I often see an interesting variety of VA jobs on Elance. The more variety of skills you possess on top of basic administrative skills, the more qualified you are for some of the niche jobs. So keep being yourself, and you’re more likely to find meaningful work that matches that true self. A couple of recently posted Virtual Assistant jobs at Elance:
I need a good English speaking VA that can book travel, events, restaurants and do any admin tasks that I need with a fast response time…
Specific expertise that I am seeking:
Excellent english speaker, well educated.
Basic Excel, data entry skills, database creating skills, great web research skills and use of search engines.
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I need someone to do ongoing web-based research to help me find an apartment.
The tasks are:
- to check websites of property letting agents for newly available apartments matching my criteria
- create/update a spreadsheet of this information
This will be on an ongoing basis (twice a week).
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I am currently looking for a Virtual Assistant to help me out with some aspects of running my business and work-related life. Initially the duties would be fairly light, but could expand into much more if this little experiment goes well.
July 29, 2008 at 11:13 am
It’s true elance has a lot of projects posted for Virtual Assistants. However, if you look a bit deeper you’ll discover there are very few of them who want to pay more than $10 hour for the task. It’s fairly obvious, when you look at the bidding history, people are bidding from India and Pakistan and their bids are $2-3 hour.
I’ve seen jobs posted that were quite labor intensive and would have required advanced skills in Excel, for example. Yet these bargain hunters want to locate someone for $8-10 hour.
When you consider the average employer in the US pays 3x the hourly rate to each employee after workman’s comp, unemployment insurance, benefits, their portion of SS and Medicare,etc. paying an independent contractor $10 hour is roughly the same as paying them a base rate of $3 hour.
I wouldn’t recommend elance to anyone who wants to actually earn real money from home.
July 29, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I’m doing pretty well on Elance in the writing category, but it requires some picking through to get to better paying jobs.
The admin category at Elance is already very competitive, but I think it is still worth keeping an eye on the jobs that come through. There are plenty of basic VA jobs that can effectively be done by someone working for $2-$3/hour, but these are not the jobs we are looking for.
Particularly if you are not paying for anything and getting the 3 free connects, there is no harm in bidding on jobs that may be looking for a quality VA.
Thanks for visiting and leaving comments!