The work-at-home world isn’t so different from the corporate life. The more you know, the more appealing you are to potential clients. And often, the more you can charge for your services!
Virtual assistance is an ever-increasing industry. The demand is high and the variance in needed skills offers a lot of potential for remote workers regardless of background and education. There are some skills that will also be necessary, however, and some skills that are on the rise currently.
Today I’m pointing out a few virtual assistant training opportunities that will allow you to up your skill set from the comfort of your home. Even better news, these courses are available on Skillshare who has been kind enough to extend two months of their Premium membership to readers of The Work at Home Wife FREE! For those of you who don’t know, Skillshare is an awesome online learning community with over 17,000 classes across business, design, photography, productivity, and so much more. Check out some of their classes below:
Intro to Running a VA Business
If you are new to virtual assisting, it is good to have an idea of what to expect when working with clients. Things aren’t always sunshine and roses after all.
Rosie Shiloh has been a virtual assistant since 2004. Today, she owns an Australian multi-VA firm of over 170 VAs. In this course, she offers a lot of insight into what it takes to be successful and how to run your business efficiently and provide your clients above par service.
One module of Rosie’s course I especially appreciated is the one on systems. Not only are we sometimes so excited to get started that we put off some of these essentials, but let’s be frank, these aren’t the most sexy parts of running a business. Oftentimes, they are the things we would rather just keep our heads in the sand about. Rosie is down-to-earth about things like accounting, contracts and more.
Intro to Your Business Social Media Strategy
One thing many new VAs don’t understand about social media management is that it is more than just scheduling updates. Way more! Clients are paying you to get people over to their sites and buying their products or services.
This course goes into how to actually write for different platforms to gain more followers and elicit more traffic. Dana also tells you how to schedule those updates so you aren’t spending more time on these tasks than you need to.
I love Canva for creating graphics. And if you are a VA today, chances are pretty good you are going to be asked to create a graphic at some point whether that be for Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram or a blog post. These are awesome skills to have and can greatly increase your appeal to clients.
This course gives an awesome overview of what’s possible with Canva. It walks you through not only what templates are available but also how to work with things like filters and adding pages.
This course runs about 1 hour and 15 minutes. It’s definitely worth the time investment!
Social Media Graphics and Ebook Covers Using Canva
Now let’s get into some of the more advanced capabilities Canva offers. You can do so much over here without having to invest in software like Photoshop or a graphic design degree.
This is another course from Indigo 29 Academy. Their courses all seem to be really comprehensive with a lot of examples. This one walks you through creating Facebook Page covers, Twitter headers, Facebook posts and eBook covers.
Getting Started with Email Marketing: Learn with Mailchimp
Another hot service offering of the moment is email marketing. It’s hot! And many bloggers and entrepreneurs are using Mailchimp for the newsletter service.
I was so happy to find that there are several courses over on Skillshare that were created by employees of Mailchimp. Who would know better about the service? This one was put together by the Product Marketing Manager. It gives a really soup-to-nuts overview of what email marketing is, what to send subscribers and examples of great campaigns.
This one also goes into some of the more advanced features of Mailchimp – and things actively being sought by clients right now – such as segmentation, design and analytics. These are skills that will set you apart from the pack.
Make sure you check out some of Mailchimp’s other courses as well. They dive deeper into writing, increasing sales, reporting and more.
How to Use Gmail to Maximize Your Productivity
One of the things I have always loved about being a virtual assistant is that the skills you learn to better your business can better the business of your clients as well, and vice versa. Email management is one of those skills.
We are all drowning in our inboxes these days. Many clients are looking to offload their email to a VA. Learning the ins and outs of Gmail and some of the advanced features it offers can make you look like a rockstar.
This course is almost 2.5 hours and holds so many little tidbits that will greatly increase your own email efficiency and allow you to pass those sanity savings onto your clients through either ongoing service or a one-time setup. You will find some of my favorite tricks in here like filters, labels, keyboard shortcuts, Boomerang and inbox zero tips.
Secrets to Getting Found by Search Engines & Shoppers
I know what you are thinking. I’m a virtual assistant. Why do I need to know SEO?
Simple. The more add-ons you can offer your client within your current line of services the better. If I hire a VA to upload my products to Etsy, I don’t then want to hire a SEO to go in and optimize the titles and descriptions. I am then paying for the same service twice. This course is going to allow you to put on your service list Upload Products and Optimize Listings for Search. This is a far better offering than if you were offering just one or the other.
These are just a few of the great virtual assistant trainings available over on Skillshare to help up your game. And don’t forget, Skillshare has been kind enough to extend two months of their Premium membership to readers of The Work at Home Wife FREE! Just click here to redeem and start learning today.
