Episode 3: Is Virtual Assistance a Legit Career?

Looking for the links? 

📌 Free Training Mentioned: Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Is Being a Virtual Assistant Legit? How to Avoid VA Scams & Find Real Clients

Is becoming a virtual assistant actually a legit career - or just another online scam?

If you’ve been wondering whether you can make real money working from home as a virtual assistant, this episode is for you.

Abbey Ashley shares her honest experience starting her own VA business - the good, the bad, and the red flags you absolutely need to know before jumping in.

Is Virtual Assistance a Real Career?

Short answer? Yes.

But there are non-reputable opportunities out there — and knowing how to spot them is the key.

In this episode, Abbey breaks down:

• How she started her virtual assistant business from scratch
• The simple services she offered in the beginning
• How she found her first legit clients
• Why relationships beat random online job boards
• And how thousands of VAs have built real income from this model

Virtual Assistant Scam Red Flags 🚩

If you’re searching for remote work or VA jobs online, here are warning signs to watch for:

• Promises of huge money for very little work
• Being sent a check before completing any work
• Paying a fee to get hired
• Listen to the episode for the rest!

Not every online job is a scam — but knowing what to look for protects you from wasting time or worse.

How to Find Legit Virtual Assistant Jobs

Abbey explains why your personal network is one of the most powerful ways to land your first clients — and shares where to look for real opportunities online.

📌 Free Training Mentioned: Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant

Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes on launching and growing a profitable VA business that fits your life.

Transcript

Hey, hey, you are tuned into Work From Anywhere with the Virtual Savvy, where you learn how to launch and grow your virtual assistant business because you deserve work that fits your life, not the other way around. All right, friend. Let's get started.

So you likely clicked on this episode because you are thinking to yourself, is virtual assistance an actual legit career? Is this another one of those just online scams? Is this one of those, make money fly by night type of things? Or could I make legit income working from home as a virtual assistant? So I wanna take some time to tell you my real and honest experience with starting a VA business.

If you haven't met me, my name's Abbey Ashley. I talk all things work from home and online opportunities here . And so if you love that kind of information, make sure that you subscribe to be notified when I release new content. So you may be wondering, is virtual assistant really a way that I can make legit money working from home?

And after starting a virtual assistant business myself, which I will get into a little bit of my journey here in a moment, I definitely know the good, bad, and the ugly about this type of career. And to be honest, there are non reputable VA jobs out there, which frustrates me to no end because on the flip side, there are so many real business owners who are really looking for VAs to help them.

And so through my experience, I started a virtual assistant business offering just the services that I already knew how to do, which we can talk about that here in a moment. I'll kind of go through the steps that I took to start that VA business. But overall, whenever I started, I was doing, you know, simple admin tasks like data entry or blogging for people or answering customer service emails, things like that.

And it was actually pretty easy to find real legit jobs. Now, a lot of these jobs I found through friends and family. I told people, Hey, I'm starting this business, and it was somebody who knew somebody, right? Or I would go to actual, you know, networking events in my city and I would meet face-to-face with a real business owner.

And so that's one of my first recommendations is if you're thinking about starting a virtual assistant business, yes, it is a legit career. Yes. Not only was I able to make great income as a virtual assistant, but I've also trained thousands of other people how to start virtual assistant businesses. Now that I have all of that experience, one of my first tips is to really like dive into your personal network, right?

Build your business off of true relationships. There are jobs that are posted online and there are good places to find legit jobs online, but nothing beats your personal network. Nothing beats just actual real relationships because then you know these are real people with real problems who actually need your help.

Now if you do end up finding a virtual assistant opportunity online and you're thinking, oh, I think this might be a good opportunity, because there are good opportunities online. I've posted virtual assistant jobs online, our VA community, we post literally tons of opportunities in our community, every single.

Week. So if you come across an online job and you're thinking, wow, this might be perfect for me, what you need to do is really equip yourself to know if it is a legit opportunity or not.

What you need to do is with every single job that you come across, you can do this litmus test. Okay? Yes or no. Does it raise these red flags or am I good to keep moving forward?

So here are some scam. Job red flags.

Number one, they promise you a lot of money for hardly any work. No, you cannot make $10,000 working from home with just an hour a day, especially if you're just starting out at a business. No one's gonna pay you that. Number two, they send you a check before you've done any work.

This is a scam where they say, Hey, we'll go ahead and send this check. You cash it, and then. They somehow end up getting information to your bank. Do not take a check if you have not done work for this individual. Next, you have to pay a fee before you start. No. While there are online trainings and courses at the Virtual Savvy, my business, we have.

Trainings and courses on how to start a business, but an actual client or employer paying you to do work, there's no reason that you should have to pay a fee upfront. So do not do that next. You can't find any legit information online about their business at all if you're researching them and there's just nothing to be found.

Definitely that's a red flag. Now, this isn't always true, but if they have a Gmail account instead of their own domain, again, this is a red flag. Some business owners just may not have an actual email address yet, but if they're using a Gmail account, especially if it's like Pinterest at gmail, no, Pinterest is not emailing you from a Gmail account.

That's a red flag. Maybe you find a job opportunity online, like on a Facebook group that you look, and this account was brand new, just started. Again, that doesn't a hundred percent guarantee that it's a scam job, but if the person posting the job opportunity has a brand new account. That's definitely a red flag.

Oh, this is a huge one. If they are not interested in interviewing you or having a get together at all, they just wanna hire you site unseen. I literally get texts to this day that say, you know, we saw your resume on LinkedIn and want to hire you. You don't wanna hire me without a Zoom call, and I don't wanna work with you without a Zoom call.

So no, if they're not interested in interviewing, I just want to hand you the job, that's a red flag. And if they're asking for sensitive information like your social security number, your address, anything like that before you've actually have a working agreement together, that's definitely a big red flag as well.

Once you know what to look for when it comes to scam jobs, you can weed those out really quickly. Yes, they exist out there, but you're able to put those aside, say, Ugh, not for me. Right? I'm not gonna fall for that. But then you can go after real legit opportunities that are online. Now, I get people who ask me all the time, Abbey, where do you actually find these legit opportunities?

So I actually created a free training. It's called Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant. It's totally free. You can go to the link in the shownotes to check it out and inside it, I'll share with you my top three favorite places for finding paying clients for your VA business.

And again, if you haven't subscribed , make sure you do, because I'm gonna be sharing tons more tips on how to start a virtual assistant business that gives you that freedom life.

All right? That's all I have for you today.

I'll see you in the next episode.