I was asked recently on a VA forum what my business name meant? The person asking didn’t want to be rude but she was very curious. Since she is based in a different country to me I can understand that the meaning wouldn’t be obvious. So, I thought I’d share my explanation here for others who are curious.

Especially because I’ve been absolutely dying to ask since I first saw the name a few years ago…how did you come up with your company name? I looked on the website (hopefully it’s not there and obvious and I just missed it) but didn’t see anything – I thought it would be rude to email and ask because you might think I was being weird instead of curious.

That’s fine, I’ve been asked lots of times, and yes, it is on my site, but perhaps not nearly as obvious as it should be. Go to http://www.vadirectory.net/aboutus.htm and read the very bottom paragraph and it explains it there. I had a story written up in a European magazine back in 1999 explaining it and it’s been explained in a few other publications from time to time. Perhaps I should put an explanation on my blog too for people to read. It all makes perfect sense once you know the background

Wikipedia also has an explanation on their site – not of my name but what the term ‘claytons’ means. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytons,

wikipedia, business name, claytons

I’ve been a tad quiet of late – usually a sign I’ve been quite busy. Three of my client associations have AGMs coming up and I’ve had preparations to do for all of them. Add to that our youngest daughter is getting married this weekend, and I’ve got family members coming to stay and others will also be visiting from interstate and things will get somewhat hectic. I’ve already notified my regular clients that I’ll be slow to answer for a few days and non-contactable for two days but if they need assistance during that time, to let me know in advance so I can get my team to assist them.

The beauty of having a support team behind you and that’s one of the great things about this industry. Because we’re ‘virtual’ it means that passing on client work to someone for assistance is easily done in most cases because you don’t have to have them come into your office to look after things – they can do it from their’s. You can give a brief background, pass on relevant documents and contact details and allow the client to be looked after for a short period of time. I did the same when my husband and I travelled overseas earlier this year.

If you’re interested in the happenings of the Thomas family, then visit our blog listed in my blogroll. There should be wedding photos up there early next week. KMT

I came across a program recently that allows you to log into your blog (almost any blog platform) and submit a post. The tool is like a mini version of MS Word and allows you to easily edit your post, add images, and set the properties for the image, even link voicefiles. I did find the connection set up a minor challenge but after going back and viewing their set up video it became more obvious what to do.

So this post is a test using that program. I saw it written up in a newsletter for public speakers in the US. You can download a 30 day trial at http://www.blogjet.com/. The good thing about this program is that you can prepare your posts and save them on your computer as drafts and then when you’re finished you can publish from the program and it posts it online. You can tick the setting that says ‘delete draft after publishing’ so you don’t end up with heaps of old files on your computer.

As a Virtual Assistant it is worth subscribing to newsletters for your client’s industry. For example I support public speakers, consultants, trainers and business coaches. So I like to read the newsletters and websites they might frequent and it’s good to keep in touch with their industry changes as it alerts me to further services I could provide to my clients. I began blogging because of a client request. And I’ve learnt a number of other programs because of needs various clients had. I also frequent discussion forums for different client industries in order to learn about their particular needs, to assist with research when asked, and also to continue making others in those industries aware of my own industry of Virtual Assistant. What better way to promote to your target market than to mix and mingle with them in their own environment?

Another item I use that I find particularly useful is a program named Tag Editor which is a Firefox Add on and I can enter in words or phrases and it creates Technorati tags for my posts. Unfortunately I can’t link it with Blogjet so have to move from one screen to another but that’s a minor issue. KMT

blog post, blog platform, virtual assistant, public speakers, business coaches, discussion forums

I had a VA contact me today, concerned because she’d been ‘off the air’ and unable to access her website and email. She’d had to use a free email account to send a message to me. The webhost had taken her payment but not kept record of it and had taken her off the web. She had proof she’d made payment – it showed up in her statements but they were being difficult to contact and not responding.

There is a very important thing for all to realise in a situation like this. What belongs to you and what you should have control of.

If you own a domain name you should have log in access to make changes to it, for example if you wish to shift webhosts, you should be able to log in and make the appropriate changes to point the domain to a new webspace. Having your ISP or webhost organise a domain for you is fine, but you should have log in access and control as the owner. I’ve lost count of the number of clients I’ve helped recover access to their domains – when I’ve been able to investigate the domains I’ve often found that either the webhost or the ISP was listed as the Tech, Admin & Registrant contacts – the client’s name wasn’t listed anywhere.

