The virtual assistant industry has an endless amount of opportunities. Whether you’re looking for a creative outlet outside of your corporate job or are looking for a career with more flexibility, becoming a virtual assistant is your key to doing just that. Once you’ve made the decision to start your VA business, one of the first things you’ll need to do in order to become profitable is determine which niche (or niches) you’d like to work in and what services you want to offer. If you’re thinking to yourself that you don’t have any services to offer, trust me, you do! Today, we’re breaking down exactly how to figure out what niches to work in as a virtual assistant and the most in-demand virtual assistant services.
What Is A Niche For A Virtual Assistant?
As a virtual assistant (VA), you’ll work as a contractor to support business owners remotely in areas that they either don’t have time for or have knowledge in. They are an extremely important part of a business and oftentimes, they are one of the first hires a business will make to outsource tasks to. Luckily, in the VA industry, there are so many different niches for virtual assistants to work in so you can truly craft your business to fit into the areas you are most passionate about.
Just like any other business professional, a virtual assistant will oftentimes craft their offerings to support a specific niche. By outlining these services, offerings, and niches, you’ll become a profitable virtual assistant. Figuring out what niche you want to work within will take some time, but the first step is to figure out what you’re good at, what fuels your fire, and what you can offer to other business owners so you can help them scale their businesses.
To help get you started, we’re sharing the 15 most in-demand virtual assistant services that you can offer.
Most In-Demand Virtual Assistant Services
Video Editing
As video continues to become more prominent across social media, it’s quickly become one of the most sought-after services that creators are looking for support within their businesses. Whether it’s short-form content to share on Instagram or TikTok or long-form content that will be shared on YouTube, strategizing and creating video content can take a long time. If you’ve created any sort of video content in the past, you know this all too well! After spending hours creating video content, the idea of editing the content can feel daunting but with the help of a virtual assistant, this can immediately be taken off of a creator’s plate so they can focus on continuing to create content their audience will love.
Pinterest Management
Pinterest is one of the best ways for business owners to grow their businesses on autopilot. As a search engine that is image and content-forward, there are so many opportunities (especially for content creators) to get in front of new people. By branching out Pinterest management as its own service, you’ll be able to help creators not only share their content to Pinterest, you can also help with the strategy behind the platform to help increase traffic and revenue.
With Pinterest, even on the days that bloggers and content creators aren’t pushing out any new content, they can still drive traffic and affiliate income to their websites through standard Pins, Idea Pins, and even Pinterest ads. At The Social Icing, we love utilizing Tailwind to create Pinterest content, schedule posts out, and help our clients grow their communities.
Copywriting
With copywriting, there are a lot of different avenues you can take based on the type of writing you enjoy most. A lot of business owners need support with their website copy so that they can accurately promote their products and services. Creators within the online space (bloggers, course creators, etc.) often look for support with blog post writing as well as creating content for their email marketing and social media content.
If you’re hoping to work with bloggers and love writing, offering blog writing services (you write the blog post that is then published under their name) is a very lucrative service that is in constant demand. Bloggers are constantly pushing out new content but with so many other tasks that need to get done, having support with that blog content is so helpful and allows them to have a better work-life balance.
Graphic Design
No matter what industry and niche you decide to work in, graphic design is one of the most popular services businesses are looking for support with. Between social media, email marketing, and blog content, graphics can be used in a variety of ways to promote a business. With social media, a fashion blogger might need a set of graphics created to share recent blog posts, shopping finds, or style tips in their Instagram Stories. A wedding planner might need graphics created for Pinterest to highlight recent weddings they’ve worked on and to drive traffic to recent blog content. A beauty company might need graphics created for its email marketing campaigns to help increase profits and promote upcoming sales.
When creating any sort of graphics for clients as well as for The Social Icing, we love to utilize Canva Pro. It’s easy to use, you can work on projects with your team members, and it’s cost-effective. If you haven’t tried it out yet, try it free for 30 days!
Social Media Management
No matter how big or small a business is, having a social media strategy for reaching current and potential customers/clients is often a large part of their marketing strategy. By offering social media management services, you can help generate content ideas, organize content calendars, write out captions, and schedule posts out so that the business is consistently showing up on social media.
Offering social media management services to businesses also gives you the opportunity to understand their business more in-depth. You’ll work closely with the business to generate a social media strategy for posting, hashtags, upcoming sales, and product drops, and truly help them be found by their ideal customer.
This is an area that not only small businesses need support with but content creators need help with as well. If this is a niche you’re interested in, you can also support these creators with managing their direct messages and comments, as well as engage with other similar accounts and their ideal audience to help them continue to build their communities.
Bookkeeping
When it comes to bookkeeping, having someone that is familiar with your particular industry/niche is key to a great working relationship. This is especially true when it comes to the small business community. As a seasoned bookkeeper and creative, you can help small business owners with high-quality bookkeeping services and keep them informed about the health of their business.
Podcast Management
Over the last five years, podcasting has become increasingly popular and VAs can truly make an entire career out of supporting the podcasting industry. Similar to video editing, podcast management is a service that so many podcast hosts are constantly looking for support with thanks to all of the tedious tasks that come with it. Not only do they have to strategize and create content for their podcast, but they also have to work hard to promote the individual podcast episodes as well as the podcast as a whole. This can look like coming up with episode ideas, pitching potential guests, creating assets for social media to promote recent episodes, crowdsourcing ideas, and transcribing each individual episode. Many podcasters also look for support with editing each episode and uploading it to their podcast management platform.
