I began working as a Virtual Assistant back in 2017 bringing the skills that I had learnt over the years. I had a background in secretarial, administration and customer service roles. In reality, the best training I ever had was learning how to type (properly). I feel for people who type with two fingers! I was easily able to transition from a clunky typewriter to a clicky computer keyboard to a sleek laptop without too much fuss so adapting to working online in the last few years has been a smooth journey and I have learned so much more since then.
What I love about working with different clients is that each year I pick up some great new skills. Clients need to be supported in different ways depending on their line of business. It’s true that some of the tasks are similar such as social media scheduling however each client has their own specific business needs and as a Virtual Assistant, you learn how to use the online tools that support each client in their business.
I knew nothing about Canva back in 2017. It is such a great online creative tool and can be used to design logos, email headers, graphics for social media, reports, posters…the list goes on. I use it literally every day and highly recommended it for business owners.
I also signed up for Adobe Acrobat which is another super tool for working with PDFs. If you need to create fillable forms for online workbooks or any kind of customer form, it will do the job. You can also convert all of your Word files into PDFs for sharing your professional looking documents online.
I regularly use Mailchimp a great tool for preparing Company Newsletters. It’s really easy to store your contact lists and once the Newsletter Template has been created you can just replicate and re-use the template for the rest of your campaigns, just editing the images and texts for each new version.
As a Virtual Assistant, I manage social media accounts for most of my clients and have tried out different schedulers including Buffer, Hootsuite and Zoho Social to help me manage weekly and monthly posting. Learning to use these tools means I can efficiently prepare and schedule several posts in advance during the month and be confident that the system will publish the posts on each platform on the day and at the time they are scheduled for.
Recently I noticed people and companies using Linktree. This is a handy tool for sharing all of your online platforms in just one link. You just set up your profile, and add in your links to your website, social media, and any other relevant online platforms. Then you can share that one weblink to new contacts almost like a business card. So clever!
Dropbox is well known of course. A great way to share online files with your team and your Virtual Assistant so they can work on the files.
When I was carving out my path to become a Virtual Assistant, I knew I needed some kind of online presence so I learned step by step how to create a basic WordPress website. Then when some clients asked me to help edit their WordPress websites, I was able to offer that support and jump into the backend to add content and edit existing content. All in a day’s work.
All of these additional skills were picked up while working with each new client and I look forward to researching and learning about more online tools that I can use to support my new and existing clients going forward.
Remember if you need support to streamline your business processes a dedicated Virtual Assistant is a valuable resource to bring on board. http://www.gillianb.org
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