Finding My Niche in the VA World

Have you ever heard the phrase “you don’t know what you don’t know?”

Well like many VAs, when I started my practice I began by offering many administrative type services to small and home-based business owners.  It wasn’t until I took a six-week class through Hot Skills VA Training that I realized there were so many more in-demand skills that I could develop as a VA.  As class participants we were encouraged by our trainers, Cindy Greenway and Tina Forsyth, to consider creating a niche for ourselves because the demand for our services would be higher (and potentially so wouldn’t our compensation).  Well that sounded like good business marketing advice, and these ladies knew what they were talking about because they both had successful online businesses, both separately and together.

So with that in mind I kind of ranked how well I liked the different skills we learned each week and found that I really liked the segments we’d covered on teleclasses and working with audio products.  What was also interesting to me was how the classes themselves were being delivered in a webinar format, and then the video was made available to us to review from their website.  So much so that when another set of training classes was offered later that year, I took the course entitled “Video, Webinar & Podcasting Production for Virtual Assistants”.  BINGO!  I had found the type of work that I truly enjoyed doing.  And you know when you’ve found something like that because you can do it for hours at a time and it doesn’t seem like work.

The instructor for the video, webinar and podcasting class, Michelle Schoen is a very well known virtual assistant who goes by the name of the Virtual Assistant Demo Girl. She herself had created a niche a number of years ago working in these specialties.  I have since taken specialized training from her and Lon Naylor (from ScreencastProfits.com) and picked up even more great information.  Together these two Camtasia experts offer a phenomenal training course.

So that’s how I found my niche in the VA World.  Now I’m still providing my clients with other types of assistance, don’t get me wrong but I’m hoping that over time my Camtasia screencast video editing and audio editing services become the majority of my work. I know that will take time but I don’t think it will take long for it to happen – the use of video for internet marketing is growing quickly.

But let me just say I encourage anyone who’s just starting out in the VA industry, or perhaps has been a virtual assistant for a while to think about creating that niche for themselves, believe me there are plenty of specialties to go around!