A Virtual Personal Assistant is an independent self employed contractor who provides professional services in their area of expertise, to businesses and individuals. What this means is that to become a Personal Virtual Assistant, you must have specific skills and experience, but to become a Personal Virtual Assistant you must build your own business. This guide will teach you how to become a virtual personal assistant.

Unlike a full-time job, there is no clear cut job description for a Virtual Personal Assistant. Most work will be project based and will be defined simply by the need of the client (a business or individual). Basically a Personal Virtual Assistant is hired on a contractual basis to do a specific job for a specific period of time as defined by the client.

Sample Services and skill sets: Standard areas that Personal Virtual Assistants are finding work in include: http://www.vmgbpo.com/

• Word processing
• Medical transcription
• Data entry
• Data processing
• Writing business plans and other business related documentation
• Design, creation and programming of web sites
• Application and software programming
• Marketing and advertisement consultation and writing
• Writing and designing campaigns and presentations
• Transcription services
• Ghost writing
• Translation services (French to English for example)

Compensation is dependent on both the skill set as well as the amount of experience you have. The skill set demand in the market will determine the need for your service and thereby influence the compensation for the skill. The number of year’s experience you have in a skill set will also determine the compensation you can expect to charge and receive for your services.

Most Personal Virtual Assistants have at least 5 years of experience in the area of their expertise. With 5 years experience in a demand area of skill set service, you can expect to charge from $30.00 to $45.00 dollars per hour. Note that often a client will want you to bid on a service on a total price not by hour, here you must determine how long such a job will take in hours and then determine its value. http://www.entrepreneur.com/humanresources/hiring/article70586.html

In order to become a Personal Virtual Assistant you first and foremost need to have a skill set (or more than one skill set) that businesses and individuals are looking to pay for (see Sample Services and Skill Sets above). Take stock of your areas of knowledge, skill, and expertise. How many years of experience you have in each one? Do you have references to support the skill set and experience?.

Focus on your strongest skills, and how they could be of service to a potential client. Document each skill set you have expertise in and write a paragraph about it, how you got the expertise, how many years experience you have in it, snd any certifications or recognitions you have received for it.

Being a self employed contractor, you will be building your own business, you may want to upgrade or acquire business management skills by attending a course on staring and running a small business. If you do not have skills in any of the areas mentioned, then it is very difficult to become a personal virtual assistant. You can attend classes to upgrade skill sets, or acquire the skill sets that are looked for in a Personal Virtual Assistant, but remember that years of experience are also a factor in securing work. You may also want to look into the BPO companies that offer virtual services, this may be an avenue to gain experience you need to become a Personal Virtual Assistant.

When your experience is lower in a given skill set, you will need to be creative and ambitious in your presentation of yourself, and you also can not expect to charge the money seasoned virtual assistant charge.

Personal Virtual Assistants are their own businesses; therefore to become one you must build your business. http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/businessideas/article71516.html

Determine the following time commitments that you are willing to make:

• 2.1. Building your new venture
• 2.2. Is it to be a full-time or part-time commitment?
• 2.3. Will it be a seven day a week commitment?
• 2.4. What hours of the day will be committed to it?
• 2.5. Are weekends available or not?

Research the demand and market:

• - As a self-employed contractor, it is your business to investigate what the potential demand is for your skill sets. Are your skills a niche or are they common skills? What is the potential competition within your skill sets?
• - List your potential clients, where they are, how to gain access to them, what their potential requirements may be with regard to your services.

Note: Don't undercharge or under sell your services. It is easy to make this mistake, when first starting in a hope to get contracts, you may get the contracts but find that you are working an extreme number of hours and not making the kind of income you could.

This does not have to be a complex job; it can be as simple as writing down in an organized manner, how you plan to operate your business including; what you will do, how you will do it, how you will go after business, will you advertise and how, pricing, business hours, equipment and supplies etc. The business plan should document what your business will be and how you plan to go about it. Building a business plan will help to formalize and make the business a concrete venture. The business plan should also identify your budget requirements. You will need to analyze your current financial position, and what money you will have to support you in building this new business as well as supporting yourself as you find and secure work in your new career as a Personal Virtual Assistant. Examine your needs. What equipment do you have and what you will need to run your business, such things as; office space, equipment, supplies, and outside services you will need, to ensure they meet your potential client requirements. The business plan should be written in such a manner as to be a document you can refer to often throughout the full life of your business.

The marketing plan can be as simple as documenting the various ways that you can go about selling your services, advertising, getting your name and services noticed, and the various avenues to market your services in. Make plans as to how you will go about marketing your services. Prepare material that tells about your service, introduce you to the client, and details the benefits of your service etc.

Keep it simple! Setup a method that will work for you, there are many small business software solutions that you can purchase that will keep your bookkeeping simple. You will want to keep track of all your income and expenses. Make sure to keep copies of all your expenses.

Before you secure your first client, make sure all the necessary legal and financial aspect of setting up your business are finalized. Decide on the type of business you will be; will you be a self employed contractor, will you incorporate yourself, or will you setup an incorporated business. If you incorporate a business, then take time to decide on the proper name for your business, after all it is a name that will represent you and your services to potential clients. http://www.ideamarketers.com/?virtual_assistant&articleid=679502

Before you go after your first client, have the following basic document templates available, you will need a non disclosure document, a services level agreement, a statement of work, and a proposal document template. There are various samples and free templates on the internet that you can download and modify for your specific needs.

Now that you have your business fully defined, your plans are all developed, your services are defined and you have the material developed to promote your services, it is time to go after business. This is where your Business and Marketing plans will come in to help you. All that research you first did will be of use in determining how you are going to go about finding business and clients.

You might want to consider joining a professional organization or networking group dedicated to your market and expertise. Many of them also offer leads as well as offer a portal for businesses to seek out the type of skills you are selling. In addition they can also offer support and the opportunity to network, build contacts and access further knowledge and potentially ally resource skills.

You may want to consider a web site for your business; these can be simple websites that are used to market your skills and expertise. The key to successful marketing is to tell clients what benefits they will receive. Always remember, you're not selling your services, you're selling the benefits of your services.

Here is where those documents come in. You will of course want to be paid for the services you are about to deliver, so these services and the payment details should all be documented, agreed upon, and signed by both parties before you commit to and deliver on the services. Stipulate the terms of payment in the documents that you have prepared for the service that you commit to.

Common modes of communication and data delivery include the Internet, e-mail, phone calls, online conferences, online collaborative work spaces, fax machine, and if the client is local, onsite meetings are common.