How I earned Virtual Assistant Skills from Scratch!

My Experience Working Online as Virtual Assistant - Internet Marketing Internet Marketing 

For over 6 years I was working as a Virtual Assistant doing everything that my employer wanted me to do, from creating wordpress websites and its promotion to the web, search engine optimization, internet marketing – email marketing, digital media buying and local business promotion (US based) but was ended last March 2014.   

How did I started working online could be a huge question which I intend to answer throughout this post. It all started with a friend, not actually a friend but a person whom I knew from my teenage days who was engage in huge medicinal marketing campaign here in the Philippines but his product were coming from its main office in the United States. I have no knowledge about internet marketing during time but I’m a bit skillful when it comes to computer application and that’s the advantage.    

How I Started My Online Presence? 

The first job was just to post a health related articles in his website and promote it to different article sites in the web for a salary rate of $120 per month, it was very small considering that during that time I’m already married and has 2 boys (still young at that time) but I have to accept it just to make a living, I need something that I can use to feed my family. Later on, I came to know that working online was already widespread in the country and that lots of people are already earning working at home especially in my home town and I personally knew some of them. Upon knowing that, I started to establish my own “online profile”, started signing up working online job sites and search for a job description that appears to be easy for me.   

After few days of searching, finally gotten myself an administrative job to an individual who was also engaged in online marketing, I remember the company name was Innovative Solution own my Douglas, forgot his family name but it was great, the earnings is a bit higher compared to the first one, its $200 per month and I was so excited because $200 was a big deal for me during that time and the job still has something to do with article marketing. Given the situation, I started doing article writing and it was pretty hard for me because writing was not my passion, I need to read a lot of sources and find the point that I already understood the topic and start fabricating my own article out of it. It was not easy it took me 3-5 hours making a 700 words article because I need to use the appropriate wordings of my sentence by searching thesaurus suggestions. At the end of the day, I was very tired, my head is in pain because my eyes could not sustain staying in front of the computer for a long time but I have to do it for the sake of my family. Then nightshift came, since my employer was located at California USA I have to align my working hours with him in order for him to track my work.   

Wordpress 

During my extra time, I started studying wordpress because I wanted to level up my skills in working online. I wanted to know how to create a website using wordpress and it turns out that it was easy because all you have to do is to choose a theme for the website and upload it the domain and boom, you have now a website. But there’s was a huge competition for this skill because if I want to create a more interactive and attractive website I must know Php (in fact that was one of the tools that I need to know), a programming tool that will be use to edit the wordpress theme to match on the requirement of the employer, that was the problem I had back then, I don’t know Php (until now). But even so, I was able to find another employer who was willing to accept my inexperience, after all they also offer training and as expected, the monthly pay was a bit high, its $300 this time. Wow, I’m going to love it and told myself this would be enough to buy food and other necessities for my family.   

Development of Knowledge & Skills I stayed 3 years on that employer and my knowledge were increased that it reaches to digital media buying. What was good on that employer is that he gave training modules, not by himself but from third party agency whose specialty was only to train people some technical knowledge with working online especially internet marketing. It was not the only training module I had undergone, there were many of them. Lots of things that I need to know for me to stay in the job, and I was enjoying it very much because I love to learn things. My affiliation with that employer was improved too, transforming the relationship of employee-employer to friendship because he trusted me so well and promoted me to manage his internet marketing campaign together with a salary increment and few incentives. It was the best job for me and my family is enjoying a lot with the earnings I am receiving every payday.   

The Setback 

But as time moves on, enjoying the job has something in return and since I was working most of the time at night, I started to felt something different in my body’s health. I started to felt severe pain in my head, my eyes and at my back due sitting down in front of my computer for at least 15 hours, until I decided to leave the job and resign and shift for a new field which is working offline, together with me is the huge knowledge that I could not forget. I need to do that because if I choose to stay longer it would result to a more huge health problem and my kids are still young, who’s going to watch over them, who’s going to give them what they need? I have to sacrifice the good pay for the sake of my family because what is a good pay if I can’t earned it anymore.   

For the summary, these are the few things I learned as a Virtual Assistant;   

Article Writing and Promotion 

Search Engine Optimization 

Search Engine Marketing 

Ebay Marketing (includes product posting) 

Wordpress Website Creation and Promotion 

Domain Management (CPanel & Hosting) 

Google Adwords 

Facebook Marketing 

Internet Marketing – Email Marketing & Digital Media Buying   

Tools that I used: 

SenukeX, DNDW, Camtasia, Ultimate Demon, Traffic Geyser, Nuclear Link Blaster, Brute Force, Article Marketing Robot, SEO Link Robot, Social Hub, Rockstar Powersuite, RSS Submit   

The only thing I regret working online is that I was not able to learn programming languages and became a developer.