How to get your first remote job as a virtual assistant
Note: This page is still being worked on and is not yet finished.
How to get your first remote job as a Virtual Assistant
We will teach you how anyone without any experience can start remote working as a VA. One of the best remote starter jobs is as a virtual assistant. Anyone that has good communication skills and organisation skills can find a remote job as a virtual assistant. Even with no experience you can support a person as a virtual personal assistant privately, an entrepreneur / businessman or a company in general. The easiest way to understand what a virtual assistant is would be an online remote working secretary. Someone that assists in easy small jobs and supports and helps a person or a company to be more effective. Often a virtual assistant helps with simple and time consuming tasks that can be organising, planning or administrative. There are many virtual variations of a virtual assistant that we will explain on this page as well as what services you can offer as a virtual assistant. The goal of this page is to help you understand what a virtual assistant is, what qualities you need and what services you can offer. You can be a virtual assistant from an employee perspective as well as being a freelancer with contracts or even various clients at the same time.
A virtual assistant is basically an extra resource and a helping hand.
To become a virtual assistant, you need to have reliable (high speed) internet.
If you are fluent in English or even better native or bilingual this is a big advantage.
If you are a mom or (single) parent, becoming a virtual assistant is a great opportunity to work for example 30 hours a week remotely. Since you work from home and with flexible hours, you can combine your virtual assistant work with bringing the children to school, picking them up and taking care of your children.
real estate virtual assistant
Marketing virtual assistant
Administrative virtual assistant
Upwork browse virtual assistant offers and jobs
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What is a virtual assistant?
A visual assistant is like a secretary that helps out a manager but then working remotely. The task of the VA is to assist with any given job in order to relieve the manager. This may sound bad to you but yes those tedious, boring and repetitive tasks can often be done by a personal assistant.
What do virtual assistants do for work?
Resources to take information from:
Task management
Task management tool
What services should you offer
Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Microsoft office
video meetings
Google documents
For who is the virtual assistant?
We will use the term manager as the person who will need and receive the virtual assistant service. This can be a woman or man and possibly a business owner
How to become a virtual assistant?
To get your first remote job, you can become a customer service representative, a junior software developer or a virtual assistant. These are entry-level work from home jobs that anyone can start so that you can work remotely.
On this page you will find:
How anyone without any experience can start remote working as a VA
When we humans are born, we have no skills and no experience. We learn very complicated things over time and they become easy for us like walking, speaking a language or driving a car. Being a virtual assistant means to use basic organisation, communication and problem-solving skills. When you are a VA, your goal is to assist a busy and high value manager so that they have more free time or so that they can get more done.
Recent changes that create opportunities for VA’s
So yes, the whole two years where everyone had to start working from home has made some positive impact on many businesses. It is really possible to work remotely and create good value. The two good changes are, managers that need a virtual assistant now often work either hybrid or fully remote and these managers are open to using a virtual assistant instead of an office based secretary.
Availability outside of the normal working hours as a VA
often a virtual assistant needs to be available outside of the normal nine to five business hours. If the manager that you are assisting is travelling for business and there is a problem with the hotel reservation, you need to take care of that immediately. Depending on the need for support, they might ask you to work on the weekends or at least be reachable. You need to think if you wish to be available outside normal working hours. Also a standby fee of two hours per day would be acceptable because you might be bothered on your Saturday evening when you are at a wedding.
What services are you going to offer as a virtual assistant?
Introduction: Most assistant services can be for personal and business appointments and obligations. Meaning that the virtual assistant can get a request to book a business meeting as well as a birthday from the partner on the weekend. Hi, can you call my friend Anna to make an appointment for dinner next week. Please find a free evening and send me recommendations for some good restaurants? After selecting the restaurant, the manager will ask you to make the reservation for that dinner, add the appointment to the agenda and add the location for easy navigating there. Let me know where I can park the car that evening? The key task for the virtual assistant is to relieve the manager from any tasks that the VA can do alone or help with. This way the manager can do more work, get better results or have more free time. Some virtual assistants are basically an online secretary. The VA is like a turbo on an engine, it makes the same engine much more powerful and gives it a high performance.
