Visions Virtual Assistance Blog

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As a lifelong learner, one of the things I love about being a virtual assistant is the ability to learn from so many different people. Each of my clients is so different and each has their own habits, some good, some not so good.

I’d like to share with you a good habit that a client has that I have recently adopted. That is, keeping the subject line in an email intact and changing it when the conversation changes. It is such a simple habit that can save you lots of time in the future.

I have to admit that I am guilty of answering an email, then adding a paragraph or two at the end that is completely unrelated to the subject line. I guess in my rationale, I had decided that one email with several subjects is more efficient than several separate emails.

The problem comes when you are looking for a piece of information later. If the subject was X , how will I know a month - or even a week - from now how to find that second bit of information if the subject doesn’t mention it? The answer is that I now have to read each and every piece of email and hope that I don’t skim past the information I am looking for.

I caught myself this morning almost hitting send without changing the subject line. It may take me 21 days, but this is a habit that I am committed to changing.

Technorati Tags: communication, email, email marketing, subject lines

Have you ever avoided posting to your blog because it’s just too much trouble getting to the right posting page?

In 4 easy steps you can create a desktop shortcut that will take you directly to the posting page with one click. Hint: You can click on any of the images to see a larger version.

STEP 1: Open the dashboard of your blog and go to the Write Post page. Highlight the address of that page, right click, then copy the address to your clipboard as shown below. At this point you can close the blog.

STEP 2: On your desktop, right click and highlight New. A menu will pop out. The second choice of that menu is Shortcut. Click on that.

STEP 3: Paste the address that you copied in the address area as shown below. Then click Next.

STEP 4: Give your shortcut a name.

Now test your new shortcut. You may have to log in if you don’t allow your computer to save your passwords.

Technorati Tags: blog shortcut, blogging tips, Wordpress

People call success many different things. Usually people choose a specific goal and figure that when they reach that goal they will be a success. I remember an old girlfriend of my brother. To her, getting a BMW meant she was a success. To others it may be recognition or an award that tells them they are a success.

I say success is tied to quality of life. Goals are great because they give you something to reach for. Each time you reach them, they are like mini-successes, but now you need a new goal. There are many miserable people driving BMWs. My brother’s ex-girlfriend is one.

A true successful person is happy to get out of bed in the morning, every morning. They are happy with everything they do during their day. I dare to say that you can’t call your business a success until your personal life is exactly how you envisioned it. Well, you can, but you’d be living a lie.

Part I:  Where do you want your business to be?

For this first part of the exercise, sit down with a notebook and mentally catapult your self into the future. Bring yourself to a time when your business is wildly successful. Now, write out what your personal life looks like. Why do your personal life first? Because ultimately starting a business is all about raising your quality of life.  

So, let’s begin… What time do you get up? What do you eat? Who is with you? Where do you live? What does your house look like? What kind of car do you drive? What do you weigh? What time do you go to bed? Fill in as many details as possible and make this day as perfect as possible.

Next, write down your future self’s perfect day at work. What hours do you work? What do you do during those hours? Do you have employees? How much money do you make? Where is your office located?

It may take you a few days to do this portion of the exercise. Especially if you don’t typically daydream about your future. It’s important to know where you want to be or you won’t know when you get there, and more importantly, you won’t know when you are on the wrong path.

PART II:  Where you are in your business right now.

For this portion of the exercise you are going to assess your business first. I wouldn’t expect your personal life to be perfect yet since you are still in a building mode. No daydreaming and be honest. No one sees this paper but you.

How much money are you making. How many clients or customers do you have? How much is each one worth to you, money-wise? What are your working hours? What tasks do you do during the day?

Part III:  Purge what doesn’t belong to make room for what does

You should start to get a clear picture about now. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be.

I watch those cleaning/organizing shows on HGTV. They have you make 3 piles: keep, give away, throw away. Start with the things you are paying monthly for. If they are not bringing you the benefits you had expected, dump them. And go right through the rest of your business. If something works, keep doing it. If it’s not working, get rid of it. If you and a client aren’t meshing, give them away. Make space for more of the good things.

Part IV: What is missing?

What is in your perfect day that’s missing from your current life. Each of those things will be your mini-goals.

