So you want to be a Virtual Assistant?
By: Lori Redfield
More and more women today are opting to stay at home to nurture their children. But this is nearly always a financially stressful decision for a family to make. Our economic situation often times demands two incomes - and even so, many couples continue to find themselves sinking further and further into financial debt.
The benefits of being at home for our children are obvious. But how can we achieve it and still contribute substantially to the financial end of things? Furthermore, there are more expressions of ourselves than mother and wife - and many of us yearn to continue building viable skills that keep us 'marketable' and also enable us to make contributions to society. How can we do it all? That is the puzzling question that more and more women are successfully being able to answer.
The advent of the World Wide Web has had a significant impact on a women's ability to work from home. There are an ever-increasing number of Internet based companies who think in a completely contemporary way. These companies are seeking to employ "Free Agents", independent contractors - otherwise known as "Virtual Assistants".
Why is a Virtual Assistant a good idea? It saves a company money. The company is not obligated with the typical overhead costs that an "employee" usually represents. There is no office building, no benefits - health, vacation, 401k or otherwise. The Virtual Assistant is self-employed, pays their own taxes, does their own invoicing and provides their services from their own office.
A Virtual Assistant provides any number of solutions to the Internet based company. There is the roll of virtual support that many companies are implementing now which allows a more personal relationship with the customer that had been lacking in Internet stores and service sites. What this is is a "Live Chat" service where the customer can request a chat and a customer service representative on duty can respond and chat real time - answering questions about products or services instantly. This is still a new concept, but it is quickly becoming the norm and there is a definite need for people who can competently provide this service and represent companies in a professional way.
Other solutions for customer support that a Virtual Assistant may offer are email and phone support for both Internet based and more traditional brick-and-mortar companies.
Oftentimes VA's are offering editing and proofreading services as well as 'beta testing' new websites or portions of websites before they are launched to the public. The beta testing mainly consists of clicking all of the links on each page of the clients site, taking copious notes of anything that is not functioning properly including testing forms, surveys or other interactive elements on the site. You would note weather or not you received a confirmation email after signing up for their newsletter - if you encountered any error pages, had suggestions for improvements, etc.
Any webmaster or website owner will tell you that a fresh pair of eyes is a tremendously valuable resource that they are willing to pay for.
Other Virtual Assistant roles might be HTML editing, updating website data, hand submitting websites to search engines, researching competitor sites for website owners. or more traditional secretarial functions like basic accounting, data entry, or mailing list maintenance. The possibilities truly are limitless.
More and more women are finding fulfilling roles as Virtual Assistants, many with more work than they can handle. Our aim is to help women obtain the necessary skills they need to become successful Virtual Assistants, teach them how to market themselves, and help to dig up current position openings.
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About the Author:
Lori Redfield is a freelancer and internet entreprenuer who works from home while caring for her 4 children. If you would like to
work from home visit her at
FreelanceMom.com.
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