Some examples of services that you can offer as a virtual assistant:
Scheduling
manage the agenda, schedule virtual meetings and business calls. Book flights, taxis, hotels and restaurants for business or personal travelling.
Financial support by the online personal assistant
Creating and sending out invoices, checking and processing payments like bank transfers. Bookkeeping, calculating cost prices, gross and net profit.
Managing cash flow, bank account balances and credit card payments.
Paying invoices of purchases for delivered goods or services including payrolling,salaries or freelance invoices.
Advice on cost savings or finding cheaper suppliers for services and or products.
Sending payment reminders when the payment date is overdue.
Project management service assistance by a virtual assistant
Plan project meetings, send out the agenda, minutes or notes of meetings and action lists. Give tasks to team members or freelancers. Monitor the project planning and milestones. Organise the celebration of a milestone. Get estimates for project costs and oversee the budget. Setting deadlines and following up on actions of project members.
Blog or website management
Of the 1800 million websites in the world, 635 million are blogs and 7.5 million blog posts are created every day.
The virtual assistant can format blog posts and make a content marketing strategy. The VA can manage, approva and answer comments on a blog or website. Monitor traffic and conversion on a blog or website with C-panel. Monitor and analyse Google analytics, Google webmaster console and conversion rates. Checking for broken links or images that are missing. Checking the mobile friendliness and usability of the blog or website. Adding new pages, managing backups. Check the website loading speed and improve it. Manage hosting plans and domain registration as well as external services for keyword research and SEO.
The cost of a VA compared to a desk or office based secretary or assistant
No travelling costs, no office space needed. Can be outsourced in a lower salary country.
USA 35000 USD vacation days off sick days cost office laptop and commuting reimbursements.
USD 950 1200
Expensive country to a cheap country
Male or female VA?
Most people think of a secretary, personal assistant or virtual assistant of a female. However it is very well possible to be very successful as a virtual assistant as a male.
Email marketing assistance services
The VA can schedule email campaigns and design email templates. Email list registrations and sending out newsletters. rack the emailcampaigns conversion, unsubscribes and enrollments.
SEO virtual assistant services
Keyword research on the topic of the blog or website and adjusting the keyword density on a page. Research competitors backlinks, analysing the results and setup link building campaigns. Advising on what new pages to make based on competition keyword research and keyword groups. Research competitor websites to find more keywords and to find backlink opportunities. Analysing the results of an SEO campaign and keeping track of the rankings of pages for the target keywords. Optimise image filenames and alternate text of links and images to improve the on-page optimisation. Keeping up to date with any search engine algorithm updates and developments in SEO. Perform local SEO by adding the company website to local business directories. Improving the search satisfaction, click through rate, user experience and the conversion of a website. Research how to reduce the bounce rate and extend the dwell time of visitors in order to improve the rankings over time. Making comments on other blogs to build more backlinks
Podcast and video VA
Write scripts for a podcast or YouTube video. Organise or perform video or audio editing including adding a logo or brand name and an intro and or outro with a call to action (CTA).
Publishing podcasts or videos to the website and social media channels like YouTube, Apple podcast or Stitcher. Planning the video or audio production including the guests for the recordings, the camera and microphone setup. Remove background noise and add background music to podcasts or videos. Transcribe videos for the subtitles or use a tool like veed.io to get automatic subtitles added to your videos. Organise and support interviews for video or podcasts. Prepare presentations, screen sharing or demonstrations for live streaming video events. Manage the live chat while streaming a video event.
Social media virtual assistant
Post messages on the social media channels when a new page has been added or when there is news about the company.
Setup new pages, groups, links and accounts on various social media platforms like:
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Email (mailto), TikTok, SnapChat, Pinterest, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Reddit, Quora
Share images, video, p[odcasts, links to the website and articles on social media in 9order to build an audience. Promote web pages and blog posts on social media. Engage with the audience through comments and interactive elements like polls. Reply to any comments and questions on social media. Research possible content or find and hire freelancers that can write high quality relevant content. Organise and promote giveaways, contests and live video seminars on social media channels. Find and use popular hashtags to use. Find and setup social scheduling tools like buffer, Hootsuite, MetEdgar or Tailwind. Upload the social media content to the scheduled tools in order for the social media scheduling to work automatically. Updating the social media profile pages like LinkedIn and Instagram. Convert content into leaflets to share on the various social media platforms. Manage and build online communities like facebook and YouTube followers.
