Disclosure: this article mentions paid tools and includes a link to the author’s own paid training, which may involve an affiliate or referral relationship.
Introduction
If you’ve thought about starting a remote online job, but you only have availability in the evenings or even late at night, I am here for you. I’m coming at you with 10 online jobs that you can do completely from home in the wee hours of the night.
Why start your own Virtual Assistant or freelance business
Before those three different categories, I want to preface that I am a huge fan of you starting your own virtual assistant business. While you could go off and find a job at a virtual assistant agency and work for that company, you’re normally only going to be making somewhere between $10 and $15 an hour. Whereas my virtual assistants are making 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, $100 per hour plus. Plus, they have the ability to scale with a team like I did. This is how some of my students have gone on to make six and even seven figures in their businesses by creating this online business.
So, is it a little bit more work upfront? Yes. But I believe that if you have these skills already, why not use them to start your own business? Let’s talk about those 10 remote jobs that you can do online at night.
Administrative Services (Email Management, Data Entry, Community Management)
Email Management
Number one, email management. Small business owners need people to answer their emails, and that’s where you come in. These clients are answering their emails themselves. They already have a system. It’s not that you have to create some fancy system at the very beginning. Slide into their system. Learn how they’re answering emails. And over time, you’ll likely see patterns. You’ll likely be able to create templates or even do it faster.
Handling email management for a client means that when the emails come in, you’re organizing them into folders. You’re going ahead and deleting spam or unsubscribing them from things that they don’t want to be receiving. You’re going to flag anything that’s important in my inbox. My VA will come in and say anything that’s due end of day or end of week. And those are the only two folders that I have to look at every single day. I usually take a look at the end of day and then if I have time or during a certain time of the week I will go in and answer those end of week emails. So that’s our system. That’s how it works and I cannot tell you how valuable it is to have somebody in my inbox handling that.
Data Entry
The next is data entry. And data entry is honestly a really unique skill set and it can cover a lot of different areas. Your clients are already likely doing this. They have a CRM or they have a database or they have spreadsheets that they’re going in and they’re manually entering in information. And so by you being able to manually enter in that information for them on their behalf, you are giving them that time back. And remember, time is the most valuable asset for these small business owners, and that’s why they’re willing to pay you for services like these.
Community Management
Next would be community management. You’re seeing communities likely pop up everywhere. There’s Facebook groups, there’s LinkedIn groups, there are school communities, there are Kajabi communities, there’s just groups everywhere, especially online groups. And these groups take time to manage. We’re giving business owners back their time. This can be done entirely at night because it doesn’t matter when you’re doing it. You’re coming in and you are accepting people into the group. Maybe there’s a questionnaire that they have to fill out and you have to actually see are they qualified to be in the group or not.
You’re managing comments. You’re answering questions. Maybe you’re posting engaging comments. You’re kicking out spammers or deleting comments that don’t follow your group rules. Every time that you’re in there interacting and engaging in the group, the group becomes better and that is such a benefit to your clients.
Creative Services (Writing, Graphic Design, Social Media Content Creation)
Writing
The first creative service we should talk about is writing. Creating content is easier than ever, and we should all be creating so much content right now with AI. If you can really train ChatGPT to talk like you or talk like your client rather, then you can be creating blog posts for them, LinkedIn posts for them, social media posts for them. And this type of content creation is so valuable.
Graphic Design
The next would be graphic design skills. AI hasn’t come quite as far as far as graphic design goes yet. Maybe at the time you’re watching this, it’s a little better, but graphic design still kind of needs that human touch, at least to the standards that I have. And so, if you are great with Canva, if you kind of have that natural eye for design, then yes, you should be creating social media graphics, reels, Facebook headers, ebooks for your clients. This is such a useful service to offer, something that can be done at any time of day or night.
Social Media Creation
And then that brings us to social media creation in general. Social media doesn’t just stop with posts and carousels with the graphics, although that could be part of it. You need to be writing captions for those graphics. A YouTube video needs a thumbnail. It needs a script. You can be writing scripts for YouTube. Social media creation could be that LinkedIn post. It could be that Substack post. It could be those threads that you’re creating content for. It could even be creating videos for your clients. Whether that be scripts or the type of content we create well because it does really well is I will just spend a day shooting a bunch of B-roll.
So just video of me not talking at all, work on my computer, taking a walk, whatever, and then a VA will come in and actually just put words on top of the video. And this kind of social media creation is such a valuable skill to have. Again, it takes time to do, but once you have a system set up, you and your client can work seamlessly, and it pays off for them.
Specialized Services (Video Editing, Content Repurposing, Podcast Editing & Management, Bookkeeping and more!)
Video Editing
Video editing can be done anytime, day or night. There are tools out there to make this process even easier than ever. We use CapCut. That’s a huge one that we use over at the Virtual Savvy. But you still need that human touch. You still need somebody to look over the video to make sure that it was edited correctly, to add in graphics if needed. All of that is required in editing. It could be long form content like courses for YouTube or it could be more vertical content that you’re editing, videos like talking videos for Instagram. Any of these services are so worth offering.
Content Repurposing
I’ll also talk a second about repurposing. I think that this is a huge untapped market is for people who are creating things like this, like a YouTube video, to be able to cut that down and turn that one YouTube video into Instagram videos. Take this big video and make it into a vertical video to take that same content and then repurpose it over on LinkedIn and then over on Substack and then over on threads for the VAs who are able to do that, who are able to take one piece of content and turn it into many pieces of content. That is such a service that I’m seeing in huge demand right now.
Podcast Editing
Podcast editing is really valuable for those who have podcasts. They’re going to need to be listening to the podcast, making sure that you’re editing it down, uploading the actual file. A lot of times we will turn those into blog posts or show notes. And so that whole process from beginning to end of what it takes to actually deliver a podcast, those podcast editing services are huge in demand right now.
Other Specialized Skills
And then you may have some other specialized skill that I didn’t even mention here. Maybe you’ve done bookkeeping before. Maybe you’ve built a website. Maybe you have some extensive knowledge in an area that I didn’t even list. Do not discredit yourself. You are skilled and people are willing to pay you monthly recurring income for those skills.
Next steps for getting started
You might be asking, Abby, okay, I get it, but how? What are the next steps? How do I actually land clients? How do I actually price and package these services? I created an entire training just for you. It’s called Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant. It shares my top three places for finding clients. It shows you how to price and package the services that you’ve decided on. Check it out at virtualsavvy.com/bbo.
