Millions of people want to work from home so get inspired by these 5 jobs for virtual assistants.
Starting your own business seems risky because it will take too long to know if it’s going to be a success.
It’s also a lot of work to put in for no reward and in the beginning it seems like a waste, especially when bills need to be paid.
How are you going to keep a roof over your head when you’re running around trying to build a business?
Maybe it’s not the best thing to do, but there is still hope.
What about helping other people run their online business?
Because they already have a company up and running it means they can afford to pay you money straight away, and you better believe they have lots of work to go around.
They are probably running around after themselves wishing there were more hours in the day.
If you want to know the kind of jobs you could be doing we’ll look at some things virtual assistants usually do.
Table of Contents
Article Writing
The articles on a website need to be written and you can’t expect your employer to write them because they are trying to run a successful business.
That means you will need to write them and you probably won’t get told what they should be about.
If you’re going to fit in at the company you will be able to do things on your own.
You will even be writing articles to publish on other websites and it will help with attracting more traffic.
Building backlinks
If you’re not sure how websites get all their traffic you might want to start reading about search engine optimization.
When someone is running a business they definitely don’t have time to go around building backlinks to their site.
Creating backlinks is the most effective method to move any web site up in the search engine rankings.
With some training this is a perfect job for a virtual assistant.
Graphic Designer
Even though written content is the most important part of a Blog site, well produced graphics helps to communicate.
If you are a competent designer you create relevant graphics to be used on the site.
When new products are released you will create product graphics.
If you want to provide design services full-time you may need to work with many different companies.
Customer Support
When people have software others pay for on a monthly basis they will have a helpdesk or contact center and questions will be emailed all times of the day and night.
You will need to go through all of them and deal with any problems people are having.
If someone gets a lot of emails you might need to go through them too and try to filter out any that are not important.
Assuming you like working with people to help them solve problems you will love this, especially doing it from home.
Editing Written Work
Maybe you won’t write any of the articles because they need to be written by a specialist.
You will just be asked to edit them and upload them to the website.
You might also get a big pile of words and you will have to format it.
If the company you are working for does videos and podcasts you will need to edit those too.
If you don’t yet know how to do any of this they are good skills to learn when looking for a virtual assistant job.
Looking for more resources on Virtual Assistants then read these articles;
- Work at Home Jobs as a Virtual Assistant
- Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Virtual Assistant
- 5 Jobs for Virtual Assistants
- What is Link Building for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
When I saw the link, I thought for sure it was going to be related to Siri. (And I love asking her to talk dirty to me. The responses are always awesome.) As for those things, I do find myself doing a lot of those things for the charity I volunteer with. Some day, I hope the org will be able to start paying us!
Great points! I am just starting out with our family business, and looking to do all the social media from home. Thanks for the info.
Your welcome Kelly. Good luck and keep up updated with your business progress.
I have often wondered about the life of a virtual assistant both from the perspective of thinking of working from home as well as someone who aspires to hire a VA one day. As I manage team members remotely at work I know all about the challenges of working with someone not in the same office and the importance of goal setting to the process but that is within a corporate environment not the small business world. I was wondering if you or anyone reading this article with experience working with VAs can answer some questions:
1. How would someone looking at becoming a VA find online businesses who would be willing to hire them? Or the reverse, how does a business looking to hire an VA find one?
2. How do they charge? Is a VA paid hourly or are they paid per post, per article, per backlink … etc? Or the reverse again, is the VA a contract worker or an employee of the company?
3. Assuming the VA is a contract employee that is free to work with multiple online businesses, are there ever exclusivity clauses for industry or is a VA free to work directly with one of your competitors?
Thank you very much.
Hi JDub,
My personal experience has only been working on contract.
If you are looking for VA work my first suggestion would be telling people you offer these service. Social media is a great advertising forum for this. I own a business/this blog and I get most of my work from people seeing what I already do and ask either who goes the work for me or if I can do it for them. Join groups on Facebook, LinkedIn and forums which cater to the people you hop to work for.
Pricing is a little tricky. I am not a company and have very little overhead so my costs are quite low. Many VAs have website with service prices. My suggestion would be to take a look at a few.
None of my VA work involves article writing so I cannot be of help for that question.
As a freelance VA you get to choose who you work with. I would never sign an exclusivity clause if I only work odd jobs or contract work.
Also, just as an FYI, the graphic has the word Virtual spelled incorrectly.
Oh my… thank you for letting me know. That was my error and I will have it fixed in a jiffy.
I loved the review/article. I’ve always wondered how a great blog is made. I’ve thought about doing one, but I lack the skills.
I am currently working full time but I am considering becoming a virtual assistant – need to put more money into emergency savings in case I do not get enough clients to make it worh while. I plan to start part time and see how it builds.
I have to work on my writing skills for my blog. I have a lot of trouble when it comes to actually sitting down and staying focused.
Nice post there.
I found a startup agency with lots of virtual agents, and all of their agents are good communicators and are very hardworking. I was impressed how this startup agency manages to still maintain quality control despite it having many freelance virtual agents in its account.
If you wanted to avail of their virtual agent services or wanted to be one, you may check their Facebook page available at:
It’s fantastic that you are getting ideas from this piece of writing
as well as from our discussion made at this time.
Mudbox is a software for 3D sculpting and painting which is developed by Autodesk.
The supposed Secret” actually fuels speculation, and it doesn’t fill the “need of certainty” within the market place, which is present because there is no talk of a tangible product. ‘ Just like many other ‘free to play’ games there are always way to spend your money within the game.