Tracking engagement statistics and developing a monthly social media strategy. Invite followers to like your content and company profile page. Monitor online reviews on for example Trust pilot.
The social media personal assistant can help create or hire a freelancer to create canva leaflets for social media promotions. These promotional leaflets can also be found
Help to setup and manage an affiliate program.
These are the hard and soft skills that you need in order to be a virtual assistant:
Communication skills
Project management
Attention to detail
Fast learner for new software tools like Slack or Jira ticketing system
Comfortable using the mobile phone and laptop with internet
Problem solver
Great organisational skills, very organised and structured way of working
Disciplined (finish your tasks, followup, do what you say and say what you do)
You can also do a “free online skills assessment” test. (link to Google)
If you lack certain skills like communication by speaking, you can sill be a great virtual assistant by email, text and chat for example. Or as a bookkeeper or administrative assistant.
Using service platforms to find virtual assistant tasks
If you get
Website chat support
General, sales and tech support
VA marketing: Sales funnels
Setup and support webinars to generate leads and get people interested in the content and brand. Developing a strategy for sales funnels and setting them up. Start and perform PPC (Pay Per Click advertisement) to get targeted visitors to the website in order to convert them to clients. Advertising is possible on many platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Google, FaceBook and so on. Performing A/B testing to optimise the performance and conversion of the PPC ad campaigns. Creating landing pages to sell the product or service. Using hotjar to follow where visitors click and how to improve the UI / UX experience. Come up with new techniques to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Calculate the cost per lead multiplied by the conversion rate you know what you can pay for a lead.
Example a website has a conversion rate of 4,3% of the visitors to customers. Besides the first purchase, the lifetime value on average of a customer is 421 Euro. The profit margin is 32% and the company is willing to spend a maximum 50% of the revenue on PPC advertisements. 1000 new visitors to the website make 43 new clients worth (32% of 421 = 134,72 euro) for the 43 clients the company makes 5792,96 euro profit. So for 1000 visitors the company is willing to pay 50% of 5792,96 euro to get that traffic to their website. Evaluating the ROI of paid campaigns and building a long term strategy based on organic traffic and PPC campaigns. Offering a free ebook for prospects to join an email list that converts to sales. Creating landing and sales pages. Managing and organising product launches.
ghostwriting?
A ghostwriter is hired to write books, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person. Ghostwriting isn’t always glamorous. Polishing a piece to perfection only to have someone else put their name on it might not sound like a good use of your writing talent.
Byron virtual assistant
Most Byron virtual assistant jobs are US based but there are also some jobs based in Europe. They prefer to hire people with 3 years of experience as a virtual assistant. However, due to the demand for virtual assistants, employees with no-experience or little experience might also qualify for the job.
Byron pays their virtual assistants every two weeks through PayPal.
Outreach virtual assistant
Find potential complementary partners for the clients company to work together with. Read and post in relevant groups and forums like quora. Find advertisers that are interested in sponsoring a post or paying for advertising on a website. Approach other blogs for a guest post and arrange a deal including the content to exchange and get a backlink. Generate leads and reach out to website owners for a backlink. Setup interviews with website owners, potential partners or sponsors as well as influencers. Create a media package, build press releases and promote the press releases to journalists and new websites. Make bookings for guest speaking and giving ted talks, presentations and training to build a loyal following.
To improve your project management skills, you can have a look at the coursera google project management course. Most answers can be found online if you o=know how to Google. You can do it all for free and just pay one month of Coursera to get your professional online certificate. You might grow from a Virtual assistant position to (junior) project manager over time.
Communication assistance
Answer incoming calls, check voicemails and notify the manager of anything urgent or important.
Manage all contact information like email addresses, location addresses and telephone numbers, private and business. Write a proposal or answer for an email, letter or other internal or external communication. This can also mean making a draft for a slides presentation for example of the financial results of the second quarter for the board of directors.
Read and answer basic questions and emails like what is your pricing, or conditions for a refund. Wheat number or email address can I reach technical support and so on.
