Virtual Assistant – THE Blog About Our Industry

About the Virtual Assistant industry for VAs and for clients

Monthly Archives: April 2010

Virtual Assistant Forums – their benefits

I’ve mentioned from time to time the various VA forums I belong to.  It’s where some of my material comes from to share on this blog. Today I want to share on the benefits of forums like these.

If you are a VA and if you are working alone, then becoming a member of 2 or 3 VA forums would be very beneficial to you.  Don’t mix up the forums with the networks.  Many networks have forums attached to them but not all forums are attached to a network.  The forums are usually free to join and some have a few hundred, others have a thousand or several thousand members. Even with that larger number that doesn’t mean there are thousands of messages every day, usually just a few hundred a month and it’s often the same people who get involved with the chats.

The great thing about these forums though is that you’re learning from the best in the industry. Those who have walked their talk and have the experience to back up what they write about and share.  As a result these forums are often to new VAs as honey is to bees and they are well worth joining.  Of those connected to VA Networks it also gives you some insight to the culture and benefit of those networks before you decide to invest in a paid membership with the networks.  It gives you an opportunity to get to know some of the members and find out what they get out of the paid memberships.  You get to mix and mingle with their members.

What if you aren’t a VA but perhaps a client who uses a VA?  Are there forums out there for you? Most likely. There are thousands upon thousands of forums out there on almost any topic imagineable.  You can join forums based on your industry, your personal hobbies and interests, family needs and so on.  Yahoogroups.com is probably one of the more well known facilitators of such groups but there are heaps of other forums, many that aren’t email based but perhaps operate via a board type forum with email notification of answers.  Why not do a search to find something you like?

And for those of you interested in joining a VA forum here’s a list of both networks and forums to get you started.  Perhaps I’ll see you online at some of them sometime soon.

The blog has a new look!

If you receive this post via email or RSS you might just want to drop by the blog itself as it has a totally new look. The theme is the same as the main website but with some differences and the last 10 posts all on the front page.  To view the full post just click on the title.

I hope you like the new look – it will probably take a little while to get used to.  Although it’s easy to change from one template to another simply by choosing and clicking, it’s another thing when you want to completely modify the template which has been done for this blog and our main website.

Change, the essence of life

“Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender
what you are for what you could become.”

The above was part of a promotion for AIOP’s Annual Office Professional Breakfast held each year here in Australia. One of my team had posted an invite to the Sydney breakfast and wanted to know if anyone else at the forum was intending to go.

Seeing the promotion took me back several years.

It was 1993 and I attended the breakfast in Melbourne. In those days it was called “Secretaries Day” and it was put on by IPSA (Institute of Professional Secretaries Australia), now known as Australian Institute of Office Professionals (AIOP).  They announced the inaugural ‘Member of the Year Award’ and my boss and a couple of other co-workers were at the breakfast with me. Cyndi Kaplan was the speaker and I bought her book ‘There’s a Lipstick in My Briefcase’.

It was at that breakfast that the seeds were sown for me to start up my own business. I was getting fed up with the rat race of travelling in traffic, or getting held up by cancelled trains and I just so wanted to stay home for my family.   Cyndi was very inspiring and I wanted to be like her – free to meet people, go places, not be trapped in a corporate office.  It was also at that breakfast that one of my co-workers said to my boss that they should nominate me for the award.  I thought they were joking.  If only they knew the thoughts that were going on inside my head!

Advance forward 6 months and I’m at the awards ceremony where the winner was to be announced. I’d already gone through interviews and knew I was a finalist.  My name was announced and my husband whispered in my ear ‘I always knew it was you’.  Microsoft amongst other companies provided prizes for the winner – the MS Office Suite 2.0.  I didn’t have a computer at home and didn’t need the software for my computer at work. So my husband and I decided to purchase our first PC for home at Tandys at Christmastime. It was late 1993, the computer was huge, a 40mb hdd and it cost us well over $4,000AUD.

3 months later I was opening the doors of my brand new business.  I wonder if my boss and colleagues would have nominated me if they knew it meant they were going to lose me?

Re-read the words at the top of this post.  Was I scared of what I was planning to do?  You betcha! But I was also scared of what might happen if I didn’t try!  I could become permanently trapped in a world I wasn’t enjoying.

Why don’t you book to attend a breakfast this year? Who knows what it might lead to for you?

New look coming!

Those of you who receive my newsletter or visit my website regularly will by now have seen our new look website.  This blog will be undergoing a similar change very soon so stay tuned.

The new look has been several months in the pipeline and this is partly due to research regarding membership software. I wanted my Virtual Assistant team to be able to login and update their own profiles as they wished and as has often been requested. Time to move on with current trends for membership sites.

Do you know I’ve been running a membership site since 1996?  Long before they became popular and before software had been developed for them. So I managed with Dreamweaver and ACT! and more recently, using Ning to manage members’ broadcast emails and jobleads as they came in.

So enter Wishlist Member Software which will open new possibilities I’m sure.  While the new look site is now in place I’m still working on the capabilities for members to log into the site and edit their own profiles but believe I’m very close to the mark now.  Things we’ve had to explore have included changing the properties for the roles in WordPress so that members can edit a page rather than just a post but a useful plugin has been located for that also.

Interesting isn’t it? You decide to make a change with a website and along comes with it a whole new learning curve and new tools to make that thing happen.

What is a VA and where do you find them?

I’ve been invited to be the Guest Expert at the Business Forum of Experts starting from tomorrow and we will be discussing the above topic.

If you’re an Aussie business you might like to join this forum and explore what there is to offer.

One of the things that I find in my industry is that all too often people who have heard of VAs do not seem to know where to find them, and they will have a vague idea of what we are and what we do, based on what they’ve heard or read from someone else.

Sometimes, it’s best to go straight to the source and find out the facts, instead of getting the information third hand from someone else who has read something that yet someone else has written.

I know that my regular readers and clients know what we do, who we are and where to find us and perhaps you can help point others in the right direction.  If you’re a member of MCEI or HBBA then perhaps you’d like to go along and join in the discussions this week.