Virtual Assistant – THE Blog About Our Industry

About the Virtual Assistant industry for VAs and for clients

Monthly Archives: January 2007

A Great Looking Website Isn’t Everything….

I saw a post tonight regarding websites and their designers. Demetria emphasised the importance of doing your research and making sure you not only get someone who can do your site but make sure they also include your meta tags (keywords and description) and make your site search engine friendly – otherwise no-one is going to find you!

Today I was at a planning coaching day and met a photographer who mentioned she was seeking more work but didn’t seem to have much happening with her website. I’d been talking about hits, Google Adwords and other things I do for my own sites and she asked if I’d have a look? I did and found a beautiful looking site that is image heavy (to be expected for a photographer) and absolutely no meta tags, except for the heading. How on earth are any search engines going to link to her site if there’s nothing (no wording) for them to make use of? I sent her an email listing a number of suggestions of things that could get done.

If you are planning a website it is most important you find out what the designer will do for you – not just in the design, but in ensuring that it is search engine friendly. Otherwise it becomes just another expensive ‘brochure’ online that will only be visited by those who know your web address. If they don’t know who you are, they won’t be able to look you up. A bit like the Yellow Pages versus the White Pages. The White Pages are used if you know the name of the person or business you’re looking for. The Yellow Pages are used when you are seeking a particular type of business but don’t know anyone in that field. People won’t find you unless you’re listed. You won’t get suitably listed if you don’t have the markers in place such as your meta tags. There is more to it but this is a simplified explanation and you need to ask and make sure it is done. If the web designer advises they don’t do this, then either find another designer or engage the services of an internet marketer to work with the designer. KMT

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Remember, You’re On Show

I read a lot of blogs, especially those relating to my industry as a Virtual Assistant.

I am constantly amazed by the bad grammar, spelling and incorrect typing on blogs that are attached to business websites, some of which belong to VAs, or those who are talking about becoming a VA. I saw such a blog just recently, through a Technorati link on Virtual Assistants. This particular person was talking about work at home opportunities and she thought that becoming a VA would be the ideal choice for her. However, if her blog was anything to go by, I doubt she’ll get much work from clients who see her blog first.

Even if typing isn’t going to be the core service for a VA, it is still an important aspect, simply because it is required for written communication. Almost any service provided requires the ability to spell and produce documentation that is written in an acceptable business like manner. And yet I see blogs that have poor spelling, use of no capitals, or all CAPS, SMS style typing and so on.

It is important to remember, like email, that your writing is on display 24 hours a day. This also includes participation in chat forums that could potentially have prospective clients or business partners (other VAs for example) involved. Often your written word is all that others have as their first impression of you. Why not make it count? KMT

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Do You Need a Virtual Assistant?

I saw a post on a ‘Start a Home Business Blog’ today that indicated engaging a virtual assistant was an expensive option. He ended up hiring someone else but didn’t explain what it was he wanted done or any indication of what he was looking to pay.

It is true that there are VAs at the high end of the market and others in the low end so you can shop around. You could engage a high school student or a uni student at the low end rate and providing they have good computer skills, and know their alphabet and numbers, then you could get a reasonable job done. You will, however, need to spend time supervising and checking the work, to make sure it is done as you wanted it. It really depends on whether you’re seeking someone to do some (basic) typing and filing for you, or whether it’s work that involves a lot more thinking and planning, and knowledge such as bookkeeping, database management, transcriptions, website management, graphic design, internet research and so on. When you engage a VA you need to consider a few things such as:

1. What are YOU earning per hour and is it worth sacrificing this if you either do the work yourself and/or engage someone with low skills and then have to spend time to monitor or supervise the work?

2. What is the work you want done? Consider that a VA is usually someone who has worked in the corporate world in a senior role. This means that after you’ve spent some time explaining your business and how you do things, they can be left to get on with the work, make decisions, and even suggest better ways to do things. They will usually be able to complete the work in much faster time than you can. So what might take you 3 hours to do at whatever your hourly rate is, could take a VA half that time at their rate.

