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Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to Your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach who replaced my college professor salary in just five months back in 2020 after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in.

Laura Nicole: 0:32

I want to share with you a really simple, beginner-friendly virtual assistant service that online business owners really always need help with, which is community moderation. Okay, so these online business owners, a lot of times they are people who are course creators. So they've created some kind of self-paced or cohort-led course for people to go through to learn a new skill, to, you know, learn something from them. Or they are online coaches and they do real-time coaching with people, whether that's in a mastermind format or group coaching or a one-on-one mentorship. And these online business owners want to create a community experience for the people who purchase from them, whether they refer to them as a client, a customer, a member.

Laura Nicole: 1:25

They want those people to have a community feel, even though the entire product and course and coaching is taking place virtually online and creating a community for their people, whether that's inside of a Facebook group or doing a membership on their course platform or doing a mastermind or hosting a Telegram channel or using Discord, regardless of what platform they choose to create that community. These online business owners care about a community experience. It increases the value of the experience that their people get from their product in their coaching. And so they're very, very important to have in place. But somebody needs to be in those communities actually monitoring posts, scheduling the posts out, replying to comments, you know, keeping up with member requests and post approvals. And business owners don't have the time to be doing those kind of tedious admin type tasks for these communities. They need the back end of the community to function seamlessly without their time and attention so that they can hop in the community and actually have conversations and give that coaching and not be worried about what's going on to keep the group operating. So that is why it's very important.

Laura Nicole: 2:50

That's why it's a very in-demand service. And then just to give you some insight into what that actually looks like. Like if I offer community moderation as a service, like what the hell does that actually mean? What would I be doing? Again, it really is all very, very, very simple. You will be doing things like approving new members into the group when they request, like checking their actual purchase to make sure that it's the right person before you let them in, approving and declining posts into the group to make sure that they're in line with like the rules and the guidelines of the space, or pulling anything, like if anything slips by, let's say, you know, in Facebook groups, you can set the posts that you have to approve or decline them before they go live. But if they use, say, like a Telegram channel, then that approval process doesn't exist, right? So somebody could just throw in a comment. And if it goes against the rules and guidelines, then you would be the one to recognize that and remove that comment. Being able to answer FAQs, right? The whole point of you offering community moderation is so that your client can really get in and actually build relationships and have conversations and do the coaching. But there will definitely be just kind of like generic FAQs that get tossed in there that you can also provide the answers to, typically under like your client's account.

Laura Nicole: 4:09

You can be pinning important posts to like the featured or the pinned section as needed. So if there's something new that your client is wanting to make sure everybody in the community is seeing, then you can tag it appropriately and then pin it to the featured section. And then also make sure to go back in and remove it from the featured section when it's no longer relevant. Doing things like greeting new members, making sure that once, you know, you typically you and your client will agree, like, okay, once we have five new people in, we'll do a welcome post. Or some people will want to do it with every new member. It depends on their volume, right? But doing, you know, new member posts and tagging people and greeting them and welcoming them to the community. Again, when we're posting things like this, we're posting it as our client, right? And they are truly greeting them. It's just that they don't need to click the buttons to make it happen. Similarly, we can schedule out content that the client wrote. So if they have things that they want posted or shared in the community, they can send that to you.

Laura Nicole: 5:08

Maybe they keep like a running Google Doc and they just braindump their thoughts. And then you actually take that and put it into the format and like clean it up a little bit, make it look pretty, and then schedule it out to go to the community when they want it to. And depending on your client and their preferences and the type of community they use, sometimes that might mean also like creating some kind of basic Canva graphics to go with the content of their posts. And those are just kind of like the overarching, like the the very common things that come to mind for me when offering the service that you would be doing for your clients in their community. But obviously the list is not exhaustive, right? And again, doing these things is so helpful to your client because they don't have to worry about the community like logistically operating smoothly. They can just pour their time and energy and effort into actually coaching and showing up for the people in the community. And this is such a perfect service to offer for new VAs because it is truly so easy to start, regardless of what platform your client uses, which Facebook's groups are still like one of the most popular. And then I've seen a lot of clients, um, small business owners now who are using like Telegram channels and stuff.

Laura Nicole: 6:26

But even if they use a platform that you're not super familiar with, none of them are complex or hard or things that you couldn't figure out by asking Chat GPT some simple questions. So it's really easy to start, it's really easy to learn. Obviously, flexible hours, right? Pretty much all of our VA work is flexible, but like you don't have to be in the group from nine to five. Similarly to how like email management is done. Typically clients will want you to be checking in like once a day to make sure that approvals into the group are happening once a day and that people aren't going longer than like 24 hours without a reply to things, but you don't have to be in there constantly. Offering the service does not require like deep strategy or specialized knowledge, right? And you can get to learn some more of like the behind the scenes of business and how it operates as a whole just by being in the room. And it's a really easy way to kind of like very quickly show your client that you can truly reduce their mental load by taking some of these very simple, tedious, but very important tasks off of their plate, which can often lead to more responsibilities because it's like they see the light, right? And they're like, oh my God, this is so nice.

Laura Nicole: 7:40

I didn't have to even think about that or worry about that, which builds trust in you, right? Your client builds trust in you when they see you execute these things. And so they're more likely to give you more responsibility, which obviously equates to more income. And clients love literally the all of these online small business owners, y'all, they value these services so, so much because you are protecting their brand, right? You're protecting their brand, you're protecting their reputation. Word of mouth is everything for small business owners. And so when you are able to help them keep their space for their community members safe and supportive and helpful, then that is only going to positively affect their reputation and the word of mouth that gets spread from the people in their group who you have helped create this community for. So it is a wildly appreciated service from small business owners.

Laura Nicole: 8:40

If listening to this episode has you thinking, okay, community moderation actually sounds like something I could totally do, then I want to invite you to my last live masterclass of the entire year on December 30th. In this free class, I'm going to walk you through what virtual assistant work really looks like, including simple in-demand services like community moderation and how women are building flexible income truly on their own terms and on their own schedule. By the end of this class, you will know whether VA work is a fit for your lifestyle, your personality, and your income goals as we head into a new year. And you're going to leave with clarity instead of overwhelm because I'm also going to give you three action steps to help you get the ball rolling if you're sitting there feeling like, holy shit, this is it. Like this is the move for me to be making. Join me live on December 30th and let's help you turn this curiosity into action, which is how we're going to turn it into real income in 2026. You can save your seat for the masterclass on the link in the show notes of this episode. And I cannot wait to see you there.

Laura Nicole: 9:58

Thanks for hanging out with me today on your virtual assistant coach. If you love this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister, or even your favorite coworker who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.