Picture this. Working from home, in charge of your own hours. Popping out to pick up the kids from school without asking for permission. Going to the gym at 9 am rather than having to be clocking into a particular place of work. Or maybe you have bigger dreams of sitting with your laptop, on a beach, looking out across the horizon. Whatever it is you are picturing here, let me tell you, it’s possible. To the tune of 5-10K Per Month!
It used to be the case that the top boss in the company had a personal assistant, or a virtual assistant, or perhaps the top few in the company. Nowadays, many more people are calling upon the services of virtual assistants across each and every industry.
Teachers more so this year than ever, with mounting pressure from the extra work created through the pandemic, have been searching for help and outsourcing work to specialists.
So, how do you fancy being one of those specialists? 5-10k per month some people are earning as virtual assistants. Services range from the traditional virtual assistant duties such as diary and email management, document production, administrative support to more industry-specific support. Within teaching, it could be marking work, creating resources, lesson planning, editing lectures, and videos, or a whole heap of different things.
This is all very good, you say. But how do I get going?
Launching Yourself as a Virtual Teaching Assistant
Well, what you need is a step-by-step action plan to get you started. The steps are quite straightforward:
- Identify your skills
- Price and Package your Services
- Market Your Services.
- Set up your processes
- Sort out your cash
Simple as that! Ok, I hear you. You’re thinking, I know the steps. But how do I do each of these things? What does ‘set up your processes mean’? What ‘processes’? Market your services where?
The internet is full of guides on how to set yourself up as a virtual assistant. But, just like virtual teaching assistants, not all guides are created equal. You need to make sure that they get to the nitty-gritty of the situation. ‘Set up your processes’. What you want is something specific that tells you what processes you will need. The systems and software you’ll need to learn and use. What you need to think about. And, in fact, if you could just give me a template please, that would be even better!
The Virtual Savvy System
Thankfully, the internet is also full of reviewers who can tell you whether certain guides are helpful or not. One that is receiving high praise is the Virtual Savvy System (thevirtualsavvy.com). It is the brainchild of Abbey Ashley, who set herself up as a Virtual Assistant during maternity leave. And then never returned to work.
The site, thevirtualsavvy.com, has everything online and in one place. With a training course of 14 modules taking you from the ‘what even can I do’ stage through to building a website, setting your pricing, finding clients, and the all-important legalities, taxes that we need to know about.
It’s been featured on NBC, BossMan, Teachable and received praise across the board from the community of 40,000 people who have accessed this site here for help and training.
https://TheVirtualSavvy.samcart.com/referral/partnersavvysystem/2mZ7A5Jywx1UtyqJ
The Virtual Savvy System and Becoming a VTA
Now let’s have a think about how that would work for Virtual Teaching Assistants. The most in-demand skills from VTAs is their ability to create lesson plans, resources, and unit packs. These need to be delivered aligned to the curriculum. And even more helpful, if they’re digital this year!
Let’s take an example. If you’re an elementary teacher, perhaps you’ve created some interactive vocabulary tests and assignments. These have gone down well with the students. You can take these successful resources and sell these online individually or as a group. Or maybe you’re an English Language specialist at the high school level. You’ve got a whole four weeks’ worth of resources on To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby. This may include study questions, homework, discussion points, close readings, cross-curriculum lessons, slides, and instructional content. Now think about how long that took you to put together. THAT is what people will pay for. That kind of resource is what will get people clicking – buy, buy, buy! And that will get you the 5-10k a month.
But where do they buy? Well, this is the kind of thing that would be covered in any of these courses. To give you an idea, Teacherspayteachers.com (or TPT as it’s commonly known) is one of the go-to sites. You can sell your resources priced individually or as ‘bundles’ as they call them. Or you have a host of freelancer sites, like Fiverr and Upwork. Here you can offer your resources for people to buy, or you can offer your services to create customized ones for them. Again, think of the time it took you to put that together. Perhaps you did it quicker than others because you’re good at it. That’s the golden ticket to making big bucks working for yourself. Find something that people need and give it to them.
Taking Your Skills to the Next Level
Your skills may be in the creation of resources, or it may be in a number of other teaching areas that people need help with – marking assignments, document creation and organization, editing lectures. Once you know what your skills are, you have your product and after that, the step-by-step guides can teach you the rest.
The virtual savvy course, for example, is $997 (there is a $2497 option too) and gives you a step by step guide to setting up your own virtual assistant business with coaching, technical training, templates, and videos for just about everything you can imagine you would need to set up. You also have access to a community of 40,000 virtual assistants to ask for help and share ideas with and specialist support for technical, marketing, and branding activities.
People are waxing lyrical about the success they’ve had from the course, with many saying they’ve recouped their course fees in four or five weeks and secured retainer clients left, right and center!
Four weeks from setting up to clients – that sounds pretty good to me! There’s also another side to The Virtual Savvy which is tech training, so whenever your clients say – do you know how to use Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing? You can say yep, yep I do (even if it means you have to get straight on there and take the tutorial!)
Scaling Your Business
How to build UP your business is also demonstrated in addition to setting up your freelancer, VA, or small business website. This course shows you how to build on what you have and how to scale it up. It coaches you on how to take on extra people to offer more services and work with more clients.
Quite often when setting up as a one-man band you worry about not getting enough work, but once you step over that hurdle you can fly – until both your hands are full that is, at which point you either learn to scale up or you stay where you are. 5-10k a month could be achievable, but not generally with your own two hands – you need to learn how to scale up and that’s where The Virtual Savvy really shines as a course for people who are not just looking to build their own small business, but those that are looking to reach the stars and build a business that really brings in the cash.
Who would say no to 5-10k per month? Not me, that’s for sure!