3. VAs do NOT need micro-managing. That is, you don’t need to be constantly checking on every little aspect of the job and watching over their shoulder. For this reason VAs do not need someone sitting by their side dictating how the work should be done.

These are just three reasons why a VA can help your business but there are many more. However, just looking at these, I encourage you to do your sums and see how a VA can save you time and money – not cost you time and money. Engaging a VA is a good investment for your business and remember, they are also in business. So they become a taxable expense providing a business service, and should not be considered an employee. KMT

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Boy, am I slow!

So good to see all the links to my post about how starting a Virtual Assistant business is not for the ‘cash poor’, but what I didn’t tell you about are some things I have available to help you become a Virtual Assistant if you are planning to do so. Of course, they are linked to the left side of this blog, but to make them more blatantly obvious, here they are.

I have a coaching program which runs for 10 weeks and covers the following topics:

  • Weeks 1 & 2 – Setting up your business
  • Week 3 – Establishing a virtual presence
  • Week 4 – Inside your office
  • Week 5 – Working your business
  • Week 6 – Planning your day
  • Week 7 – Belonging to the VA community
  • Week 8 – Engaging help
  • Week 9 – Web technology
  • Week 10 – Professionalism & Ethics / Where to from here?

Or, if you would just like to read about becoming a VA then the book ‘How to Become a Virtual Assistant’ is an ideal place to start. There is, of course, a charge for each – the book being the lower cost option, but both will give you good information about working at home and setting up as a VA.

Just a couple more things that will help you on your way in your new career. KMT

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You Gotta Laugh!

It almost reads like a comedy with a phishing story included. But it’s not, it is, or was, reality.

A client of mine has been registered with a free teleconferencing company that has a web based control panel which we’d been using for teleseminars. Late last year she got an email saying that she needed to renew her registration and they’d changed their number. She sent it to me and I said, ok, we’ll need to update the web promotion – which we did for this year.

We logged in yesterday after dialling in to pre-test the system for Thursday’s event (which is what we always do), and started to run into problems. She was never asked for her pin code to be the moderator of the call, therefore the recording mode was not operable. I could log into the website but was unable to access the web control interface which helps us to track the number of callers on the line, to mute out those who aren’t speaking, and so on. Something was definitely wrong.

I tried to fill out their contact form but it wanted a list of code numbers relating to the call – I only had two of them and they needed four. I’d not needed that many before. My client gave me an email address she had for the head guy so I emailed him outlining our problems and I got a quick response of apology advising we’d been given the wrong phone number for a recording account and he would organise that straight away.

A new number and code number was given to us and we realised we’d need to notify all the attendees for the conference coming up so I prepared an email to go out, but didn’t send it till my client had approved it. We kept missing each other yesterday and finally caught up with each other this morning prior to the call. Something was still amiss and so I tried again and sent an email. I wanted to know why we no longer had web access and the reply was they’d never had it but that their service didn’t need it. That’s when the penny dropped. It was a different teleconferencing company.

It seems what happened last year was that a teleconference company my client had made contact with, and registered with, about 12 months previous sent her an email to renew her registration. They have a very similar domain name and use the same colouring on their website. What made it more difficult for us was that the website we had been logging into regularly had changed its look over the Christmas period and things were in different places. So, with the changed website we’d thought nothing of the changed phone number and code number either. I’d not been able to access the web control panel because my client wasn’t dialled into their system but we had no way of knowing that at the time. A series of things led us in the wrong direction entirely.

Now, if we can make this mistake with a genuine company that emailed us and end up in the wrong place, imagine how much more difficult it would have been had we fallen for one of those phishing emails and logged in with important and private information? Thank goodness that wasn’t the case and thank goodness we’d not sent that email out – because another would have had to go as well with yet another number and the original code we’d had in the first place. Egg off our faces, we updated the email that was going out with the correct phone number and code, after we both dialled in, and I accessed the website and we tested the system. It worked! KMT

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