When I decided to go into the VA business I didn’t want to waste any time. I’m one of those practical “just tell me what I need to know real quick” people and I only want to learn and provide the things that are requested the most from clients. I already had a good foundation in Web Design and Development from my years at AT&T and IBM so I crossed that off my list, but what else would I have to learn? From my research I have determined that the following skills are most in demand and will bring you the highest hourly rates. Now, just having one or two of these skills will keep you busy but having all of them will bring you the best, most consistent across the board, rates.

To be a well paid VA you need to be able to

1. Setup, manage and use a shopping cart system. Shopping Carts & E-mail Database Systems – experience with 1ShoppingCart, Constant Contact, Aweber.
2. Format and distribute broadcasts/ezines/newsletters/announcements using AWeber, Constant Contact or 1shopping cart – and consider ways to measure their effectiveness via link tracking and open stats
3. Setup and completely automate online teleclass registrations – from registration to post-class follow up. Setting up Webinar classes is also in demand but not as much as teleclasses right now.
4. Setup WordPress blog and maintain blog posts for your clients such as being able to create new posts, add images to posts, add pages to the blog, add plug-ins, setup Feedburner, etc. is essential.
5. Assist with creating audio and written products and setting them up to sell on a website. Formatting Ebooks and Creating PDFs along with setting up product pages.
6. Consult and support gaining website traffic through Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click
7. Manage email based customer service inquiries effectively
8. Make updates to web pages, use an FTP client, use Dreamweaver and create new pages on websites.
9. Article & Press Release Submissions – knowing how to do this and track it all
10. Setting up Social Networking sites such as Linked in, Facebook and Squidoo
    Audio Editing

O.K you got it. Easy right?

So how in the world do you learn all that stuff before you have a paying client? You need to go step by step and do it all for your own business first. As a VA you ought be marketing yourself the same way as you are marketing your clients and although, not all of them will want to sell products or get into affiliate marketing you should still be doing some of that for yourself because, believe me, sooner or later some client is going to want that and you need to at least be familiar with it enough to speak intelligently. In a future post I will provide you with a step by step plan to learn it all, in the best possible order. In the meantime, why don’t you start by registering a domain name and signing up for hosting services over at Hostgater.com. All the VAs seem to be using them.

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