Archive spam or pointless emails.
Follow-up on sending emails that have not yet been answered and are waiting for a reply.
Unsubscribe from unwanted email lists.
Forward emails to other people or departments when appropriate.
Customer service assistance
A Va can also help with customer service and things like crediting a purchase or refunding a cancelled order. Tasks like setting up a service desk and hiring and training new customer service representatives can be done by a virtual assistant.
Making purchase orders and arranging transport and shipping of the incoming goods.
Answering the liche chat function of the company website can be a job for the virtual assistance. Any inquiries and customer questions can be answered by the virtual assistant.
Setting up or managing the CRM Customer Relationship Management software.
Employee or Freelancer virtual assistant
You can become a VA as an employee that is hired for a fixed amount of hours. You can work fulltime or part time. The other option is to offer your assistant services as a freelancer with a fixed rate per hour. Freelancers can have several clients that they work for at the same time. Also they might work more than the normal 40 hours in case they hav a lot of work to do. Freelancers can find clients through their business network or on websites like upwork.com, fiverr.com or freelancer.com. There are many other websites where you can offer your freelance services.
Administrative tasks
Data entry, take a paper list of contact information and add it to the digital address book. Manage digital files and backups. Password recovery of accounts and password registration.
Generate reports for example expenses, or hours worked by staff on projects and monitoring and analysing them. Manage small tasks like the email signature and the out of office reply.
Setup and update spreadsheets. Being part of a meeting just to make the minutes or notes of that meeting including the action list. Gather information that is often requested and add it to the knowledge base or intranet for future use. Collect outstanding payments or even hand over the payment request to a bailiff or collection agency.
Assistant tasks
Send out cards for a birthday or anniversary to business and personal relations. Buy or send gifts, for example flowers to the partner on the wedding anniversary. A virtual assistant can help with hiring new employees for example by placing job advertisements, pre selecting possible candidates and screen resumes. The virtual assistant can be supporting in the onboarding process of new (virtual or remote) employees. The visual assistant can source freelancers for outsourcing tasks that can not be handled by the VA.
Social media presence
Post regularly on business or private accounts so that followers regularly get updates by social media.
Followup important tasks
If the manager that you are assisting is waiting for an important report from for example an architect, you as the virtual assistant might have to follow up on that report. You get the email and telephone number of the architect and are asked to ask regularly when that report is going to be finished. You might even have to read it and give a short summary by voice note that your manager can listen to while driving the car. Or use AI text to voice to generate a mp3 file of the information in that report. Saving time and energy for your manager.
General support (being a parent, general care)
Some parts of being a virtual assistant is almost like being a parent. Have you eaten today? Can I get you some healthy food delivered? When do you have time to exercise? Did you get your suit ironed for that convention next week? Even just listening, how is your day going? How is your mood? Can I help you with anything, even just some friendly advice?
Salary or hourly fees for the VA
When you do a job interview for a position as a virtual assistant, you have to know what salary you would like to get for your services. Make sure that you know your costs for the home office like electricity, heating and setting up the home office like a desk and a chair. When you are a freelance VA, you need to include social fees for healthcare and unemployment, vacation days and vacation or extra payments. Also your pension and costs for a laptop, software need to be included in your freelance VA fees.
Virtual assistant coach or virtual coach
Determine your virtual assistant rate per hour
If you like to see what you can charge for being a virtual assassin, you can visit upwork.com, fiverr.com or freelancer.com. You search for “virtual assistant” and see what price per hours is being asked.
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How to become a virtual assistant?
What income virtual assistant?
Salaries of up to 60.000 USD or Euro are possible if you have a specialisation and some years of experience.
Zoek Upwork voor virtual assistant en kijk wat je ervan kan leren
Perform research as a VA or PA
Metaverse commercial opportunities for a startup.
Who is a Virtual assistant for?
Parents with children at home
Full-time or part-time virtual assistant
Especially if you are a single parent with children at home, your life is already very busy and stressful. You can work 32, 28 or 24 hours a week divided over 5 working days. Per day you work in the range of 5 to 6 hours a day allowing you enough time to bring the children to school, pick them back up or work when the baby is sleeping.