If you don’t have access to your domain name, change that situation today. Register with a registrar today and then apply to get your domains transferred from wherever they are currently.

Furthermore, if you have had a website designed for you, you should have access to log in and download the files, or have them sent to you. When you engage someone to design a website for you and you’ve paid them for it – the site belongs to you. They have no right to withhold it – providing you have paid for what was done. The webhost or designer does not hold ownership of what you engaged them to do.

So, if you have either ISP (internet access) or webhost (where your domain and website is housed) problems, you should be able to set up with a new ISP or a new webhost and have your domain and website transferred over within the 24 hour period in most cases. Often much less than that – perhaps 2-3 hours, depending on the situation.

Make sure you know what you own, what you have access to, and that you know where to go to get help if you need to shift things quickly. KMT

web host, ISP, domain registrar, domain name, off the air

First published May 2003.

Further to my previous issues this subject continues – part III.
This month I’ll share on Topic Changes and Read Receipts. Both can give you some trouble if you’re not careful.

Topic changes
This applies particularly to discussion groups, but could also take place in normal everyday exchange of emails between two or more people.

It is common that subject matter in emails change quickly – one person might send an email with one topic, another replies and it prompts them to add another topic in that reply and then others start replying to the changed topic – but forget to change the subject heading – which can be very confusing for those later joining in the discussion and difficult to relocate one of the originating messages if filed away electronically – with the unchanged subject heading. This applies to searching through archives online also.

When responding to an email take a moment to think about it – are you changing the topic, should the subject heading be changed and whether the replied message requires any trimming of the original message before hitting the ‘send’ key. This can be particularly important when responding to business leads or enquiries relating to your business. A general rule of thumb for email seems to be to keep the number of topics discussed to a minimum – and start new email messages for new topics.

Auto Responders and Read Receipts
A supplier, who gives me excellent computer support, had been receiving a lot of emails over the past few months and she struggled to keep up with them in her busy workload. So, she decided to set up an auto respond to emails saying she’ll be in touch within 7 days. She also added ‘read receipt’ so she knew her message had been read.

Not long after I started getting a lot of emails from this supplier, all with the same message (autorespond). I’d sent her a few messages some days before about a computer problem a client was experiencing. After around 75 of these messages I rang and left a message on her pager. 150 more emails and I rang again. Her business partner rang and said he was heading back to their office to see what was happening. More emails.

My supplier rang the following morning sounding very sheepish. She hadn’t thought about the consequences of an auto respond linked with a read receipt. In her defence, she’d been very tired and was working late. Every time my computer logged another of her responses it sent back a read receipt and her autoresponder sent another reply to my read receipt, autorespond, read receipt, autorespond, read receipt, autorespond………. get the picture? I had some idea of what might be happening but could not stop the process. All I could do was block her email address at my end until she woke up to what was happening.

Just thought you might appreciate what can happen if read receipt, and auto respond are used together without thinking as to why you would do that. Of course, if you use them separately you are unlikely to run into this kind of trouble. Next month I’ll touch on using the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) field and the use of backgrounds for your emails. KMT

topic changes, subject headings, read receipt,autoresponders, bcc

Does this sound like you? Have you wondered why that might be?

The chat forums are a great way to learn about your industry, mix and mingle with other VAs (or whatever your industry might be) and pick up work. However, unless you monitor your membership with these forums, you may find you’re missing out on information or worse still, a job referral! Because the forums have addresses that are used by hundreds of thousands of people, it also means that they have their fair share of spammers and people who misuse the system. Consequently there will be times when your ISP may block any email coming from a particular domain address, for example, yahoogroups.com. It means then that any group messages to your email address will bounce and you won’t be receiving them.

Of course the bounces can happen for all sorts of reasons and often for temporary situations where your mailbox might be full*, the mailserver overloaded or something else.

So, if you belong to a forum you know normally posts every day, or every few days and it’s been a week and you haven’t received a message, it’s time you logged in and checked that all is in order and there aren’t any messages saying your address is bouncing.

A good rule of thumb is to register more than one email address with your forum account so that if one address is experiencing receipt problems, you can swap to another address for a period of time so you don’t miss out.

* Note – if you’re running a business and dependent on your email, your mailbox should not get full regularly. You can’t afford to let that happen. Either increase your mailbox size or learn to clear it out every single day. You wouldn’t let the phone stay engaged indefinitely and you wouldn’t let your snail mail box overflow so nothing else could be delivered, so don’t do the same with your email.  KMT
chat forums, full mailbox, bounced email, virtual assistant