The trick is to do this exercise at least yearly to keep you on track to reaching your ultimate success goal - a perfect personal life.

Technorati Tags: business planning, goals, success

Some people like to network face to face, others do it online. By network, I mean, getting known to people who may one day use what you have to sell or may know someone else who needs what you sell.

I have heard people say they feel more productive if they get dressed in the morning as if they were going into an office. That’s fine for them. Those are the same people who typically like to attent networking events. I network almost completely online because I don’t like putting on uncomfortable business clothes and wearing makeup. I work virtually so I can throw on a pair of jeans, tye my hair in a ponytail and be done with it. Online it doesn’t matter what you are wearing.  It only matters that you do a good job.

So which is better? It really doesn’t matter - as long as you are doing it!  Networking doesn’t mean joining forums and then lurking , either. Whether you are new to business and just shy or you’ve gotten too busy, you cannot grow your business from the point of where you are now if you do not network. Find the time to network and muster up the courage to post.

Networking can be one of the cheapest forms of advertising your business. Obviously both types of networking require certain tools that you may have to purchase. But you can easily control the cost. The cost to not network is lost business.

Technorati Tags: local networking, networking, online networking

I am challenging you to go into the dashboard of your blog, update your plugins, and deactivate or delete unused plugins.

Why? Because every plugin or widget you have comes with it’s own set of files. When a visitor comes to your site, Wordpress has to call each and every file to load your page. Unused files simply slow the process down. And since Wordpress is continually coming out with newer versions, plugins have to keep up. So they come out with versions to stay compatible.

To access the log in screen, go to www.your-site.com/wp-admin or click on the link in your Meta area that says Login or Site Admin. On the top right hand side you will see the word Plugins. It may or may not have a red number above it. That red number tells you how many plugins need updating. Click on it and the page with the list of all your plugins will open up.

(click on this image to see it in a larger window)

Go down the list. If there are any plugins that you do not use, delete them. Sometimes we look at a plugin and it sounds cool so we add it, then find out it didn’t work as we thought it would so we abandon it. Other times we just find we don’t need the features it offered, or we found an easier solution. That leaves us with lots of extra files hanging around.

To delete a plugin, first deactivate it. Then you will have the option to delete it.  If any of your plugins that you do use suggests that you upgrade, also do that now.

You may not have even realized how much a certain plugin was slowing your blog down until you delete it.

Technorati Tags: blogs, challenge, plugins

Well I guess I’ve hit the big time. I came to post to my blog and found 44 instances of spam waiting for me to give the final Whap! and send them off into oblivion.

I’m using Askiment, the spam filter that came with Wordpress. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into the plug ins I’ve been using and promoting and I am finding out lots of interesting stuff. Did you know that Askimet runs comments through their server? Yup, they have a blacklist and if a commenter is on it, their comments don’t get through. That’s a good reason to make sure you are the one who makes the final decision as to what is spam and what isn’t.

If you don’t like that idea, there’s another choice, SpamKarma2. It decides what is spam and what isn’t based on the criteria that you set up.

I’ve used them both, sometimes at the same time, lol. They both do their job, which is catching spam.

Technorati Tags: askimet, plugins, spam, SpamKarma2

“Know what is good about your competition“. This line was written by Felicia Slattery in one of her free email courses that I subscribed to. She goes on to explain why she feels you should know what’s good about them, but it got me thinking about why I think it’s a good idea to know what’s good about them.

What’s good about your competition can be why someone chooses your competition over you. It may be something you cannot compete with, either. Charisma, for example, is something you either have or don’t. It’s not something you can purchase or fake. Back when I sold real estate there was an agent that had charisma. Me, well, I like to think I’m fun. But I am not a charmer. This other agent was a charmer. Everyone liked him, or wanted to be more like him. From what I could tell most of his business was buyers. At the time so was most of mine. Our buyers were pretty much in the same price range so that made him my direct competition. Whenever I showed a property that he also showed, it usually came down to his client or mine. Lots of times he won out and my buyers were left to find another property.

I couldn’t compete with his charisma, but I could compensate by being knowledgable about the market and about the properties that I showed my buyers. I never had a buyer think, “I wish I had chosen him as my agent.” Knowing his good points helped me to know where to up mine.