Following up
Support
Benefits of a virtual assistant job
What communication methods does a virtual assistant use?
Slack
asynchronous
Video meetings
WhatsApp or Telegram (text or voice messages)
Calling by WhatsApp voice, Telegram voice call or just by regular phone conversations when immediate real time communication is needed.
Virtual human resource recruiter or virtual talent acquisition specialist
Benefits of VA work
How to land your Virtual Assistant Job with no experience
General virtual assistants can provide help with your everyday life.
What is Virtual Assistance?
Being a virtual assistant allows you to work with flexible working hours and is great for single parents.
How to get started as a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant has all the advantages of any other fully remote job. This means no commuting (no travelling to and from work) and working flexible hours.
Schedule meetings
The goal of a VA is to do simple, repetitive and tedious tasks so that the business or person that they work for has more time for higher value deep work.
A VA can work for a business or an individual person.
You can get hired from a business or a private perspective.
Some virtual assistants support their clients in both aspects.
Like my accountability and business coach also asks me about my social life, my diet and romantic relationships.
Are you familiar with Microsoft Office, Google documents, Windows, Android and Mac / IOS?
typing or word processing similar to data entry
Collect and monitor data
As a VA, you can collect data, make a dashboard overview of that data and give warning signals if important values are going wrong. For example, check the number of unique visitors, the dwelling time, bounce rate, pageviews of the company website each week. Including how many signups for the newsletter, the mailing list and the conversion rate of visitors to paying customers or leads. This information can easily be displayed
Especially as a freelancer, you can work for several clients as a virtual assistant. This way, you can experience what kind of tasks you like and how you like clients to work with you. Also in case one client no longer gives you work, you still have work from your other VA clients.
When you are just starting out as a VA without training and without experience, you can start with a low salary or rate per hour. Over time, with more experience and or training you can slowly raise your income.
What Are The Benefits?
Work from anywhere as a VA
Can hire Virtual assistants for many different tasks, including:
Organising travel bookings and virtual events
Researching data for sales reports or marketing information
Creating content and helping with search engine optimization (SEO)
Setting up social media accounts and posting updates to your company’s performance. Many virtual assistants are responsible for maintaining the company’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other charges.
What Is It like to work as a Virtual Assistant?
Entrepreneur that works alone can only work so many hours. By hiring a VA the entrepreneur can get more results, build the startup faster and have less stress.
Virtual assistant salaries and rates
Virtual Assistant Jobs For Beginners
In general moms or single parents are great at being a virtual assistant.
Becaus ethe children need support all the time, this role comes natural.
Most of teh skills like organising, being responsable and monitoring come natural to parents.
Organise, host and lead a podcast recording
Here are some of the best virtual assistant jobs for beginners:
Customer Service Agent (virtual callcenter)
Administrative Assistant
Byron Virtual Assistant
Virtual Recruiter or HR assistant
Virtual Assistant Internship
Single parents that like to become a virtual assistant
Anynchronous working
Flexible working hours
Available the next 4 hours for a meeting.
Work part-time to have time for the kids.
Virtual assistant for finance, administration and bookkeeping
Research assistant
Commercial support setup email funnels and track conversions Google analytics
virtual travel agent assistant
Virtual Data Processing and data entry
Callcenter / Virtual Phone Support
Virtual Personal Assistant
Content Writing
Editorial Assistant
Proof reading
Find images for a new blog or website page
Live Messenger or chatbot
transcribe
Virtual Graphics Designer
Virtual Event Planner
Virtual Tutor
Virtual Personal Assistant
Setup a new office in a new country or city
How to be professional and make a great impression on video calls as a virtual assistant
What are the Best Skills for a Virtual Assistant?
Virtual assistant training
excellent listening skills
English language
communicate effectively with their clients and be passionate about
like to help others
computer, internet
organized
how to prioritize their tasks.
writing skills
compose reports
monitor key values of the company
flexibility
respect deadlines
maintain professionalism in all work-related matters.
How to become a Virtual Assistant Without Experience?
problem solver
a fast learner
software programs
(canva,, pivot tables in excel)
Assist in solving problems with for example an employee that is fired or a copyright claim.
Virtual assistants are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.
