Increase Your Virtual Assistance Income Without Adding New Clients

Are you working very hard but not making the money you should be making from your virtual assistance practice?  While being a VA is a great way to earn a great income working from home, many VAs are not making the money they could be from their practice.  Here are some tips for increasing your virtual asssistance income without adding any new clients to your practice.

1. Examine Your billing structure.  Most virtual assistants bill on either a project for retainer basis.  Project-based VAs charge just for hours worked. VAs who work on retainer have agreed on a certain number of hours per month that the client pays for in advance.  Billing by retainer helps you keep a stable number of hours in your practice.  Another way to bill (especially as you become more technically proficient) is value added billing. Value added (or package) billing is when you charge a flat rate for a package of services.  You could also consider working on a commission (more common for affiliate managers).  Ideally, you could have a mixture of commission, flat rate and retainer work in your practice.

2. Make sure that you are billing all of your time.  Use a time tracking system (like Office TIme) to keep track of all of your hours.  I have found that batching my work and doing one client's work at a time without checking e-mail in between is a great way to increase my client billing.

3. Be proactive  Make suggestions to your clients for improving their businesses.  More than likely, they will ask you to implement your suggestions.

4. Consider adding affiliate and other sources of income to your practice.  Adding affiliate income can be as easy as recommending tools to your client (with your affiliate link) such as autoresponders, teleseminar lines, web hosts, etc.  I often recommend Send Out Cards to my clients around Christmas card time because it provides an easy way for them to send out their Christmas Cards.

5. Raise your rates.  Perhaps the easiest way for you to increase your income is to raise your rates on a regular basis.  Many VAs forget to give themselves a raise each year.  Make it part of your plan to increase your rates by at least 5 -10% each year.

With a little creativity, you can increase your virtual assistant income without adding more clients to your client roster.