Periodically there will be requests on the Virtual Assistant forums asking about free advertising. In fact you find requests for free almost everything.

I’m a believer of that old saying ‘you have to spend money to make money’ and the fact is if you’re in business, you should expect that you’re going to have a number of taxable expenses. It goes with the territory.  However, given that, there are a number of low cost or free options for a number of things in business and if you can save money, then that’s a good thing.

One VA recently posted this question at a forum:

Does anyone know of any free internet advertising services for my secretarial service?

Answers included the following:

http://www.ebayclassifieds.com is a great place to advertise and it’s free. I have ads running all the time in my local city.

Register your website with Google, Yahoo and other search engine.  Also, register with Google Places.   Blog and update it frequently and use Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter too.  Participate in online groups or forums where potential clients may be too.

My response was:

Do you have a website? If so, add it to your signature at the bottom of EVERY email you send out.

If you don’t – then get one.  Domain names don’t cost much these days and webhosting can be quite low too.  What you want (if you don’t know how to design a site) is WordPress – not wordpress.com as you can’t use that for commercial purposes but wordpress.org.  To use that you need your own paid hosting (not free hosting as it will carry adverts on it that detracts from your site).  You can get a domain name + webhosting for a full year for around $150UAD or less per year.  You’re in business so this is a taxable expense and one you should be considering.

Now, if you have a website already that’s great. Develop a signature block, add your phone number, web address and anything else you want to add.

Are you on LinkedIn.com?  That provides a facility for an online bio/outline of your experience and will give you a profile page web address you can also use – particularly if you don’t have, or don’t want, a website for now. That is free.  You can participate in forum discussions there that will bring you in front of potential clients.  It’s the participation that’s important as people won’t know you exist if you don’t speak up.

There are tons of forums at yahoogroups.com.  Look for forums that have your hobby listed, or topics of interest and join. For example I’ve joined authors groups as I’m interested in writing but that has also provided me opportunity to gain work with authors. Same for professional speakers and business coaches. I’ve joined local networks (local to where I live where I go and meet them face-to-face) and participated in online forums.

Networking is a really important and often overlooked form of marketing which is a very effective way of getting people to notice you.

Look for local networks close to your home where other business people meet and congregate and make sure you always have business cards with you.

Business cards are important offline and your signature block is your online business card.

When you participate at VA forums you can learn a lot about what others have done to successfully get the word out there about their businesses, whether free, low cost or at higher cost. They’ll let you know what has worked and what hasn’t worked.  It makes sense to learn from the experience of others.

I know I’m going to get people arguing with me on this one but hear me out.

If you’re running a Virtual Assistant business then you are servicing clients who need your help.  Those clients come from all walks of life and not all of them live on the internet as many VAs do (me included).

So, to get in front of them we have to go out and meet them. That means doing face-to-face networking and meeting people in person.

Yes, we have the avenues of the internet, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, industry based forums, hobby based forums and all sorts of other discussion groups.  Yes, we have online advertising, ezines, newsletters, articles, blogs and so on. And yes there are a multitude of millions of people online.  And along with that you also have a multitude of millions of other sites to compete with, other people networking also.

But… what about your neighbour and the person across the road? What about the business owner down the street or around the corner? What about the local business person who attends business networking events and never even heard of a Virtual Assistant let alone know what one is? What about that business operator who cannot type over 10 wpm or doesn’t understand how different software programs work, let alone know how to use the internet?  Aren’t they missing out on knowing about how you can help them?  And you have a much smaller number of people to compete with and sometimes not even one. The odds for getting new clients are increased considerably.

There are many places to meet people offline.  Business networking groups is just one option. There’s the post office, supermarket, library, church, sporting club, school – wherever you go and wherever people congregate.

Check locally where you live – chambers of commerce, BNI, rotary, school groups, clubs, anywhere where groups of people get together. And volunteering can help – it definitely works. I’ve volunteered (given back to community) in some way or another most of my business life – I’ve been in business over 16 years. It definitely pays to be out there amongst people who will notice you and tell others about you.

If you choose to market only online you stand to miss a good percentage of potential clients who look elsewhere for the type of services you have to offer.

Make sure you ALWAYS have business cards with you.

