Self-employment Archives - Page 22 of 22

How To Become a Virtual Assistant

Last Updated: September 20, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 41 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Want to learn how to become a virtual assistant, but perhaps first you’re wondering what is a virtual assistant or what does a virtual assistant do?

How do I become a virtual assistant? That is a question that many of you asked, especially after I wrote my post last week titled What Does a Virtual Assistant Do? Now that we’ve cleared up some of the roles that you can fill as a virtual assistant, we, of course need to cover how you can become one yourself.

Many of you send me e-mails and leave comments saying that you’ll never reach the level of extra income that I have, but I definitely want to know that you are wrong. Just last year I was looking up at all the big bloggers and thinking the same thing “How nice that must be to have all of that extra income.” But now I actually have a decent amount of side income, and I’m still trying to increase my extra income even more. There’s always room for improvement!

Virtual assistant tasks may include social media management, formatting and editing content, scheduling appointments or travel, email management, and more. Basically, you can get paid to do any task that needs to be done in someone’s business, but doesn’t need to be done by them.

If you are looking for free work from home courses for virtual assistants, then, I recommend checking out Jumpstart Your Virtual Assistant Business. In that link, you’ll receive a free worksheet and workbook that will help you decide what virtual assistant services you can offer (there are over 150 choices!).

Related content:

Recently, I detailed all of the different ways that I make extra income and I also recently talked about how to get into freelance writing. I hope all of my posts have been helpful. I have many more planned still also. I plan on talking about starting your own blog, finding your niche and everything else. If there is anything that you would like me to cover, let me know.

A lot of you have asked how I found my virtual assistant positions. I will start off by saying that I am not an expert in this area, and I had to do research for this post in order to help you all. I am learning about everything at the same time as all of you. So, while I have not tested everything myself, I am almost 100% positive that these ideas should work for you. [Read more…]

So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer?

Last Updated: September 9, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 105 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Last week I finally started my Ways to Earn Extra Income. A lot of you have questions, and today I figured I would continue my Extra Income series with how to become a freelance writer or a staff writer. A lot of you seem very interested in this. For the sake of this post, a staff writer = freelance writer, just to make this all easy.

Before September, I never thought I would be staff writing, and I never even thought about it. But once I began, I really started to enjoy it. I really love to write (yes, I do realize that I’m not the best and I probably should proofread more, but I do like to talk), and writing for different blogs was fun for me.

And I’m not going to lie, the money is nice also. Being able to write about topics that I enjoy, from the comfort of my home is great. I try (yes, try) to throw all of my extra money towards student loans, since I do have a $38,000 student loan payoff plan that I am working on.

I believe I started freelance writing in September of 2012. I DID make mistakes though. I signed up for way too much, and as a result, my own blog suffered. I feel like the content on my blog wasn’t the greatest when I had signed up for so many staff writing assignments. Luckily, that did not last long as some of the assignments were only short-term.

Then I ended up stopping a couple of others and right now I am at my perfect amount. Taking on too many writing assignments at one time was definitely a mistake that I made.

Related content: How To Become A Freelance Writer

My tips on how to become a freelance writer:

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Do You Want To Be Self Employed?

Last Updated: November 18, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 3 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Yesterday, I made a tweet about how everyone keeps asking me the same question about life after my MBA. “Will you stay in your same position or apply at new companies?” I have been asked this by multiple people online, and ALL of my friends, family and those that I had my MBA classes with.

My plan is to stay at my current position. This also led to the next question that a couple of other people asked me (Such as 20s Finances), which was “Why don’t you go the self employed route?”

Below are a couple of tweets that others said. There are some tweets missing, so they don’t really go in order just if you’re confused.

The girls over at So Over This and Savvy Financial Latina are on opposite ends of the self employment debate as you can see above. I’m still not really sure where I fall. I do think being self employed would be great, but I do like the stability of a constant paycheck.

I think one common misunderstanding is that self employed life would be easier. However, I think it’s the exact opposite of that. You will be taking on all types of roles and doing all types of tasks, which, especially in the beginning, will be very time consuming.

Self discipline is also another big factor when it comes to being able to be successful in your own business. Since you will be your own boss, and you will most likely control your hours and the work that you do take on (and the clients you chose), you have to be able to follow some sort of schedule in order to stay on task. No one will be there to tell you to hurry up or give you a deadline.

Below are benefits of either choice, and yes I do realize that not all are positively true for each situation.

Benefits of being self employed:
1. You get to be your own boss. Don’t like working for other people? Well then be your own boss!

2. Your company might be your passion, or something you enjoy doing. I’m assuming that if you start your own business, that it’s not something that you completely hate. It’s either something you like doing, or that you are really good at.

3. You get to set your own hours. I don’t know about you, but I am NOT a morning person at all. Being able to set my own hours or start a couple of hours later would be wonderful.

4. You are in control. This goes hand in hand with the other 3 reasons above, but it’s the truth. You are in control of what you decide to sell, make, market, advertising, and everything else.

Benefits of being an employee:
1. You will not bring work home with you. Yes, some jobs require you to bring your work phone and work home, but if you are self employed, you will most likely dedicate much more time.

2. You want steady paychecks. If you are self employed, there might be months (especially when you are first starting out) where your income might not be the greatest. Maybe they’ll never get up to the point where you would like them. With being an employee of someone else, for the most part, you will have stable paychecks.

3. Vacation, health insurance and other benefits. Yes you have benefits if you are self employed, but the costs will be high. With a position at a company, it will most likely be paid for, or at least some of it will be.

4. You enjoy working with other people. If you’re self employed, you will most likely be working by yourself (at least in the beginning). Maybe you like making friends at work and interacting with others. Not saying that you can’t do this when you’re self employed, but you won’t be surrounded by as many people.

Do you want to be your own boss, or have a boss?