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Whether you want to work remotely or you’re looking to outsource some of your tasks it is important to understand this flowering business model and to learn more about it.

As a Virtual Assistant, you can significantly supplement your income or just work full-time from home. As someone who employs a virtual assistant, there are many benefits to it as well.

Let’s go deeper into this subject.

What Is A Virtual Assistant And How Can You Become One?

So, a virtual assistant is someone who helps entrepreneurs and businesses by performing tasks as varied as data entry, social media management, copy-writing, editing, website maintenance, research, and so much more.

VA’s can be hired for a particular task or work full-time, but they are, as the name suggests, virtual employees. They work remotely through email, phone, and internet correspondence to meet the specific needs of their clients.

To become a VA, you have two options: You can either dive right in and find jobs through various VA websites (which I’m going to show you) and forums or you can establish your own business and online presence in a more direct, entrepreneurial fashion.

In either case, the first step is to know what skills you have so that you can effectively market them. Decide what type of VA jobs you are looking for and what jobs fit your skillset.

To further advance your options, consider taking virtual assistant courses on websites like Freelance U or learn niche skills with courses on Udemy.

If you are taking the bold route of pursuing your own clientele, you must focus on networking and cold pitching. You will want to create your own website or a blog and market yourself in the VA arena.

Why Should You Consider Hiring Virtual Assistants?

If you are a company or an entrepreneur looking to get additional help with administrative or clerical needs, it may be beneficial to consider hiring a VA.

Here are some benefits to considering the employment of VA’s in your business:

• you don’t need to rent an office for a VA since they work from their home-offices
• VAs are usually easier to manage since they don’t work next to you each day like other full-time employees
• your workload would be greatly reduced with a VA to whom you could delegate tasks, hence, you will have more time to focus on primary functions of running your business
• a virtual assistant is less expensive than a full-time employee
• a virtual assistant can handle tasks that you and your other employed staff may not have the knowledge or experience to perform

These are some great benefits, aren’t they?

We all want more space, more time, and more freedom to do what we really like, don’t we?

Let’s say we’re considering hiring some specialists.

What are the skills they should possess?

Let check it out!

What Qualities Are Essential To Be a Good Virtual Assistant?

There are many qualities and skills that you need to assess when looking for a good VA. Here is a list of qualities and skills that should be present in every virtual assistant:

• honesty
• reliability
• attention to detail
• excellent time-management
• expediency
• resourcefulness
• good communication
• ability to multi-task
• ability to work independently
• basic computer skills

Furthermore, depending on the tasks for which you are hiring a virtual assistant, you will want your VA to be well-experienced in fields that may include one or more of the following:

Computer Skills

Beyond the basic computer skills that you would want and expect from someone working virtually, you may need your VA to have more proficient computer skills.

If you are hiring a VA to research a topic, you would want them to be able to utilize internet search engines as optimally as possible. If you are looking to hire a VA to do data entry or generate word documents, you would want them to be able to type 30 or more words per minute.

The use of email, chat, and various video conferencing tools may be required.

Writing Skills

If you are hiring a VA for copy-writing or to correspond with clients or even to formulate documents for your business, you would want to make sure that you find a VA with good writing skills and who is proficient in English, or in the language you require for the work.

A good understanding of vocabulary and grammar is essential for any VA job for which you seek to hire.

Accounting Skills

Obviously, if you are hiring a VA to do some accounting for you, you will want them to have a basic understanding of accounting and adequate skills to meet the job requirements.

Knowledge of simple software like Quickbooks could be key.

Social Media Skills

Your VA may require a basic knowledge of and some experience in managing social media profiles and posts.

If so, a basic knowledge of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest is crucial. In some instances, you may also want them to be at least somewhat proficient with YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram.

These are the skills and qualities good VA’s should have. If they don’t they should learn them immediately as they’re crucial in this outsourcing world.

Let’s check how and where we can hire them, shall we?

We’ll now take a look at my top picks for websites where you can hire virtual assistants.

7 Places Where You Can Hire Virtual Assistants

Fiverr

The first one is Fiverr. The company started in 2010 by Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman. It is based in Tel Aviv Israel but also has offices in New York and San Francisco. Their database of freelancers is coming from various parts of the world.

As the name suggests you can get a simple task done for $5. More difficult tasks, however, carry a larger price tag. This site is good for finding VA’s who can assist with everything from transcription to audio to graphic design.

You can easily filter who are you looking for by inputting a price range, location, or delivery time. At this moment there are 10,000+ virtual assistant services available.

Another unique thing for Fiverr is that instead of posting an open job and then having to check each of the applications freelancers list their service packages. All the clients have to do is browse and buy whichever you prefer.

For everyone who’s looking to hire a VA this kind of interface could be of huge help.

Why?

Because they’re able to see how these service sellers promote themselves, how well do they write and how good are they when it comes to designing theirs about pages.

This is so much better than going through hundreds of identical answers to a job listing, isn’t it?

What would my advice be when hiring from this platform?

Well, if you’ve found a profile that you think could be a decent choice don’t hesitate to contact him or her and ask about their experience and tell a bit more about your needs.

That’s a must! Never hire someone before finding out whether they’re able to perform the tasks you want (even if they say so in their service description).

How about the costs? How much is Fiverr charging the customers?

