March 16, 2020
When you want to succeed in your business endeavours, then you need to optimize your finances and facilitate efficient operations. A Virtual Assistant (VA) enables you to put your working hours to good use, reduce the operational costs and make informed decisions. To foster business growth, it is crucial to seek assistance from professionals, whether in the form of virtual assistants or virtual receptionists. Wondering what a VA does? Here’s a simple explanation for you.
What Is a Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant (VA) is someone who offers services for businesses from the comforts of any location they are in for some agreed amount of money. The task of a VA can be typically anything that the in-house team can do and sometimes, much more than that too. A VA can get rid of the repetitive tasks that the employees do every single day and give them enough time to put their creative minds to use.
Getting a virtual assistant for a business isn’t going to cost as much as one thinks. When you compare it with the amount of time saved and the cost reductions, it’s worth the investment. There are several factors that determine the rates of virtual assistants in Australia.
Services Provided by Virtual Assistants
A job as a virtual assistant can be practically anything that a business wants. There are quite a few hits of jobs required by companies. Here are some of the top few popular services by virtual assistants.
1. Social Media
Nowadays, every business needs social media presence but not many have the right team to make it happen. There are many social media strategists, social media marketers and Social Media Virtual Assistants offering their services as a VA. In this job, the responsibility can vary from providing suggestions on the best social media practices to working on creating posts and social media campaigns on behalf of the company.
2. Blogging
There are several tasks that a company needs with regards to blogging. The VA can create blog posts, refurbish and update the old blogs, manage the blogging platform, respond to the blog comments, reply to emails, manage other bloggers, manage the links on blogs and many more.
3. E-Commerce
In an e-commerce store, most of the work happens online and a VA can perform a lot of tasks remotely with great efficiency. There are several tasks that can be delegated to VAs in e-commerce business like customer service, invoice management, inventory management, website maintenance, order tracking a lot more. The company can get the help of VAs to perform these tasks instead of being overwhelmed by them.
4. Content Production
As a business, creating content regularly is vital to keep the business remembered in the minds of customers. A VA can act as a content producer and help in creating and curating videos, creating graphics, taking photos and performing other tasks to produce great content.
5. General Admin
This is a fairly vast domain where there are more tasks involved. While the entire job of admin cannot be done by a single VA, the sub-section of the tasks can be assigned like bookkeeping, email management, data entry, spreadsheet management and calendar management.
Virtual Assistant Pay in Australia
There is no hard and fast rule that goes into determining the rates of VA. Let’s see some of the main elements that decide the pay of virtual assistants in Australia starting with the determining factors.
Factors That Determine the Cost of a Virtual Assistant
Before hiring a virtual assistant, one should have all the details that go into deciding the cost of hiring one. Let’s see some of the deciding factors for the cost of a virtual assistant in Australia.
1. The Type of Work Required
As we saw before, there are several types of work can be done by a VA. Based on the expert levels of assistance needed, the VA rates can vary.
2. The Frequency of the Job
Some would hire a virtual assistant on a long-term basis which means they will be paying them every month for certain hours spent working for the company. There are some situations like implementing a marketing strategy where the company may need to take on someone for consultation or strategic planning or with a specific domain-specific task. During such times, the VA will charge based on the hours spent or a fixed cost till the end of the project.
Sometimes, the VAs charge less for the same work if it’s on an ongoing basis when compared to a one-time job. So make sure to take these cost inputs into consideration when hiring a VA.
3. The Expertise of the VA
How well-versed the VA is in the job also plays a vital role. Like any other employee in the company, the more experience the VA has the more their rates will be.
On the other hand, the experienced virtual assistants will possess practical knowledge and great communication skills to provide the right service needed. There are some VAs who have prior experience in working in a corporate atmosphere or a similar in-house position before. So these are people who will be of great help to the organization and can offer much-needed expertise at lesser rates than the in-house employees.
4. The Specific Technical Knowledge and Tools Needed
When hiring a VA for a finance work or a marketing campaign, they need to have access to some of the tools and software for better operations. For example, let’s say that a company is hiring a finance virtual assistant to create a balance sheet and audit the expenditure for the quarter. This VA will need access to some finance-related software to provide this service and this can be added to the total cost of the VA.
So the tools and software that the VA may need to fulfill the requirements can also play a factor in deciding the cost of hiring the virtual assistant.
5. Freelance VA or VA Companies
The virtual assistants are on the rise and there are several new companies that offer the services of a VA. There are also several VAs that freelance on their own. So based on the type of VA chosen, the cost can vary accordingly. Usually, new or moderately-experienced freelance VA will have lesser rates than the experienced ones or companies offering VA services.
What Are the Common Pay Methods of a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant can choose any number of factors to decide their pay scale. Let’s see the costs of hiring VA in Australia based on different models.
1. Cost of VA Based on Experience
Here are the costs of virtual assistants in Australia based on the expertise they have.
- VA with Average Experience – The hourly rate for freelance VAs with average experience in Australia is $15 to $40 per hour. These are VAs who have previously worked in similar jobs earlier or have just entered the field as a VA in this domain.
- VA with High Expertise – These are people who have 10+ years of experience in a similar field as the services they offer. Therefore, they possess extreme industry knowledge and will have proven expertise to fulfil the requirements. Such expert VAs will cost anywhere from $40 to $200 for an hour of their service.
2. Cost of VA Based on Job Description
As some industries or job responsibilities don’t need too much work, the cost is comparatively less than the other vital services offered by VAs.
For example, the cost per hour of a VA doing a data entry job is $15 to $25 while the cost of a VA offering social media marketing services starts from $20 and can go anywhere up to $50 or even more for an hour.
So, here are the costs of hiring a virtual assistant based on the job description
- For simple jobs like administrative tasks, data entry, clerical work, proofreading, calendar management, research work, etc, the cost per hour is between $15 to $30.
- For jobs that are specific and need some expertise like copywriting, accounting, marketing support for emails and social media, domain-specific support like WordPress, Salesforce, etc, the cost starts from $20 and increases to $75 for an hour.
- For expert VA positions like business consulting, project management, IT management, web development, server management and other related tasks, the costs per hour start from $40 and may go up to $100.
How to be a Virtual Assistant?
The following are some easy to follow steps to become a virtual assistant on your own
- Choose a specific offering you can soon become an expert in.
- Establish your presence about your new business by creating a website and social media pages.
- Devise a specific pricing structure that you can follow.
- Compare the current rates in the industry and set a good rate based on your experience – nothing too low or too high.
- Reach out to clients in your target markets or try to get referrals from friends and families to land the initial few jobs.
- Start taking new clients as you roll, get feedback from them and use positive feedback to score more jobs.
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to our clients and ask for referrals.
- Use negative comments to build and refine your work.
If you are planning to become a virtual assistant, you can easily use one of the online job forums to find your clients. Start sealing more deals and improving on your job to get a steady stream of revenue.
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