When you’re working as a virtual assistant, one of the things that’s going to separate you from a more traditional employee is that you’re working on your own. And that necessitates a familiarity with technology.

Technology for VAs starts with the basics: a computer, a CD or DVD burner and external hard drive for backing up your files. But then there are also more specific considerations.

When you start exploring the ways in which VAs use technology, you’re likely to discover:

1. That learning to keep a blog – and to keep it optimized for your keywords – helps to let others know a bit more about who you are and what you can do;
2. That there are going to be a number of cases in which you’ll want to edit photos – it’s a good idea to learn how to use software that makes it easy;
3. That there are open source software products out there that work just as well as the name brand expensive software and let you save files in a comparable format.

Of course, we use technology in other ways when we work as virtual assistants as well: we connect on forums, design websites and focus on other tools that will help get us to where we want to be.