When you’re ready to become a virtual assistant, you’re likely to discover that there are many resources available. Some of the resources for virtual assistants that you’ll find are going to put you at a much greater advantage than others.

Lately it seems as if “virtual assistant” has become something of a buzz word. Plenty of sites are cropping up that talk about how easy it is to run a VA business and make a fortune from home. There are other sites that will tell you that virtual assistance it “the home business” to go into and that the resources that they have are the best you’re going to find.

Like all resources on the internet, you should stay skeptical of those that make promises that seem to be too good to be true (as an aside, those who are looking for a virtual assistant should also be cautious if a VA’s rates seem too good to be true and keep in mind the old adage of you get what you pay for). The reality is that running a business is challenging: shouldn’t you be looking for resources that are provided by successful virtual assistants?

The right resources will help to simplify the process of running your business, of talking about the skills that you have and marketing yourself and your services, and help you to find the clients you need to get your business up and running. They’ll provide you with support when you need it, encouragement when things aren’t going well, and the help that you need to be successful.

Virtual assistant marketing is all about getting the word out about who you are and the services that you provide. The virtual assistant network that you belong to can help you to get the word out and provide pointers on attracting new clients, but you’re also going to have to put in an effort on your own.

In addition to just talking with small business owners and networking in your local community and making sure that you have flyers and business cards to help you to market your services as a VA, your best virtual assistant marketing is going to happen with your website.

Of course, using your VA website effectively is going to mean paying attention to a few specific details. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What are my specialties? When you’re clear about the services that you specialize in, it’s easier to promote them with your website.
2. What type of clients do you want to attract? This is a really important thing to think about. The best thing that you can do is to know who you want to reach. Ideally, you want to be able to attract clients who share your ethics and with whom you can work well. Reach out to them with your website.
3. What services do you offer? When a prospective client visits your website, one of the things that he or she is going to want to know is what you can do - whether or not you offer the service that you need. Make sure that you list them.
4. How will prospective clients contact me? You can advertise your services on your website until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t make it easy for prospective clients to get in touch with you about those services, chances are good that you won’t attract more clients.

In other words, your website attracts clients by telling them who you are, what you do, what you can do for them and by making it easy for them to get in touch with you - and that’s why your website is such a vital part or marketing your real estate business.

There’s a reason why they call the traditional job market a rat race: it’s all about learning the right tricks, the right turns and getting to the top - the end of the maze - as fast as possible. Throw in being passed over for promotions and getting stuck in traffic during your commute and all of a sudden you’ll have even found the dead ends.

Virtual assistant training might be just the thing to get you out of the rat race for good.

Think about it: you’ve got administrative skills - you’ve been answering phones and creating correspondence for years. You have a variety of other skills too - some of you are great at marketing even if it wasn’t your primary job; same is true for web design, photo editing, travel planning and more.

Virtual assistant training isn’t designed to help you learn how to be an assistant; it’s designed to train you to be a business owner so that you can put the skills that you have to work for yourself - to give you a chance to own your own business, work with the clients who you choose to work with and, to some extent, to set your own schedule.

And, for an added benefit, if you work at home, there’s no commute so there’s no traffic to get stuck in. Because you’re the boss, there aren’t any promotions to get passed over for - you’re already at the top.

Sure, there are still elements of the virtual assistant business that lead to competition; there are things that you will need to know to get to where you’re going. Virtual assistant training can make sure that you’re always headed along the right path.

In a recent Harris Interactive poll, there was a basic summary of how people in business over a wide range of businesses felt about outsourcing their work; nearly 2/3 of the people who responded were willing to outsource at least some of their work in order to free up time in their day. For those who are considering becoming a virtual assistant, this is really good news on a number of levels.

First, it means that all of those who become a virtual assistant will be able to find work (provided that they look in the right places). Second it means that there are going to be tasks out there that some VAs will be better suited for than others: by joining a network with other virtual assistants, you’ll find that you’ll get referrals from them.

That’s one of the really great things about becoming a virtual assistant: because it’s (on some levels) still relatively new, there isn’t a general sense of cut throat competition. It’s possible for virtual assistants to work together. In fact, sometimes that’s the ideal solution - to become a part of a network of virtual assistants.

When you become a virtual assistant and network with others, everyone wins. You’ll be able to do the work that’s best suited to your skills, and work with others who can make sure that everything is done well.

Virtual assistant training isn’t all about learning to answer the phone for a client who isn’t in the same area as your business; it’s not about teaching you to learn basic administrative skills: you already have those.

