How to become a virtual assistant as a rehabilitation professional:

Want to use your therapy skills to become a virtual assistant for other therapists?

You may be thinking – I’m a PT or an OT, I don’t know anything about technology! But with YouTube and courses, anyone can become a virtual assistant or start their own digital marketing company. And today I’ll walk you through how to transition from a physical or occupational therapist, speech therapist, or assistant and become a virtual assistant.

Step 1: Deciding What Skills You Like To Be Known For:

There are so many niches to digital marketing, so the first step is to figure out where do you want to start.

You can start by asking yourself, have you liked any technology in your previous jobs or when you are at home. For example, do you enjoy doing Zoom meetings with your family, co-workers, or patients? Did you enjoy setting up tele health systems? Did you enjoy writing emails? 

Go through your day and any experiences you have had in the past and see what you enjoyed, or at least what did you hate the least!

You can also go through this list of online niches as well:

-Email marketing

-Website creation

-Search engine optimization

-Answer/receiving patient calls

-Scheduling visits

-Finances

-Affiliate marketing

-Video or audio editing

-Video or audio creation

-Self publishing

-Blogging

-Graphic creation/design

-Live stream or webinar producer

Do any of these topics interest you? You can hop over to YouTube to quickly get a summary of each of these roles too and see how these roles sound to you.

What is your time availability?

I’ve worked with several people who wanted to be virtual assistants but they were still working full time. This is important because as a VA, you cannot promise your clients tasks which you are not able to fullfil. So make sure when you are picking a topic that this topic is something that fits into your full time work schedule.

For example, blogging can be done any time of the day. But live stream or webinar producer is often at a set time, so that may be a niche that you cannot do yet – even if it is of interest to you.

Learning how to perform the role:

Now that you have your desired skill set narrowed down, it’s time to actually learn how to perform the task.

1)      Sign up for free trial or free version of the skill needed – this could be Zoom, many email marketing platforms are free for a small number of email subscribers, many graphic editors are free with limitations.

2)      Practice and Watch Videos: Once you’ve signed up, just start trying to use the software. It also helps to watch YouTube videos on the software as well or join free Facebook groups.

3)      Courses: You can take a course to help dive further into how to perform a certain task. I’ve been pretty disappointed in courses that dive deeply into how to use software as most seem to just do surface level explanation – but it is another helpful resource.

4)      Real life practice: Once you have a base level of understanding with your technology and your role, try to find people such as your family members, co-workers, friends who may benefit from your help for free. Offer to help them for free in return for feedback, patience and even a review (or putting their website as a sample website as well).

Once you have perfected your role with at least one, but preferable several people, you know ready to advertise and get some paid clients!

Setting up to get clients:

You can totally start providing virtual assistant services before creating a logo or website so don’t wait to start promoting your skills, but there are some things you really need to do as you grow:

1.       Create your logo: simply go to Crello or Canva and for free create your logo

2.       Create your website: Wix, square space, and a lot of other websites have easy to use templates to create your own website

3.       Create social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, linked in and others that are pertinent for you

4.       Create your free Paypal and Stripe accounts

5.       Create your invoices using Stripe or Paypal

6.       Create your free email campaigns using Mailchimp or Convert Kit

Biggest thing is to just get out there and start promoting yourself. No one will come to you without advertising to other people via videos, social media posts, and on your own profile that you provide virtual assistant services.

Technology to help you perform your virtual assistant roles:

Here are some software that could really help advance your career as a VA:

1.       LastPass: This is a free (with some limitations) and paid, password sharing software. It allows your clients to give you their password without you ever seeing the password.

2.       Ubersuggest: This is a free website that will allow you to search keywords and also look up websites and tell you how they can be improved in terms of site ranking.

3.       Keywords surfer: Free keyword extension

4.       YouTube: I literally watch videos all the time!

5.       Metricool – it has a very generous free social media platform.  Hootsuite also has a free plan and so to start, each client could just have a free plan that you manage.

6.       Canva and Crello: Both are excellent graphic creation tools that have generous free plans.

7.       Mailchimp and ConvertKit: These are email marketing platforms that have fairly generous free plans but they are also widely known and well integrated with lots of other tools.

8.       Zapier – this is a tool that can allow other software’s to communicate and integrate with each other, even if it’s not built in. They have an free plan, although it is quite limited.  

What to charge?

I get this question a lot and there really isn’t one crystal clear answer. What you charge really depends on the time it takes you to complete the task. For example, if editing a video takes you 2 hours, make sure to charge enough that it is worth your time to do the editing.

You can use your current salary as a bench mark. Meaning, if you want to eventually earn $3,000 a month then you need 6 clients paying you $500 a month, 3 clients paying $1,000 a month or 10 clients paying you $300 a month. This then can help you create package rates or hourly rates.

I will say that virtual assisting is competitive and the price has really been brought down due to foreign labor which is much cheaper than labor in the United States. So working on your pitch as to why you stand out is really important.  Ultimately the goal is to get monthly reoccurring income as you’ll feel the most happy and secure with this type of income.

How to find clients:

There are many ways to start finding clients, here are a few ideas:

1.       Social media – Become a member of related Facebook groups and answer helpful questions when they arise. Casually and not in spammy way, mention that you could help them or that you do “x” task.

2.       Creating a Youtube channel and podcast are additional ways to get free traffic

3.       Having a website and trying to get organic leads to your website

4.       Asking friends and family to share that you now can do “x” task

5.       Asking any clients to share your skills with anyone they think would be a good fit

I’m going to tell you that getting PAYING clients is the toughest thing of becoming a virtual assistant. Learning and setting up is easy. It’s that next step of creating a profitable and successful business is tough as it will be hard to convince people to pay you what you may think is your value.

Summary: My top tips:

Becoming a virtual assistant as rehabilitation professional can totally be done and many have successfully transitioned! My best recommendation is to focus on healthcare professionals and healthcare businesses as you’ll be most knowledge in this area and you’ll be able to stand out compared to other potential providers.

Being a VA at first means being on call a lot – so try your best to have scheduled times for communication with your client – such as a weekly 1pm Friday meeting.

As a virtual assistant, try to work on clients you can keep paying you each month versus trying to find a new client each time. This will be more sustainable for your business.

My best advise is to try to provide the best customer service possible. If you do that, then even if you mess up or aren’t the best at something, you’ll likely still be chosen by the client. Be down to earth, hardworking and relatable and from this you’ll be able to charm your first clients.

Best of luck! Check out our YouTube channel here for tutorials also: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLtZeYvn8dZCk85LMdOjkfw