Episode 25: How I Made Over $3k in My Freelance/Virtual Assistant Business While Moving Across the Country

Full Episode Transcription:

(00:07):
Hello everybody. As many of you know, I just moved across the country, my husband, my daughter, and I, we used to live in Texas, Houston, Texas for five years. And now we just recently moved up to Ohio from my husband’s job and to be closer to family ’cause we’re originally from Michigan. And so that all happened in February of 2021. So I wasn’t able to work a whole lot in my business. But I was still able to replace my income only working a couple days out of the month. I wanna show you guys how I was able to make that happen and just kind of give you inspiration to show you that you can do the same.

(01:33):
So I’ve got a whole breakdown for y’all and I’m gonna kind of go through each thing in more depth and just give some of my experience with offering these services. First thing, I was paying $97 to do ongoing website maintenance. This is a client that I do this service monthly for, with my website maintenance packages. I just make sure the plugins are updated. I check the site speed, optimize anything if it’s kind of bogging down the site. Also I upload two new blog posts for her a month and then up to two hours of additional page edits. So if she just needs like some wording changed or like a new section put in, I can do up to two hours of that. So I get paid $97 a month for that. I was also paid a hundred dollars for a new addition to a client site.

(02:26):
Usually I charge more for new pages, but this page was very basic. If you’re familiar with Linktree, if you go to someone’s Instagram handle and they have like a Linktree link and when you click on it, it has just different buttons that take you to different pages like their website, their freebie, their podcasts, like a whole list of buttons. That’s all she wanted, but custom built into her site, not on Linktree. So that’s what I did for her. So it’s really easy. Took me like an hour if that, to do so. That was a hundred dollars. I was paid $1,597. So $1,597 for a five day website build. This is the most intricate website I’ve ever built. It was for a counselor and she has a membership built into her site. And so I built that for her. In hindsight, I probably should have charged more because I didn’t realize how many pages went into making the membership.

(03:31):
So going forward now, I know I would charge more for sites that need a membership built in, but you live and you learn. So I pretty happy with making $1,600 for doing a five day website build. So that’s really five days of the eight days I worked in February was just for that site. And then the website maintenance and the page edition, like those only took me a couple hours. So I’m not gonna count those as a whole day. Then – so the way that I do my VIP days that I do, where I build the site in three to five days, I take 50% deposit upfront in order for them to secure their spot in my calendar. So I haven’t even done the design for these clients yet. They just paid me 50% to hold their spot. So I made $698.50 for one client for her site and for 50%.

(04:32):
So I’ll still get the other 50% when we do her project coming up and then another 50% deposit of sorry, $748.50 cents. So this is my breakdown. As you can see here, five days for the website build, I had one big project for February, but other than that, it was a lot of little things that I was able to complete in my spare moments between moving. Some things that I want to note: a lot of my packages center around VIP days now for the website side of my business, because it allows me to get things done faster and then work less. And that’s just really one of the biggest benefits of VIP days. They’re priced higher because they are a premium service. You’re putting your sole attention on that specific client’s project during their day. I usually don’t do any other work for other clients on those days, unless it’s like a little thing, but usually my sole focus is on them.

(05:34):
So I get to charge a premium fee. I’m not charging hourly at all. And then I can design a website so quickly because I’ve done quite a few of them. I don’t recommend going for the VIP format right off the bat when starting your business. I would get at least, like, three similar projects under your belt first so you can get used to how to do things and you can develop a system. You don’t wanna get like stuck and end up spending so much extra time if you’re offering VIP days, like you wanna have your system a little bit down pat, where if you do get, get a little hiccup, like, it doesn’t take you that long to move past it, but you kind of know the general overview for how to do everything.

(06:20):
Then I wanna mention other services that lend well to VIP days, it’s not just website design. So if you’re not interested in offering that as a service at all, don’t be scared. Social media management works well for VIP days. You could plan out their whole 30 days of content for the coming month. Also Pinterest management. You could create a whole bunch of their pins and descriptions and get them scheduled out on a VIP day. Copywriting, which is just any written marketing content for a business. So like the written part of their social media posts, their emails. What else is there? The written copy for their website? That’s all part of copywriting. And so you could bust out all of that in a day or a couple days. And then podcast management. You could like edit a bunch of their podcast episodes in one day. There’s probably more, I’m not thinking of, but these are the ones that just came to the top of my mind.

(07:19):
So do you have any questions for me? I hope that this was clear and this was helpful to show you. What’s possible if you put the time into this, if you’re still in the classroom, which I know so many of you are, this is something that you can really is really easy for you to offer while still being a teacher. But when you do finally make that jump and ditch the classroom, this is a really amazing way to only work a couple days a month and still replace your income with ease. So feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, I am so, so, so happy to answer them. And then I wanna ask you if you’re interested in a more in-depth training on how VIP days really work, please also reach out to me. I would love to do a more in-depth podcast on, you know, the way I run my VIP days so that I can help y’all to the best of my ability if you want that. So let me know if you do you, can you either just message me on Instagram or Facebook or drop a comment. And I would just love to know how I can serve you the best. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today, and I will see you soon.