Pinterest Virtual Assistant Interview #6 – Meet Yi Ming Lai

This is the sixth (#6) interview of a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, Yi Ming Lai, who will tell you about how she started working from home and more

If you haven’t read the first three remote job interview, you can check it out

Work from home job interview 2: Meet Drew Drew Duboff – Virtual Assistant

Work from home Job Interview #1 Meet Montse – Translator & blogger

Voice over jobs from home interview #3 – Meet Julie – A voice artist

Work from home job interview #4 – Meet Jessica (Blogger and Businesswoman)

Freelance writing for beginners interview #5: Meet Lisa Tanner

For those of you who have read the first five interview of our remote job series, you can skip directly to the interview about Pinterest virtual assistant.

Today, we have Yi Ming Lai with us and she will talk about tips and tricks to be a Pinterest virtual assistant.

If you are a new reader, let me tell you something about this series.

A lot of my readers are looking for remote jobs and a few of you may be struggling to grow your online business. I receive emails where a lot of you have asked me questions on how to find remote jobs, start working from home, are work from home jobs scam, what are my options etc

The purpose of this interview post is to tell you how others have successfully created a dream job of their own, earning a full-time living (at least $1k-2k+ a month) and staying at home to work.

This post may contain affiliate links to products I trust. This means if you make a purchase using the links I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for the support!

Relevant Reads: 

50+ work from home options that are high paying

How to be a freelance proofreader and earn $40000 a year

The questions in this interview will help you understand

• What are the different remote jobs
• How to use your existing experience and convert it into a work from home job
• What resources can help you
• What are the challenges that others have faced and how they overcame it
• How much money can you expect to make (and, no whopping 100k claims, I promise)
• Whether or not your inhibitions are true

If you read the entire interview series, I promise you will overcome some of your challenges and motivated into taking action (because real people are going to talk about how they did it and how you can too)

And, what better time in the year, than NOW to start working from home. It is the holiday season and you can take out a few hours each day working on setting the work from home job that you like.

Today, we have Yi Ming Lai with us and she will talk about tips and tricks to be a Pinterest virtual assistant.

You will enjoy this interview because she has so much valuable information to share.

#1 Tell me something about yourself and your work

My name is Yi Ming. I’m a full-time Pinterest virtual assistant for small business owners, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. I live in Sydney, Australia.

Note: If you are new to the word “Virtual Assistant”, I highly recommend you to check out this blog post on How to become a Virtual Assistant and earn $100 an hour along with this detailed resource. 

I started using Pinterest originally in March of 2018 to promote my own products on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT). After hearing about the amazing potential of Pinterest as a marketing tool from a fellow TPT seller, I began to experiment with Pinterest and Tailwind to drive sales and traffic to my TPT store.

After a while of using Pinterest, I began to find lots of articles about how to make money on Pinterest. Curious, I started doing a lot of research and discovered that you can actually make a living as a Pinterest virtual assistant!

So now, I work 20 hours a week managing Pinterest for Shopify sellers, bloggers, and other business owners.

#2 How did you get into working from home as a Pinterest virtual assistant?

I stumbled onto this by accident.

I initially wanted to work from home as a freelance proofreader and blogger. While going through the proofreading course, I realized that proofreading was not for me as I quickly became bored with it.

While searching for other online businesses that would be a good fit for me, I discovered the Work At Home Woman blog. From there, I discovered a whole new world about virtual assisting. That’s when I decided to invest in an online course to become a Pinterest virtual assistant. After 6 months of full- time hustling, I became a full-fledged, work-at-home Pinterest virtual assistant

#3 Did you have any inhibitions about working from home? If yes, how did you overcome it? Did something help (any online resource)?

Yes, I did.

As I was still working part-time as a piano teacher 4 months ago, working from home would mean that I would need to adjust to a whole new working schedule. My main concern was that I would be too lonely and feel bored over time.

Another issue I had was the fact that I really hated my job. I wanted to quit my job so bad but I only had one client. However, I decided to quit in August as my job was affecting my mental health and my marriage. I was worried that I would not be able to pay my bills after I quit.

Since quitting my job in August, I am beginning to LOVE working from home. Apart from scheduling my work, I also schedule time for leisure, meeting my friends, exercise and family time.

One of the best things I’ve done to keep a healthy work-life balance is time blocking. I used to work non-stop for 4 hours at a time and always be on my laptop between my regular job and down-time. That was very detrimental to my mental health as I quickly
became depressed and burnt out. Now, I try to LIMIT my working hours and the time I spend on my laptop.

Having a clear and organized way of managing my time, writing down goals and tasks as well as keeping a daily journal has increased my productivity by 200%!

Being a member of many supportive Facebook groups have also given me the support that I needed. As a work at a home Pinterest virtual assistant, not many people really understand what I do for a living(including family members). So having people in the same industry as me as my support group really helps!

#4 How long have you been doing this as your main source of living? When did you start seeing money coming in?

I’ve been a Pinterest virtual assistant/manager since July of this year. I started doing this full-time in September. So within a month of quitting my job, I’ve managed to land 6 clients! I would say this is my 3rd month of having stable and consistent income from Pinterest management.

I highly recommend you to check out this FB live on How to make $$ on Pinterest. It is a gem of a video on how to become a virtual assistant and make money on Pinterest!