According to their FAQ site: „All purchases are subject to a service fee of $2 on purchases up to and including $40, and 5% on purchases above $40.„

Upwork

The next place where you can find freelancers and virtual assistants is Upwork (formerly Elance-oDesk, rebranded in 2015). According to the company itself, it is „the premier freelancing website for top companies to hire and work with the world’s most talented independent professionals.”

Upwork has more than 12 million registered VA’s at your disposal. With the ability to post jobs and to interview potential candidates there are many benefits to using this site for your needs.

As I’ve said you can either post a job or do an interview after checking through people’s resumes online.

They have a completely different way of working than Fiverr.

They’re able to track the freelancers hours if they’re doing some hourly jobs.

Going through so many potential candidates can be hard but Upwork’s filtering system is quite advanced so you shouldn’t have problems finding the right freelancers.

Fine, but how much is Upwork charging the customers?

There’s a 2,75% processing fee per transaction.

Freelancer

Another place is called Freelancer and it is one of the largest online freelance job boards to find quality virtual assistants. It’s quite similar to Upwork (they also track the time of their freelancers) but there are some differences.

You can actually search for people that are currently online. It can be an advantage if your project is time-sensitive.

Here, on this platform, you can also check the profiles of the freelancers and assess if they’re the right fit for your needs.

As you can see at the moment of writing this article, there are 16746 jobs found and there are more than 50,000 VA’s listed.

To use it you have to open an account and post your job. As you wait the proposals will come.

However, there’s also another way. You can type „virtual assistant” into the search bar on the homepage and start looking for individuals immediately.

After you find some you can also narrow your search by pricing, location, etc. It’s all very simple.

When you’ve found someone that fits your needs you can either contact them through their profile (if you found them using the search bar) or give them the job if you’ve posted a job advertisement.

How about the most important thing? How much does Freelancer charge the customers?

For fixed-price projects, there’s a fee of 3% or $3.00USD (whichever is greater) and for the hourly projects, there’s a 3% fee for each payment.

Zirtual

The next site is Zirtual and it works differently than the ones we previously mentioned. They can help you with tasks like email management, social media strategy, marketing, event planning, research, website maintenance and many more.

What is different about them is that they online hire U.S. college-educated people to work for them.

Also, instead of placing a job or searching thousands of virtual assistants you only need to submit all the information about what you need and they’ll find someone among their team to help you with this task.

If you don’t like the person they chose you can easily change him. All you need to do is contact their customer’s service.

At Zirtual you need to choose a plan based on how many hours of task work and how many people you need.

There are four plans and you can check them here.

WeWorkRemotely

The next site where you find someone who would work for you as a virtual assistant is WeWorkRemotely.com. On this site people who are looking for specialists simply post jobs so the freelancers could find it and do it from home.

It costs $299 per month to post a job on their website.

There are lots of categories that are currently available.

Things like sales and marketing, programming jobs, customer support, copywriting, business and management, etc.

This is even more different than the previous services as it’s mainly used by the bigger companies to post job vacancies so they wouldn’t have to hire people full-time.

VA Networking

The next company is VANetworking and it has been in business since 2003. They’re located in British Columbia, Canada.

They have more than 30,000 members worldwide.

If you’re looking to hire you can post a job for free and they’ll try to match you with the best suited VA.

The categories they operate in are web design, social media, real estate, programming, etc.

The pricing structure is a bit different here because the VA pays to be a part of this network and customers pay what they agreed to pay for a particular project.

Guru

Another very popular site – similar to Upwork and Freelancer – for virtual assistant work is Guru. You can find and hire freelancers to do services like copy-writing, accounting, sales, marketing, programming, translation, etc.

As of the moment of writing this article, there are 1,591,256 freelancers offering 4,221,912 services online.

These are some decent numbers, aren’t they?

To find the perfect ones for your project all you need to do is use the filtering system.

I’ve read some complaints about their help center which apparently isn’t that high quality.

The pricing system, unfortunately, is much more complex than on other sites.

Depending on membership and tasks you pay 2,95% for each transaction + 4,5%-11,95% per monetary operation.

Great, we’ve checked 7 sites and now it’s the time to sum it up.

What Are The Best Sites To Find Virtual Assistants?

So, we’ve seen a few virtual assistant companies where we could hire someone to do some of our tasks. How to tell which is the best?

Well, it depends on what you exactly need.

If it’s a very simple task then a quick gig at Fiverr should be enough. When it’s more difficult I wouldn’t order it there and I would look for some real professionals.

Where to find these professionals?

I would say that you should look at Upwork, Freelancer and perhaps Guru (however, they’re quite expensive).

Zirtual, on the other hand, says that they only hire people from U.S. Colleges but it looks to me that they’re not really specialists. They can do some general tasks but when it comes to some specific stuff like web design and programming they fall short.

Another important factor is obviously the price so we have to answer one question:

Which platforms charge the least?

Fiverr is obviously the cheapest one but the quality there isn’t that high. When it comes to these higher-level freelancing sites the cheapest is Upwork, because they charge only 2,75% per transaction.

To sum it up:

• the best for simple tasks – Fiverr
• the best for more advanced tasks: Upwork, Freelancer, and Guru (the most expensive of the three)

Thanks for reading!

I hope you’ll find it helpful!

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