If you’ve already jumped on the virtual assistant (VA) bandwagon, you’ve probably started experiencing the benefits everyone’s been promising – the flexible hours, the convenience of working from home and all that.You feel, though, as if you’re not making enough.There was that one VA who claimed she makes around $60,000 a year providing VA services.Why then are you making far less money than she is?

In case your paycheck is not living up to either your or the statistics’ expectations, read on to find out how you can increase the money you earn from home.

Please the Boss

Alright, so you technically don’t have a boss when you’re a virtual assistant. If you think about it, though, your client is as close to a boss as anybody can get. Your client dictates the terms of your contract.Your client signs your checks and sets your tasks and deadlines.

Thus, if you want to maximize your earnings as a VA, you have to make sure that every single one of your clients – if you have more than one, that is – is happy. To this end, you should pay attention to the small details.Perhaps, you can insert time stamps in transcription files to make looking for certain segments easier.Maybe you can format word documents in such a way that they’d be very easy to read and upload.

The small details are the things that get noticed. For a little extra effort on your part, you could gain leverage when negotiating your rates, your schedule or your workload.

Streamline Your Work Strategy

If it’s true that time is money, then you can maximize your earnings by maximizing (not increasing) the time you’ve allotted for work. This can be done by, say, downloading the next batch of work while you’re working on the current one on the word processor. This will be an extremely helpful strategy if you’re working on a project like transcribing a conference that involves a lot of file transferring.

You can also maximize your time by using the proper equipment. The term ‘proper equipment’ could mean anything from a clipboard to a transcription pedal, depending on what work you’re doing. Analyze how you could save even a few seconds of your time. All of these ‘few seconds’ will add up and allow you to do more work (and consequently earn more money) in the same amount of time. Getting more things done in a shorter time will also please your client because it shows that you’re efficient and committed to your job as a virtual assistant.

Waste as Little Money as Possible

If you are working from home, it’s sure you are already saving money. After all, you’re cutting down on transportation and food expenses. However, there are costs involved in being a VA as well. Costs like fund transfer fees (when your clients send you payments) and costs for consumables like ink and paper could add up to a significant sum.

Try to minimize any wastage of money.Find a payment method that costs the least fund transfer fees.Perhaps you can set up an account with your client’s bank so that there would be no transaction fees involved in money transfers.As for office resources, you just need to be more mindful of how you use them so you can make them last as long as possible.

Admittedly, trying to earn more money from being a virtual assistant requires a lot of time working and planning.The time you spend strategizing, planning and doing value added services is time that could have been spent working and earning. However, you should not look at it as time wasted.Rather, you should consider it to be an investment for the long term.Try the above mentioned steps and you’ll see that you can earn more money while doing the same amount of work or while using the same amount of time.