#5 Can you share the approximate (monthly or yearly) income from this online business? You don’t need to be exact – whatever you are comfortable with.

I am now making around $2500 a month, but I have goals of doubling my income in 2019. A Pinterest virtual assistant typically makes more than $36,000 a year.

#6 What were the top 3 challenges that you faced while getting started?

The biggest challenge for me, in the beginning, was my self-doubt. As I had no paying clients and experience as a Pinterest manager, I was struggling to market myself and at times did not believe in my own abilities.

The second challenge was finding clients. It’s not the fact that there are not many clients looking for Pinterest VAs or managers. My biggest struggle was getting potential leads to actually respond to my emails and pitching. I was going about it entirely wrong. I thought that I needed to sell myself in my pitches with data and numbers.

After 3 weeks of quitting my job and struggling to land new clients, I began to realize that I should be focusing on my own Pinterest profile, my work with me page AND my professionalism. I also started sharing the results I achieved through my own Pinterest for my blog and participating in discussions on Facebook groups.

Note: It is important to have a services website if you are going to be a Pinterest Virtual Assistant. It is help you showcase your clientbase, work, results and much more. 

You can start a blog with as little as $3.95 a month or Rs. 276 a month (if you are in India, you can also opt for Hostgator for Rs. 350 a month) or go with the free options. However, I do not recommend using free options. You can read about other options here and here.

You can use this step by step tutorial to get your WordPress blog up and running. If you have difficulty in understanding the basics (like domain name, wordpress.org or .com, hosting etc), you can read this article on website basics.

If you do not want to invest in a website designer (which I did not, and created this website on my own), buy a theme builder like Elementor. It is super easy and is almost drag and drop.

Lastly, I also struggled with staying organized with multiple clients. As this was all entirely new to me, I did not learn how to get organized with my business.

After struggling for a couple of months disorganized, I finally bought myself a book called “Get Remarkably Organised” by Lorraine Murphy. This book inspired me to declutter, keep my business expenses and my work schedule organised.

#7 If you could go back in time, what would you change that would help you get where you are (now) faster?

I would definitely tell my past self to stop spreading myself too thin and focus on the quality of my work. In the beginning, I was so desperate to hit the income target that I kept accepting new clients and projects.

Needless to say, I quickly became overwhelmed and stressed. During this period of my Pinterest management career, I had to stop overworking, fire a few clients and create a working schedule that made sense to me.

For all aspiring VAs or Pinterest virtual assistant out there, I would advise you to know your worth, don’t spread yourself too thin and provide the best service you can to all of your clients. That’s a surefire way to build a successful business through word of mouth and referrals!

#8 What does a typical day of your look like? How much time in a day do you spend on this?

My day typically starts at 9 am in the morning. I work in 5-6 half-hour blocks each day. As I use Tailwind to automate a lot of my work, I usually work no more than 4 hours a day on my clients’ Pinterest.

So in a typical week, I would work around 20 hours. Sometimes, I would take on some freelancing projects to increase my income. As I also run a blogging business and several other online ventures, I can only devote this amount of hours to my Pinterest VA clients.

#9 What types of skills and/or tools are needed to run this online business successfully?

To become a successful Pinterest virtual assistant, here are a few skills you would need:

• Pinterest skills
• Canva graphic design skills(basic to intermediate)
• Time management and organizational skills
• Great eye for detail
• Email writing skills
• Basic business understanding
• In terms of tools, you would need:
  -A professional-looking website with a “work with me” page
  -Business name, brand name, and logo
  -Invoicing and bookkeeping tool
  -Project management( I use Asana )

#10 Do you recommend any course, blog etc which can help in this journey?

I highly recommend the Become a Pinterest VA Today! online course. This course is the single course that taught me everything I needed about launching my own Pinterest VA and management business, the business and Pinterest aspects of my job as well as
continued support on Facebook.

Other courses I took that taught me a lot about Pinterest include:

• Pinteresting strategies by Carly from Mommy On Purpose

Note: I personally recommend Pinteresting Strategies to everyone. This course helped me understand Pinterest and reach 500k pageviews within a few months. 

• Pinterest Traffic Avalanche by Create and Go
• Ultimate Bundle’s Genius Bloggers Toolkit
• Pinterest Ninja ebook by Megan from Love Family Health

#11 Last but not least, what should be the learning process (or steps) for someone aspiring to be a Pinterest virtual assistant?

It’s not complicated at all to become a Pinterest virtual assistant. However, you have to be willing to invest the time, energy and money required to be one. Do some research online about which courses to take, learn the best practices of Pinterest as well as practice Pinterest on yourself!

If you can produce great results for your own blog, Etsy store or Shopify website using great Pinterest marketing strategies, chances are you can do that for paying clients as well.

Another great asset to being a sought-after the Pinterest manager is to invest in a great website. Get your own hosting, learn a few basic web design skills, design your own logo and put some thought into your brand.

Doing all this work up front means that you’ll have a smoothly run and thriving Pinterest management business. Best of luck!

I highly recommend you to sign up on the waitlist of becoming a Pinterest VA and learn the tricks of the trade from someone who earns $4k+ a month working part-time. 

Are you ready to become a virtual assistant and offer Pinterest services? Any concerns or doubts? Comment below and ask away!