Step 1: Selling Yourself as a VA

The first step is to change your resume to a profile and focus on your skills and not just a list of your jobs. To do this lets take the most successful sales techniques used to market products worldwide, and apply them to your profile. The most popular and successful approach to writing copy that sells is AIDA,which stands for: 

Attention - Interest - Desire - Action

It’s a simple formula, but still very effective. You aim to capture the prospect’s attention quickly, then stimulate interest by showing the benefits. You provide enough information to generate a desire for your service, then encourage them to take action by getting in touch.

You can use the AIDA formula to produce a structure as follows in creating your Personal Profile.

• Write a benefit-driven summary paragraph that captures attention. This will highlight your key strengths, and shows why you are the perfect choice for relevant projects.
• Generate interest by listing your key skills and competences in bullet point format, so that the prospect can immediately see what you have to offer.
• Demonstrate the depth of these skills by showing how they have developed during the course of your career, creating a desire to find out more.
• Encourage the prospect to take immediate action by providing all necessary contact details at the end of your profile. 

Next, build up a good portfolio, as this is an essential element in developing your career. As time goes on, you will undertake an ever-wider range of projects, allowing you to build up a diverse portfolio. So whatever a client is looking for, there’s a growing chance that you will be able to demonstrate relevant expertise. Having experience of exactly the right kind of work can be surprisingly important. If you are involved in producing printed materials - magazines, brochures, adverts, etc. - be sure to get hold of a file copy for your records. In many cases, you will have to go out of your way to get them, but it is important to persevere. 

Finally, you need to create a cover letter, this may be the last item you think about, but it will most likely be the first one that your prospect reads. So you need to ensure that is well written and professional in approach. As in your profile, you need to emphasise the benefits, sell your skills and suggest a call to action. Make sure the letter is personally addressed to the individual concerned - and triple check that you’ve spelt the name correctly. Names are very personal, and mis-spelling them is a sure fire way to kill a working relationship before it has even started.

If you have had contact with the prospect, either in person on the phone, try and make reference to something you discussed. This will help to establish that the letter is a personal response, not a standard reply.