Paid Ads Management
While the best kind of growth in a business is organic growth, investing in paid ads is a great way for businesses to continue to reach their ideal audience and increase brand awareness. With platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram making it incredibly easy for anyone to run paid ads, most business owners would rather invest in paid ads management to ensure their hard-earned money is well spent. When offering paid ads management as a virtual assistant service, you can help these business owners strategize the copy and visuals for ads, who they are targeting, how much to spend on paid advertising, and so much more. With your support, these businesses will be spending money to advertise who they are and what they do, but will also have a much better ROI than they would if they did it themselves.
Launch Management
It’s no secret that launching a new product, service, or offer takes a lot of planning. By offering launch management services, you can help business owners outline a strategic launch plan, as well as offer support with planning and marketing implementation before, during, and after launch. With your support, business owners will feel organized, in control, and in alignment with their goals thanks to your support.
This is also where your knowledge of other areas comes into play. With launch management, you can offer:
- Launch strategy
- Waitlist email sequence
- Public launch email sequence
- Sales page copy
- Systems set-up to support launches
- Social media graphics
Search Engine Optimization
Creating SEO-friendly content and having a website that is not only user-friendly but can easily be crawled by search engines is one of the best ways for a business to be found organically. By ranking organically for specific keywords, services, and products, a small (or large) business is able to not only grow its audience but also increase leads. For bloggers and content creators, having their websites rank organically can drastically increase affiliate income and open them up to more brand collaborations.
With that being said, search engine optimization (SEO) can take time to understand and learn and for most business owners, it’s an area that they know is important but they’re not necessarily interested in doing it themselves. That’s where digital marketing/SEO specialists come in! By offering SEO services, you’re able to help these businesses have a well-rounded marketing strategy and help them get found organically.
Affiliate Marketing
In the influencer industry, affiliate marketing is typically one of the top ways creators make money. After all, they are truly in the business of sharing products, their honest review, and for fashion bloggers, what they’re wearing. Why not make money on the brands they use every day and are promoting for free on their blogs and social media? There are so many affiliate programs out there for bloggers to make a profit on the content they share and helping them manage their affiliate marketing will help them increase their revenue.
Offering affiliate marketing support to creators will allow them to better strategize what they share and when they share it, create graphics and content to post to the affiliate marketing platforms they’re on, as well as offer a helping hand to manage product linking.
Email Marketing
While we love social media (looking at you, Instagram!), it’s no secret that you have no control over what happens to your account or your followers. This is why it is so important for business owners to avoid putting all of their marketing efforts into one basket. With email marketing, an email list is something that a business owns and has full control over. If Instagram was to go down tomorrow, it’s a way for that business to still get in contact with potential and current customers to promote products and services.
If email marketing is something that you’re passionate about, we cannot recommend building out an email marketing package to offer clients. With this service, you can not only offer full email marketing support but also offer a la carte options such as list management, email marketing templates, and account setup. For email marketing, we can’t recommend Flodesk enough!
Content Repurposing
When it comes to content creation, the key is to work smarter, not harder. Creating content for blog posts, social media, newsletters, and podcast episodes takes a lot of time and effort and if an influencer is never repurposing that content, they’re going to burn themselves out. With the support of a virtual assistant, they’ll be able to repurpose that content so it’s not wasted on one Instagram post.
When offering content repurposing services to influencers, some areas you can help include:
- Content repurposing strategy
- Updating copy for different platforms
- Hashtag and keyword research
- Graphic creation to highlight the content
- Scheduling out content
Project Management
Similar to offering launch management services, project management services help business owners manage projects on a day-to-day basis. When offering project management services, you can help business owners plan, prioritize, and collaborate on both short-term and long-term projects. This support will allow them to focus on the areas of the projects that are in their zone of genius and helps them maximize the profitability of their projects.
Systems Strategy
Creating systems and automation in a business is the number one way to take care of as many day-to-day tasks as possible. Business owners know how valuable systems and automation are in their business but it’s a task that is often put on the back burner. They take time to set up and figuring out how to make them as efficient as possible can be difficult if this isn’t an area that a business owner is familiar with.
By offering systems strategy services, you’ll be able to help business owners get time back and breathe easy knowing that their business is running as efficiently as possible. The great thing about systems strategy is that you can offer it as a one-time service or offer monthly retainers, depending on how you want to offer support.
How Do I Choose A Niche As A Virtual Assistant?
Choosing a niche as a virtual assistant doesn’t have to be hard! Once you’ve determined what types of services you want to offer, think about who you want to work with and support. If you are a creator and are looking for additional income, working with other bloggers and influencers is a great option!
If working with bloggers and influencers is something that interests you, you’ll also have to determine what niche of creators you would like to work with. Creator niches to consider:
- Fashion
- Beauty
- Cooking
- DIY
- Fitness
- Family/Kids
- Home
Final Thoughts On Niches For Virtual Assistant
If flexibility and creativity are things you are looking for in a job, becoming a virtual assistant could be the right option for you! That’s not without saying having your own business doesn’t take a lot of hard work because it absolutely does. Determining what niche you want to work in and what services you want to offer are two things you need to be sure of in order to become a profitable virtual assistant.
One of the benefits of being a business owner and a virtual assistant is being able to make adjustments as you go. What you offer for virtual assistant services when you start can change over time, especially as you work with different businesses on different types of projects.
Ready To Learn How To Become A Virtual Assistant?
Are you ready to start your virtual assistant business and start working with passionate influencers? Let’s make it happen! With our 1:1 coaching, you can learn how we went from $0 to $5,000 in my first month as a virtual assistant and how you can do the same. We’ll also help you along the way of building your virtual assistant business and answer any questions you might have along the way.
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