Your beginning will not always be your present situation.

My journey is not one of those moments where you will think that it was an easy and successful one. I came into the virtual assistant industry by accident. I will talk some more about this.

I am Julian, but I prefer to be called Juli. I am from Jamaica and I went to school and studied to be a Guidance Counsellor and also did some Data Entry courses during my time in college when I was studying for my degree.

Fast-forward a year later, graduated and getting ready for the workforce with no work. Yet another year passed with me volunteering at schools, staying online on social media, and still no job. I must say I love to watch TV and this is where I saw an advertisement for a boot camp on how to make money online.

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How my online journey started from a freelancing site.

I went to the boot camp, which introduced me and educated me vastly on how to make money online. I signed up to the Fiverr platform and Upwork (formerly known as Odesk) and choose to offer virtual assistant services because I did have some experience in Data Entry.

Little did I know that this is where my journey would begin. Fiverr, I must say, was where I had made the majority of my income when signing up; I was not as successful on Upwork, but I wanted to do more with my career and I was not planning on staying on a platform to make an income starting at $5.

Mind you, I know that Fiverr presents the opportunity to make more and to be successful, but this was only the tip of my iceberg on my journey and I did not want to solely depend on Fiverr because, even though it was my learning ground or school to be educated in this industry, I was getting more and more frustrated with the many issues that I was facing with the platform.

I will show you how I researched and learn.

I researched every day on different ways for me to earn. I even joined another platform to see if I could earn more than what I was earning now. That was not successful either. I came across groups and social media platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook, which was more than a graduate school in itself.

This is where I learned in groups that, as a virtual assistant, the potential is there to work and build relationships with your ideal clients, and of course to make more money.

Discovering myself on my journey.

The first thing on my journey that I discovered which I learned, was that coming into this industry, it’s imperative to have a website. Little did I know that this was only the beginning stage of this process; I thought that that’s all I needed until when I was in groups I saw other person’s pitching their services.

I signed up for almost everything just to be educated. Some seemed to be fruitful and some were just not for me, but what I did learn and appreciate from all the information that I gathered was that I learned each time when I signed up for a webinar.

Social media played a big part in my journey in this industry because I learned from others in various groups that I was in. When I needed support or a question to be answered, I did get that support.

Offer services that you love and outsource those that you don’t like!

I learned from day one to stick with services that I liked or preferred to do. What I mean is that tasks that were time-consuming and were not easy to manage, I stopped offering such services before it was something that I thought would make me leave the industry before I was ready to.

Another one was I did not want to be attracting the wrong types of clients that would not understand that this was something intended to be beneficial to both myself and for these clients receiving my best service.

As a small business owner myself, starting out your business, we tend to make the mistake of not hiring out for help from day one or putting in place measures that can assist us in the growth of our business.

We tend to not want to let go of the horns of the bull of our business because we think we can do it all.

Wrong! Misconception. We have to put measures in place; some of the time, we do not think of what will happen if you are unable to work tomorrow if an accident were to happen or you being sick for a day.

Mind you, we might not think these occurrences might happen, but how many of you have put in place a backup plan when this happens, because days like these when you will be unable to, your business and customers are still there and this is where a virtual assistant will come in, that will assist in getting the flow of your business growing.

Now I am at the stage where I will be working hard to meet those ideal clients and to deliver the quality to my clients. My journey is not yet done in this area; it’s only the beginning, but I am glad that I did start the race to do this business and I will continue to do so until I reach the finish line.

It was nice of you to stop by.

Until then, happy hiring, and best wishes with your business.

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Photo Credit: Haute Stock