3 Places to Find Your First Client as a VA

In this blog post, we are talking about 3 places to find your first client as a VA. Because, well, that is probably one of the most important things you wonder or think about when you start your business, like where do I find the people I want to work with?!

First off, there are a lot of places you can look to find your first client, but today I am going to zone in on 3 places specifically that I would recommend starting with:

01. Your Personal Network

02. Instagram

03. Facebook Groups

Now I have found clients through each of these avenues which is why I feel confident speaking about them, but there are other avenues like freelancing websites, LinkedIn, job boards… the list goes on.

But I think these three places have a lot of power and the first two, your personal network and Instagram, are my main lead generators and are for most of my students as well so let’s dive in.

01. Your Personal Network

Okay, so I am really passionate about not keeping your business a secret for this reason. Your personal network has connections to other people that you haven’t even heard of, and in our line of work, referrals are huge. If you can build a solid referral network, you know you are providing a great service!

And I am truly not talking about spamming all your friends and family with “check out my new business messages” because this isn’t 2017 anymore and we don’t do that here. Lol. I mean, truly think about who you know that you could share your business with that might be able to connect you with people who need your services, or will at least share for you!

When I first started my business, I thought of two friends that owned online businesses and I knew that they were well-connected and knew other people in the online space as well so I literally just sent them a message that was like, “Hey I am going to start my business working as a virtual assistant, so if you know of anyone, do you mind passing along my information?” The funniest part about this story is that BOTH of those friends ended up replying and saying that THEY actually needed a VA and wanted to jump on a call. Those two clients are still OBM clients of ours to this day.

I didn’t text them anticipating that they would be the ones wanting to hire, I just had good relationships with them both, and figured they might know someone that needed support in their business and turned out, the “someone” was them!

This can also look like simply just sharing about your business on your personal Facebook or Instagram pages! Your personal network will be able to see your posts and you will stay top of mind for them if they know of anyone or come across anyone looking for a VA. When I had started sharing about my new business, I actually had people DMing me stories from creators and business owners they followed that were looking for a VA. I was the first person they thought of when they saw others post about that – staying top of mind is huge!

Okay so that’s your personal network but now let’s talk about social media, and social media is really points 02 and 03 but I split them up because they are specific and very different.

02. Instagram

This is where probably 98% of our leads come from for our agency, maybe even more. I have built online businesses, primarily on Instagram, for over 5 years now and it continues to be one of the most powerful forms of lead generation and client acquisition that I have come across, specifically when building an online business. And the best part is it’s free.

As I had mentioned earlier, we are adding a lesson to The VA Roadmap that is all about how to start using Instagram to market your business but I’ll give a couple of tips here as well:

❋ Optimize Your Bio

This is important because Instagram has rolled out some features to improve SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, which is huge because 70% of consumers go to Instagram to find a product or service. 70%! People are using Instagram as their modern-day Google. So optimizing your bio for discoverability is key. Do me a favor - open up your Instagram app and type in  “virtual assistant” in the search bar. No seriously, do it right now - unless you are driving don’t do it lol. Wait until you are parked somewhere. But if you are not driving, when you type that in, do you see all the people that come up? YOU need to be on that list! And the way to do that to go to your profile, click “edit profile”, and then where it says “NAME”, you can add any keywords to help your SEO. 

The rest of your bio is also prime real estate for people finding you and seeing what you are all about, so make sure you use it intentionally and wisely.

❋ Have a Public Profile

This is important because when people stumble across your page, they want to be able to see what you are all about and the value you share, right?! So make sure whatever Instagram you are using to share about your business, it’s public. If that means making a separate Instagram account from your personal one because you don’t want to share a picture of your kids or family or whatever, do it!! I still would recommend making sure you talk about or post about your new business here and there on your personal account so people know what you are up to, and as I said before, you stay top of mind. I think it’s important to remember you are in control of what you share on social media.

In my previous business, I shared a LOT of my personal life, and after I got pregnant with my first son, I started to not feel comfortable doing that anymore. Over the last few years, I’ve really pulled back what I share on my social media and continue to reevaluate what that looks like for me and my family! I still share a little bit of my day-to-day, personal life because I want people to get to know me as a person too, mostly in stories, but I focus most of my posting and strategy on my actual business. 

Recently, I created a private Instagram account for friends and family only so I have a place I am comfortable sharing more of our personal or day-to-day life and then my business accounts can be used to promote our business!

So long story short, if you are going to use Instagram as a main source of lead generation for your business, make sure you have a public account, even if that means creating a separate one!

❋ Make sure your account is either a business or at least a creator account

This is important for insights and analytics! These make it so that you can see what type of content your audience is engaging with and create more of that type of content. You can’t rely on just likes anymore, those days are gone.

ALSO, if you are using a scheduling tool, like Planoly or Later, it’s extra important you are a BUSINESS account, not a creator account because that’s how you can schedule and auto-post your content to your pages so you don’t have to worry about, “Oh my gosh I forgot to post today” or whatever. If you don’t care about using one of these programs or auto publishing, a creator account is fine!

❋ Start Posting Consistently

I feel like this is where people always get hung up because maybe the world consistently makes you think “every day”. That is not what I am saying. I am just saying to be consistent with what and when you are posting! This could be like 3 days a week you are adding value to your feed and showing up in stories M-F. And this is something I know I personally struggle with and am working on!! So if this is a weakness of yours, don’t stress. Start small!

If you need help creating some content, I have a freebie that is 30 content prompts for any small business that you can easily use for your VA business, and I also have a content planning spreadsheet available and it’s only $9! It can help you map out and plan what you are going to post, and then schedule all of that in a scheduler, and boom – you have potentially a month of content ready to go! I will link both those resources in the description and the show notes!

Let me just say this – Instagram is a FREE platform to promote and grow your business. I think sometimes people forget that when they are frustrated with the algorithm or changes that are happening to the app – we don’t own our Instagrams. So while I believe using Instagram to promote your business is a really great move, I also want you to take steps to not solely rely on Instagram whether that is starting to build an email list, creating a website, or some sort of landing page, etc. Because if Instagram disappeared tomorrow, you want your business to still run!

03: Facebook Groups

There are Facebook groups that promote VA or freelancing jobs in particular, HOWEVER, I don’t necessarily recommend those types. Those are the ones that post a job description and then there are 200 comments from people wanting the job and some people who are willing to do it at the rate of $5 or $10 an hour and I don’t want that for you, friend.

The Facebook groups I am talking about are networking groups. So places that you can just meet other people that you have things in common with and if they end up needing a VA or knowing someone who needs one, cool, but if not THAT’S COOL TOO! These networking groups can still be a great place for you to learn and just make genuine connections with people, without feeling like you have to sell.

But we know, networking is a great way to gain clients. It’s like what we were talking about with referrals. I have found some awesome clients myself or have recommended service providers to people in these groups before because sometimes someone will ask for something they need help with. I would start by looking for local business groups in your area, we have one that my friend here in Arizona started (shoutout to Taryn @thesociallifestyleco), and it’s a really cool community or group of business owners in Arizona and we meet up for lunch or happy hour here and there, connect for trainings, but also its a place that people can ask for recommendations!

So I would look for a group in your area like that or even other online business FB groups. There are also a lot of free Facebook groups that other entrepreneurs have for their communities, or even some tech platforms have their own as well!

Just don’t be spammy in these groups – a lot of groups have rules about self-promotion. Go into these groups with the intention to make friends and genuine connections and who knows what opportunities could arise! 

 I hope this was helpful and that it got the wheels turning a little bit for you!