Five Passive Income Ideas for Virtual Assistants

When you are a self-employed freelance Virtual Assistant, it is pretty much a given that the workload has a propensity to be erratic. Your work is tightly interwoven with that of your client and a bad period for them inevitably impacts their use of your services. Depending on the nature of your services and contracts, you may even find that not only do you experience periods of reduced workload, but there are also periods of complete drought between finishing one big full-time project and starting another.

How you legislate financially for these periods of downtime, aka reduced or no income, is a personal matter but one that has the potential to be eased somewhat by the development of streams of passive income. By that, I mean income which you have not been actively involved in generating – i.e. you could be making money whilst you sleep!

I first started looking at passive income options after COVID-19 hit in March 2020. Within a week of Covid starting, I lost 90% of my work. My clients were mainly small businesses who had to close and so they ceased my social media marketing services. Whilst the majority made it back and I was lucky enough to pick up three new regular clients, my income was significantly impacted for around 12 months.

I never wanted to feel so financially insecure again and once I had gotten over wobbles involving wanting to find a full-time job, I realized I had to diversify my Virtual Assistant business so I wasn’t 100% reliant on client work to earn a living. I put my downtime to good use and invested it into developing passive income streams for my Virtual Assistant business which I continue to work on week to week. Here’s how….

Create a Course or Write a Book

As a Virtual Assistant, you have skills and knowledge, likely even expertise in some areas. It may be that you are a whizz on Excel or WordPress for example, or have expert advice on a process that you can share. Whatever it is, you can create a course or write a book to teach others about it!

My own Virtual Assistant course is a beginner’s guide to becoming a Virtual Assistant which is hosted on Udemy. I chose this because I could drop it there and leave it. There is no monthly fee apart from commission, so I don’t pay anything unless I sell something. I am opted into their marketing campaigns and so each month I receive a steady stream of enrolments and income without doing a thing.

Amazon follows much the same principle for their books. Simply write a book, upload it then sit back and watch as the royalties roll in!

Become an Affiliate

When was the last time you recommended a product? Did the person you recommended it to end up buying it? If that was a yes and you had been an affiliate of that brand, you would have received a commission. It’s as simple as that!

Think about the products and services you use daily as a Virtual Assistant and check if they have an affiliate scheme available. Once signed up, they generally provide you with varying degrees of marketing collateral to help you promote it. This could be on your social media, through email to your mailing list, or on your website if you have a blog.

Advertising on Your Website

If you have a website and you blog regularly, look into advertising with the likes of Google Adsense or Amazon.

Advertising consists of hosting banners and ads on your site in the header/footer/sidebar. You are then paid a fee per number of visitors who view/click on the ad!

Short, sweet, and minimum effort required!

Downloadables

If you have a keen eye for design, then why not put it to good use in the creation of downloadable printables that you can charge customers for.

There are so many options, it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few but planners, checklists, and social media posts are great options to offer for starters as a Virtual Assistant.

If you don’t have a website, then it’s no problem – websites such as Etsy are perfect for this purpose.

Paid Collaborations

If you are an avid user of social media for your business, then paid brand collaborations would work well for you. This isn’t ‘passive’ income per se, but it is a fantastic way to monetize content that you have already. Get Blogged for blogging and Tribe for paid social media posts are my favorites to use!

My Tips for Success

Setting up passive income streams properly can take a lot of time and in the midst of it, it can feel fairly fruitless, but if you feel those demons creeping in, it is essential to change your mindset to one of investment.

Yes, my course may have taken me say two weeks of work all in all with everything considered, but I now have an end product that will be around forever, and which will hopefully keep on paying me again and again.

Some weeks it can feel the same when I am writing my blog posts. That hour I spent on blog writing could have been spent generating work and income for a client. But – change my mindset – and that same blog could actually be worth hundreds per year in advertising and affiliate income if it ranks on the first page of Google!

To be successful in building passive income streams, you need to be in it for the long game but be consistent and persist and it will pay off for you…especially in those periods of downtime.