There are many highly-qualified and specialised skills out there that command high end salaries; hourly rates of pay that do not differ by much, regardless of whether they are performed in full-time employment or on a freelance and work from home basis.
Unfortunately, although most of us possess an eclectic array of skills and knowledge we don't all hold the certified qualifications that command high-end salaries positions.
The most abundant type of work at home jobs available to a virtual assistant are those that require basic admin skills - skills that all of us have. The perceived downside there is that those work at home jobs also have the most number of freelancers going for them.
Anyone-that has had a desire to be a virtual assistant or has browsed any of the popular websites that advertise work from home jobs and assignments would have found that the-payment offered by many employers for basic admin type work at home jobs, ranges from poor to mediocre.
Not ALL but definitely many!
The secret to earning $45 an hour as a virtual assistant working at home is a simple one.
A structured working week, with a set number of hours that you dedicate to work and targeting multiple small projects from multiple employers
Firstly decide on what-those skills are that you possess that you will market and apply for assignments that are directly relevant and will be your main focus of work at home jobs that you will apply for. It is around those assignments that you will build your structured working week and earn $45 an hour working from home.
For example your main skill could be blog writing or customer services or telesales or transcription whatever it is, that is where you focus your energies first and apply for assignments that pay a rate that works out at no less than minimum wage.
Your goal here is to always have sufficient assignments in your main niche that are paying you for every hour-you are dedicating to your work from home career.
So that if you have decided to dedicate 8 hours per day, then you have an assignment or assignments that is paying you at least minimum wage for each of those 8 hours.
From there, the trick is to now go for very low impact and low paying-assignments (and there are lots of those) which you can perform in tandem with your main daily work.
Some good examples would be email monitoring, online chat support, basic blog commenting, calendar-management, bulk email and the list is really endless as there are literally thousands of different simple tasks out there that you can get paid for and attach to your work at home income to accumulate $45 an hour.
Basically, what you need to do is imagine an average working day in an average office anywhere in the world and all the tasks that are performed in that average-working day. Imagine the average customer service agent working in any service based company for $15 an hour; what does he or she do in their average working day.
Make and answer fifty telephone calls, read and respond to fifty emails, chase up ten unresolved issues and do any-number of other duties they are given during the day; all of that for one employer for $15 an hour.
Add up all the tasks you do in the office, the emails you write and end, the calls-you make and receive, the memos and letters you type; if you make $100 a day and perform 200 tasks in that day, then you are being paid 50 cents for each thing you do at work.
So think about that when you see assignments like email monitoring for $2.00 an hour or provide online customer service support for $3.00 an hour; don't just skip past it in disgust, think about it first.
How many-emails are there likely to be in an hour?
How many online support requests will there be?
The answer is usually one or two an hour on a busy day because the overwhelming majority of these kinds of work at home-assignments are for small companies that want to pay a small amount of money for the support just being there; rather than there being a whole lot to do.
What you should be thinking is; at $2.00 an hour for email monitoring as long as there are no more than 4 an hour it's no different for what I would be paid for that task in a regular employed position.
The right and positive thing to be thinking is that you are being paid $2.00 an hour for just being there just in case; when, let's face it, if you are working from home then you are sitting there anyway.
So why lose out on $2.00 an hour - $16 a day - $80.00 a week for sitting in a chair by your PC in your home office; which is where you would be anyway if that money was there or not.
And...
There is no reason why you-cannot be doing five assignments exactly like that for five different employers all in tandem with each other and your main niche assignments.
Do not focus on the payment for each individual-task you perform during your working day in your home office and focus on what you end up in the bank with at the end of the week or month.
You don't work out your salary like that in a regular employed position; based upon each thing you do. You just look at your pay-check at the end of the week and know that's what you have been paid for that time at work.
This is an example of how you can structure a 30 hour week as a virtual assistant working from home - it's based on actual assignments that I was doing within two months of setting us as a virtual assistant working from home.
It comes out at $1090 a week - just over $36 an hour; so I hadn't quite achieved the $45 an hour target by then; but it did show me very quickly though that a disciplined structure and multiple low impact projects gave me a good income-without the stresses and strains of the corporate rat-race
Posting 50 simple one or two line blog comment $25 per week X 4
Manage and approve posts on my blog $30 per week X 1
Manage and approve posts on my blog $25 per week X 1
Submit 10 pre-written ads to Craigslist daily $20 per week X 3
Manage my email inbox $35 per week X 3
Appointment setting by email $60 per week X 1
Online customer chat support - 4 hours per day $40 per week X 1
Online customer chat support - 6 hours per day $80 per week X 3
Email customer support - 6 hours per day $65 per week X 2
Telephone Customer services - inbound $115 per week X 1
Audio Transcription $135 per week X 1
Opinion and survey sites $50 per week
If you think- you are able to be organized and have good time management then you can easily attain your desired income by working from home.
Try the method for yourself and you will see that it's all down to logistics managing a mixture of different things that can be done in tandem with each other try it for-yourself.
