side hustle ideas – virtual assistant
If you want to begin your side hustle journey and have a bit of experience in administrative work you can become a virtual assistant (VA).
A virtual assistant is not “just” an online personal assistant, even though some tasks may overlap with a personal assistant. The services that VAss offers are diverse and individual, which means that you can construct your service list however you like. Horkeyhandbook has defined VAs as such: “A virtual assistant is anyone who offers services to other business owners from afar in exchange for an agreed upon fee.” Which is really broad, and therefore, it’s guaranteed that you can offer something that someone need.
I’ve curated a list of examples of what a VA can offer;
- data entry
- customer support
- social media management
- website maintenance
- proofreading
- editing
- calendar management
- email management
- bookkeeping
- content creation
- SEO optimization and keywords search
- graphic design
So.. how do you get started? Let’s dive right in!
- First of all your should sit down and figure out your business structure. You can ask yourself these questions:
- Do you want to work within a specific industry? If so, which one(s)?
- Do you only want to work with local businesses, or does location not matter to you?
- How much time will you be able to put into this? Is it your goal to become a full-time VA?
- And lastly; what types of services will you be offering?
Next, you have to decide on pricing. Pricing can vary as a VA depending on what you’re offering, so keep your services in mind when you’re defining your prices. You also need to decide whether you want to offer an hourly rate or a fixed rate. In the beginning I would recommend offering an hourly rate to begin with, because that way you can keep track of how much time is needed to finish a task and just get started. Later on you can change it to a fixed rate, which makes sense when you gradually gets more efficient in your work and you can complete the tasks on your schedule and not have to clock in and track your time. As mentioned, pricing can vary, but just to give you an idea; my hourly rate is $30, 180DKK, 25€.
Once you’ve done the above you can start to build your online presence. You can build a website with a call-to-action, use social media to promote and be active on Pinterest driving viewers back to your website. You can also use freelance platforms like upwork.com, fiverr.com, contra.com and marketingcapacity.dk to reach more businesses, on these platforms you need to register an account. And now, whether you want to use freelance platforms or your own website (or both) you can start reaching out businesses that can use someone like you.
You got this!
talk soon! xx