Episode 3 - Replace Your Teaching Income as a Freelancer/Virtual Assistant

Full Episode Transcription:

(02:34):
Okay in today’s episode we’re kind of going to cover, and go into detail, what the heck a freelancer or virtual assistant even is. I know when I first learned about this, I didn’t even know something like this existed, so I just wanna give you guys some more information and yeah, we’ll just go ahead and dive in. So a freelancer or a virtual assistant is someone who provides services to business owners all over the world from a remote location. They’re usually an independent contractor, which means they’re not an employee, but they work on a project basis for their clients. As a freelancer or a virtual assistant, you can typically work with a variety of clients around the globe. You’re not location dependent. It doesn’t have to be a business who is nearby. It’s all virtual and in today, society where we’ve got all this COVID going on, it’s really nice that you can do this from anywhere and gives you that freedom and you don’t have to share germs.

(03:46):
So as a freelancer or virtual assistant, there’s two different types of projects you can do. One type is one-off projects or more like one-and-done. Examples of this might be a logo, a website design, something of that nature where you’re not going to do it on a continued basis for the client. Then another type of project is monthly retainers. These are services that continue month-to-month. Things like social media management could be a monthly retainer, general admin services, Pinterest management, all those things. And I’ll dive deeper into all the different titles that you could kind of have as a freelancer. But those are just some examples of monthly retainers. Monthly retainers are very good because you have that income. One-off projects – you’ll get paid for that project, but then once it’s done, you need to find another.

(04:48):
Monthly retainers, uou’ll have that consistent income month-to-month until your relationship with that client ends. I recommend having most monthly retainers and then maybe a couple, one-off projects just to boost your income a little bit each month. I say that, but I specialize in website design, so that is very one-off based. If you do wanna specialize in something like website design, that’s totally fine. You just have to understand the difference. You’ll have to be looking for clients more than someone who has monthly retainer clients would have to. As a freelancer, one of the most amazing, amazing benefits is that you get to set your own pay. Freelancers starting out – I would not charge any less than $20 an hour. Do not go below that. As you grow in your skills and your confidence, you can start charging more every time you land a new client. I’ve seen freelancers charging a hundred dollars an hour, some even more than that.

(06:03):
It can go as high as you want it to go. There’s no cap. And it’s just about your confidence. The clients you’re attracting. So as a beginner, you might be attracting more beginner businesses who can afford your services, but as you become more specialized and more of a pro, you can raise your rates and you’ll be attracting businesses who maybe are a little bigger and can afford more of an expert level and want those expert level services. So yeah, like I said, do not charge any less than $20 an hour, even starting out. Like I said, you get to set your own pay. Another benefit of being a freelancer is you get to set your own schedule. Being a stay at home mom myself, I’ve always got my daughter around so I can set when I’m available to have meetings with my clients, when I’m going to work, if something comes up with her, I can adjust my schedule around.

(07:04):
I don’t have set hours. One thing I hated about being in the classroom, especially like professional development days. If you got everything done, you needed to get done, you still had to sit in your classroom and twiddle your thumbs or find a project to work on until the clock turned three and you are allowed to leave. But with freelancing, you decide when you’re done working and when you need to work. So that’s really awesome. You also get to decide what services you want to offer. If there’s a type of service that you have no interest in, you don’t have to do it. That’s really the beauty when you’re leaving the classroom, you’re probably doing so because you’re just not happy there, you’re not feeling fulfilled there anymore. You don’t wanna start a business that makes you feel the same. You wanna start a business that lights you up, that you really want to do.

(07:57):
You want to offer services that really interest you. And if you don’t feel confident in a service yet you can always learn. I always say that Google is your best friend. Like I said, before I was a kindergarten teacher. So I went from teaching five and six year olds how to stand in line and use a glue stick, to website design. All I did to learn how to become a website designer was watch YouTube tutorials. Like I said, Google’s your best friend. Everything can be figured out. I promise. So let’s kind of dive into the different freelancing roles. Now I’m gonna list kind of a bunch and what they do. I might have missed some, there’s a lot of different things you can do. So if there’s something I didn’t mention, but you’re curious if that could be offered as a service as a freelancer, just shoot me a message on Instagram.

(08:57):
And I’ll let you know if that’s something that freelancers do. Starting out let’s go into being a general administrative assistant. Generally, when a lot of people start with this, as they are starting their virtual assistant business. General admin assistants can do things like email management, booking travel, data entry, customer service, kind of more your assistant-type roles. The next one I have is social media manager. A lot of businesses need to be showing up online, especially in today’s economy. They have to be showing up on all these different social media platforms and they just don’t have the time to do it. So they’ll hire a social media manager to kind of handle all of that for them. Social media managers can create graphics and/or the captions, they can do hashtag research, community management. So managing like a Facebook group. And also engagement. Engaging with that, business’ ideal clients, commenting on the ideal clients, posts, responding to messages, things like that are all covered under engagement.