The side effect was that my competence gained his attention. When he opened his own office he contacted me and asked me to be a buyer’s agent for him. I turned him down, though. I had too much fun competing against him to work for him.

Technorati Tags: competence, competition

The first benefit of blogging is that you are building a relationship with your reader. In this world of faceless internet users, it is a way for your customers to get to know you on a more personal level. So much trust is lost when our customers can’t see our facial expressions and body language. Your blog can help build that trust and familiarity that is missing.

Second, blogging is one of the fastest ways to get the attention of the search engines. Having a page rank shows your customers you didn’t open your business doors yesterday and you may be around tomorrow. If your blog has new, relevant content regularly, you will rank higher faster.

Ok, blogs are great. But let’s face it, blogs require regular attention. You have to keep posting to make it worth anything. You have to pretty much daily, approve comments and delete spam.

If you are finding that this sounds like you:

• I’ve tried blogging but just can’t think of anything to blog about?
• I’ve started a blog but just don’t have time to keep up with it?
• My blog is, um….. ugly!
• Blog? What blog?

If any of that sounds like you, then you may want to give me a call.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs

Sending email to people who did not ask for it is Spam. If you met someone at a mixer and they gave you their business card, you still cannot send them anything related to your business without their permission. So what’s the point of gathering business cards and contact information if you can’t send them anything?

If you’ve ever seen a web page where there was a place for you to sign up to receive something, that’s an Opt-in list builder. Basically, the law says that someone has to give you permission for you to send them anything about your business. What companies do to show that permission is that they ask people to fill out a form, typically asking for a first name and an email address, sometimes more, that’s located on their web site. Then they send an email to the address asking the recipient to click on a link saying that they really did ask for this information. This is called a double opt-in. Clicking on the second email proves that the person who owns the email address really meant to be put on your mailing list and that it wasn’t a prankster who signed them up.

So why would people want to sign up to receive email that’s trying to sell them something? Because they want the free gift being offered in exchange for permission to email them. The more valuable the gift, the more people will sign up for it.

There are a couple more rules that you need to be aware of when sending business email. Most important is that every email must contain a way for the recipient to opt-out. They must be able to tell you that they no longer want to receive your email.

Going back to the business card you collected at the mixer, what you can do is ask the person if it’s ok for you to email them more information about your business. If they say yes, you are then free to send them information, at least one time. If your intention is to put them on your general emailing list, try to get them to double opt in by sending them to your opt-in page on your web site.

Now, some people have been building a list without anyone opting-in. What can you do to be in compliance with the law is to simply send an individual email (not cc or bcc) to each person inviting them to subscribe to your email list. Again, offer something of value in exchange for their permission.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, spam

It’s really funny how there’s so much information on the internet, but when you’re looking for something and you don’t type in the right keywords, you can’t find it. I was recently looking for an autoresponder when I should have been looking for a sequential autoresponder. Apparently they are two different things.

An autoresponder sends an email message in response to someone sending you an email. You may have seen these when someone is out of the office or gone on vacation. You send them an email and you get an immediate response saying the person is out of the office and what their instructions are. Most web hosts offer you a set number of autoresponder emails, not very helpful if you want to send a training course.

A sequential autoresponder is a timed series of email messages. Typically you’d have to sign up for a company to send out a sequential autoresponder. There is one more option, you can have someone set this up on your own web server using MySQL. If you choose to do it this way, be extra careful to ensure people double opt in to your mailing list. You don’t want to have your ISP banned from the email companies.

A good use of an autoresponder is that when someone signs up for your newsletter, you can offer a free download. When they sign up, an email is automatically sent to the prospect asking them to click on a link. Once they click on the link, the autoresponder sends a second email. This is the email you put the link to their free download in. You set it up once and forget about it until you want to change the item you are offering.

Because there’s no limit to the amount of emails you put into a sequential autoresponder, this is best when you want to send a series of emails where person A signs up today and immediately gets email #1, then he gets email #2 so many days later, and so on. Person B signs up next week and he also gets email #1 immediately with email #2 coming on the same schedule.

This is different from an ezine. With an ezine, person A signs up today and gets this month’s issue. Person B signs up next week and he doesn’t get anything until the next issue is sent. Like a magazine subscription, person A and person B get the same issue at the same time.

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, ezine, sequential autoresponder