to Become a Virtual Assistance
First of all, carry out a self-assessment to understand whether or not you have the required experience and skills to begin your own virtual assistant business. Skills such as good typing skills, ability to organize events, designing brochures and flyers and letter writing are some of the skills that a virtual assistant must possess.
Next, create a plan or outline covering things like your business name, goals, hourly rate, permits/licenses, services you are willing to offers, equipments required and so on.
Finally, you have to have to find a client base to whom you can market your business of providing virtual assistant. This can be done in a number of ways such as networking with fellow business owners, spreading word of mouth, setting up a website, participating in discussion forums, writing and postings articles that the target market would be interested in or registering with virtual assistant networks or business directories.