(10:16):
Another really popular one is a Pinterest manager. When I first heard this, I was like, “you mean I can get paid to play on Pinterest?”. Pinterest, if you didn’t know, it’s a really fun place to pin recipes and DIY projects, but it’s one of the biggest search engines in the world – ranks pretty high up there with Google and Bing, and all the other ones. When you go on Pinterest, you tend to be looking for something specific. Businesses sometimes can utilize Pinterest to drive more traffic to their website. As a Pinterest manager, you would be responsible for creating the pins and the descriptions in the pins, creating the boards and kind of all of that. So that’s a really popular area to get into in a really fun one.

(11:11):
Another really popular freelancing role right now is a podcast manager. As a podcast manager, you can create show notes, you will edit the episodes, you can create the episode graphics, find guests to be on the podcast or pitch your client to be on other podcasts as a guest. There’s a lot of different things you can do as a podcast manager. And it’s a really profitable area to get into right now.

(11:39):
Next one is a copywriter. So this is kind of a weird term, and it took me a minute to understand what it was when I first started. A copywriter is just someone who writes the copy or does the written content. So a copywriter could write a blog post, a copywriter could write, the social media captions, things like that, email newsletters, they’re just doing the written content. So it’s C-O-P-Y-W-R-I-T-E-R. Not like copyright as in plagiarism. The next thing kind of could fall under copywriter is a blogger.

(12:17):
You would just write blog posts on a given topic that would then be posted to your client’s website. Sometimes you would be what’s called a ghost writer, your name would not be attached to the blog post. You would just be writing it as if you were your client, if that makes sense. But other times you’re allowed to include your name and then therefore show that to other clients. Next one is a website designer, so this is kind of my specialty. As a website designer, I do wanna mention, you can do like all the custom coding coding and crazy things that take a lot of skill. But now in this time, there are so many what’s called “page builders” where you can literally drag-and-drop different components and then just swap out some colors, the text and the pictures, and build a site. There’s really minimal coding knowledge required to be a website designer.

(13:18):
If you have more questions about this, I would be so happy to chat with you, ’cause I geek out on website design. So again, you can message me with any questions you have about this, but website designer is really fun and a another very profitable area to get into.

(13:35):
Next one is graphic designer, which I also do. So graphic designers can do like social media graphics, logos, cover photos, designing a newsletter, things like that. Also business cards would be another one. Video editors – a lot of businesses are putting videos out on YouTube or even TikTok, so you could be the one who edits their videos. Online business managers – they will oversee kind of the operations of a business they’ll implement systems to kind of streamline things in the business and they can also manage teams and then marketing. You can manage a business’ newsletters, do their email marketing, build their sales funnels, webinars.

(14:26):
These are kind of all big terms. They’re not very hard to figure out. I’m going to work really hard to bring different teachers who have successfully ditched the classroom in each of these different roles, so they can kind of talk to you a little more in depth about how they got into this and how they learned everything they needed to learn. If there’s a specific one that I mentioned that you are like, “yes, I wanna learn more about that now!” Send me a DM, send me an email, whatever you prefer and let me know. And I will try to get them on, and find a teacher who has is no longer teaching and has successfully taken on that role and I’ll get them on the podcast ASAP. So like I said, kind of covered a lot of different roles.

(15:13):
There may have been some I missed, so if you’re curious about a specific service that you have in mind, shoot me a message and ask me about it. But I do wanna mention it can be kind of overwhelming. And when you’re first diving into this world, you can feel like, you know “what business is going to hire me if I don’t have the experience?” and it’s the same with any job, there are people out there who are willing to hire newbies. There are lots of businesses who are new themselves and they might not have the income to pay an expert so they can pay you a little less than an expert would charge, and then they can also train you to do the service the way they want it done. So experts tend to have a certain “set-in-stone” way of doing the service. But if these businesses want the service done a certain way, they can train you how to do it.

(16:10):
And then you’ll be able to implement that for them. So many businesses are willing to hire newbies. Sometimes it takes a little bit of work to find them, but I promise it’s possible. I said back in episode two, when I shared about my journey – my first clients, I got within a month of starting because I hit the ground running and I was applying like crazy. So if you’re ready to take this step, I promise it can be done quickly. Even as a newbie. If you’re wondering what service might interest you, I do have a free quiz for y’all. So you’ll be able to go to the link in the show notes and take the free quiz. Just answer a few questions and it’ll tell you kind of what role might be a really good fit for you. This is is not the “end-all, be-all”. It’s not what you have to do, but it might just be a really good place for you to start exploring. As always, like I’ve said multiple times throughout this episode, you can always DM me on Instagram.

(17:17):
My handle @arianna.vernier, And I’ll have that in the show notes as well, so you don’t have to worry about the spelling, but I just, I want you guys to feel like you can always come to me with your questions. That’s why I’m creating this podcast to help you be able to ditch the classroom and stay home with your babies and raise your income through the roof. I just want this for everybody because I know how possible it is. Also. I want to remind you of our giveaway going on, make sure that you get entered into that before October 29th. All right, guys, I will see you on the next episode and as always, thank you for tuning in.