Instead, virtual assistant training is about developing business skills that will be useful to you in your business. Basics like time management can help bring you to a place where things make sense and even when you have 6 projects due on the same day, everything is done with time to spare and you don’t panic about it. More in depth VA training is about things like internet marketing or using particular software tools that clients are going to want you to use - those things that will help you within your business for yourself and for your clients.

In other words, the goal of training classes that you take part in is to help you to make your virtual assistant business better - not about learning to be a virtual assistant.

You know what skills you have. You know which services you plan to provide and you know how to use a wide variety of tools. You even know how to put your skills to work. Virtual assistant training is meant to give your business a nudge - a nudge that’s meant to help you get ahead.

When you’re running a VA business you’re going to find yourself doing some things that you may not have done before. For some, you’ll find yourself asked a question that could be a little bit daunting: do you know how to use Photoshop?

Photoshop is one of the most common image editing programs out there and plenty of virtual assistants are going to need to at least have some knowledge of how to use it.

On one hand, you’ll want to know how to use Photoshop because it’s a great tool for designing headers for your website, for creating flyers and brochures and other website graphics. On the other, you’ll find that some clients who use a lot of photos on their websites that need to be tweaked a bit because the scene wasn’t “camera ready” - the lighting was off or there were unnecessary elements; Photoshop will let you change the way the light falls, clone out problems and basically clean up an image.

As a virtual assistant, knowing how to use Photoshop is going to help you get and keep clients - two things that are essential for running a VA business.

Everyone who becomes virtual assistant is going to have his or her own reason for becoming a VA.

Many people who take the plunge and look into virtual assistant business training so that they can move that career forward do so for one of the following reasons:

1. They don’t enjoy working for someone else
2. They want to put their skills to work to make money for themselves not for someone else’s company
3. They want to be able to work without having to be away from their families
4. They believe they have greater potential and that they’ll never be able to live up to it in their current position
5. They want to work, but don’t want to have the hassles of a commute or the distractions of office politics

For those with administrative skills, marketing abilities and a passion for what they do, any of these reasons is a great inspiration to become a VA.

Once you know your inspiration, once you’re started looking at your goals - clearly identifying them and the paths you’ll need to reach them - it’s all about making a commitment. Getting the business training that you need to succeed in becoming a virtual assistant is a great way to make that commitment.

Virtual assistants need to have a toolkit that they can go to to help them through the basics of day to day operations. Some of your VA tools are going to be related to the software that you use, the internet access that you have and other office basics. In some cases though, it’s good to create an interview or questionnaire to use as a foundation.

For example, do you have a new client interview that focuses on questions that you would ask when a new client calls about your services?

You can focus on the most basic questions like:

1. Have you worked with a virtual assistant before?
2. What’s your business all about?
3. What types of projects do you have in mind?
4. What do you expect from working with a virtual assistant?
5. How will we communicate?

Or you can focus on more specific questions if you prefer, but the basic gist is that you need to be able to get to know someone who calls about your services and you’ll need to be able to determine whether or not you could get the job done, fit it into your schedule. In other words, you want to be able to tell from the first conversation whether or not you and the client will be a match.

A simple list of questions to ask and have answers can save you a lot of hassle down the road.

Much of the training for running a business as a virtual assistant comes from previous on-the-job experience: the marketing skills that you developed; organizational and administrative habits; web design; writing. While the skills that you bring into your VA business are valuable, they aren’t always a strong foundation for launching and running your own business.

Think about it: just because you’ve been maintaining schedules and creating correspondence, does that mean that you know how to create your own brand? Just because you’ve designed flyers in the past, do you know what it takes to market your business online with a website, a blog, an electronic newsletter, press releases and articles?

Virtual assistant training can help you supplement the skills and experience you have with the knowledge that it takes to successfully run your own business.

When you launch a business, yes the skills and experience you have will help you to perform for your clients but the difference is you are not working for them when you have a VA business - you will be working for yourself. Shouldn’t you take the time to network with other virtual assistants (those who are established as well as those who, like you, are just going into business), to continue developing skills and to learn more about moving forward with your own business?

When you’re running a virtual assistant business, you’re likely to find that marketing is a big part of what you do.

You’ll be marketing your VA business with your website. You’ll market your business online with press releases, articles, a blog, an electronic newsletter or some combination of the above.

Similarly, you’ll find that you do a fair amount of marketing offline. You may put flyers up at a local supermarkets; you may pass out your business cards at the small business association or to friends and other business professionals that you know.

However, what happens when you’re marketing your VA business and you come up across those business owners who don’t yet know what a virtual assistant is?

At that point, you’ll need to be confident about expressing what you do and who you are and how your services can help. Having access to other VAs can help you out with this; they’ll be able to give you tips and talking points that will help you tackle the challenge of promoting your business.