Once you’ve got your home office set up and have all the basic tools you need; such as web hosting, file storage facility, virtual phone or VOIP and have signed up for free basic accounts on some of the popular work from home sites like Odesk and Elance for example; you are well on your way.
There are many highly skilled and specialized skills that demand high salaries; hourly pay rates that do not differ much, regardless of whether they are in full-time employment or independently and working from home.
Unfortunately, while most of us possess an eclectic array of skills and knowledge, not all of us have the certified qualifications that high-level salary positions demand.
The most abundant type of work-at-home jobs available to a virtual assistant are those that require basic administrative skills, skills that we all have. The perceived downside there is that those work-at-home jobs also have the highest number of freelancers seeking them.
Anyone who has had the desire to be a virtual assistant or has browsed any of the popular websites that advertise work-from-home and assignments will have found that the pay offered by many employers for basic, administrative-type work at home varies. from poor to poor
Not ALL but definitely many!
The secret to earning $45 an hour as a virtual assistant working from home is simple.
A structured work week, with a fixed number of hours you spend at work and with multiple small projects from multiple employers.
First, decide what those skills you possess that you will market and apply for tasks that are directly relevant to and will be your primary focus of the work-at-home jobs you will apply for. It is around those assignments that you will build your structured work week and earn $45 per hour working from home.
For example, your primary skill could be blogging, customer service, phone sales, or transcription; Whatever it is, that’s where you first focus your energies and apply for assignments that pay a fee that’s no less than minimum wage.
Your goal here is to always have enough assignments in your main niche that will pay you for every hour you spend working from home.
So if you have decided to put in 8 hours per day, then you have an allowance or allowances that are paying you at least minimum wage for each of those 8 hours.
From there, the trick now is to go for very low-impact, low-paying assignments (and there are plenty) that you can do alongside your main day job.
Some good examples would be email monitoring, online chat support, basic blog commenting, calendar management, mass emailing and the list really is endless as there are literally thousands of different simple tasks to do. that you can be paid and add to your work in household income to accumulate $45 per hour.
Basically what you need to do is imagine an average business day in an average office anywhere in the world and all the tasks that are done in that average business day. Imagine the average customer service agent who works at any service company for $15 an hour; what he or she does on their average work day.
Make and answer fifty phone calls, read and answer fifty emails, look up ten unsolved problems, and perform any number of other tasks assigned to them throughout the day; all that for an employer for $15 an hour.
Add up all the tasks you do at the office, the emails you write and finish, the calls you make and receive, the memos and letters you write; If you make $100 a day and do 200 tasks on that day, then you get paid 50 cents for each thing you do at work.
So think about that when you see assignments like email monitoring for $2.00 per hour or providing online customer service support for $3.00 per hour; don’t pass it by in disgust, think about it first.
How many emails are there likely to be in an hour?
How many online support requests will there be?
The answer is usually one or two per hour on a busy day because the vast majority of these types of work-at-home assignments are for small businesses that want to pay a small amount of money for support by simply being there; instead of there being a lot to do.
What you should be thinking is; At $2.00 per hour for email monitoring, as long as there are no more than 4 per hour, that’s no different than what I’d be paid for that task at a regular job position.
The correct and positive thing to think about is that you get paid $2.00 an hour just to be there just in case; when, let’s face it, if you’re working from home, you’re sitting there anyway.
So why waste $2.00 an hour – $16 a day – $80.00 a week for sitting in a chair next to your PC in your home office; which is where you would be anyway whether that money was there or not.
Y…
There’s no reason you can’t be doing five exactly the same assignments for five different employers, all side by side with each other and your primary niche assignments.
Don’t focus on paying for each individual task you do during your workday in your home office and focus on what you end up in the bank at the end of the week or month.
You don’t calculate your salary like that in a regular job; based on everything you do. Just look at your paycheck at the end of the week and know that that is what you have been paid for that time on the job.
Here’s an example of how you might structure a 30-hour week as a work-from-home virtual assistant: It’s based on actual tasks you were doing within two months of setting up as a work-from-home virtual assistant.
It comes out to $1090 per week, just over $36 per hour; so I hadn’t hit the $45 an hour goal by then; but it showed me very quickly that a disciplined structure and multiple low impact projects gave me a good income without the stress and strains of the corporate rat race
Post 50 simple one or two line blog comments $25 per week X 4
Manage and approve posts on my blog $30 per week X 1
Manage and approve posts on my blog $25 per week X 1
Submit 10 pre-written ads to Craigslist daily $20 per week X 3
Manage my email inbox $35 per week X 3
Email Appointment Scheduling $60 per week X 1
Online Customer Chat Support – 4 hours per day $40 per week X 1
Online Customer Chat Support – 6 hours per day $80 per week X 3
Email Customer Support – 6 hours per day $65 per week X 2
Telephone customer service: incoming $115 per week X 1
Audio transcription $135 per week X 1
Opinion sites and surveys $50 per week
If you think you can get organized and have good time management, you can easily earn the desired income by working from home.
Try the method yourself and you’ll see that it all comes down to logistics: managing a mix of different things that can be done together, try it yourself.