I saw a post by a lady the other day who wanted to leave her job and become a VA as an interim step to setting up another business.  She was given some good advice by other existing VAs on what to do but it was obvious within a 24 hour time span she was getting impatient. She didn’t want to spend time networking or building a business. She simply just wanted to earn money as she spent time building up what she really wanted to do.

Is that how some really view our industry?  Has it been so hyped up generally by those ‘not in the know’ that this is a quick way to earn some money?

No business is a get rich quick scheme.  Otherwise that’s what it would be – a ‘scheme’.  All businesses take time to build up. Some businesses provide a quicker return than others, but all have a time frame that needs to be recognised.

For a successful Virtual Assistant business you need a minimum 1 year but I would say at least 2-3 years, to be bringing in a profit that is reasonable.  You need time to develop a reputation with clients before they will refer you to other clients, and for the business to be really successful, those clients need to be long-term. It’s much harder finding new clients all the time rather than continuing to serve those who you’ve already built a relationship with.

In this case, the lady already had a 1 year plan to build something else and was hoping becoming a VA would quickly return her a yield during that time of building something else.  WRONG!  She’s better off staying in her job or doing some temp work that brings in an income, rather than trying to be something that actually requires time and effort on her part to build up. And that’s not going to work if her heart and mind is elsewhere.

I had an email from one of my team recently who’d been sub-contracting to another VA.  Turns out that while the job had been completed there had been some disagreement about how the job should have been handled and therefore billed.  I’ve had similar emails from VAs from time to time.  Sometimes things aren’t that clear.

They came to me for advice and we chatted about the outcome and what might have taken place before the job was secured.

Basically it’s like this (IMO).  If you’re sub-contracting to another VA, doesn’t matter how well you know them, or even if you’ve done work with them before, they should be treated like any other client you would work with. Get everything in writing – don’t assume anything.

If I get clients ringing me to give me instruction, I will either ask them to email me with the same information, or I will send them an email confirming what had been discussed on the phone.  A client asked me why I would do that when we chatted on the phone about this and I explained that it’s an audit paper trail for me. I can print off the instructions and re-read them. It’s hard to replay a conversation exactly in your head but with the written word you can read, re-read, cross off as you complete things and it’s less likely you’ll forget a component of what needs to be done.

Plus you can send back queries as a reply to that email so what had been mentioned or discussed before is there in front of the person reading the email.

Which leads me to another point: Reply with the original email intact if you’re replying to something that has been said or asked. Don’t reply with a blank email – it makes it hard for the recipient to know what you’re referring to without the original email included.

I run a training course for VAs as many of you know and occasionally I’ll get responses from follow ups of those who haven’t gone through with the course for whatever reason (usually time or money, or both). Below is a question from one recent prospective student and my answer to her.

I am still very interested in doing your course as I think it will be a great help.  I guess I wanted to feel more comfortable before deciding to establish a virtual PA business.

My concern has been whether there are enough businesses out there that require this type of service.  When speaking to people of my plans they generally have not heard anything about the service and doubt that I could make sufficient income from it.  Do you find there is not enough Virtual PA’s out there to fulfil the demand?

Hi, the best way to get over that concern is to join a VA forum where you can mix and mingle with those who are already doing it.

Do you know this industry is 14 years old? It’s been around for quite awhile and there are several thousand VAs worldwide.  Despite that there will always be people who don’t know we exist and it is our role to educate them.  However, if they’ve never had need for virtual or ad-hoc admin support then chances are it would never have occurred to them to search for us.

If you look in the Yellow Pages under secretarial and wordprocessing in your state you’ll find a listing for “A Clayton’s Secretary” who is the business providing the VA trainer course.  The Yellow Pages doesn’t have a ‘virtual assistant’ category but you’ll find that each person listed there is a member of the ACS team and is a virtual assistant. We get requests every day for clients wanting work to be done from simple word processing to transcriptions to powerpoint presentations to data entry.

It’s not until you get involved with the industry that you begin to see how widespread and active it really is. So I encourage you to join the forum linked on the front of the site at www.vadirectory.net and see what could be happening for you.

The reality is it isn’t until you get entrenched in an industry and really involved that you begin to understand how far reaching it is.  For those who were wondering the same as the potential VA above, then I encourage you to do the same – get involved, join a VA forum or two or three and see just how much this industry has to offer those who want to join it.  You will be pleasantly surprised!

Taking a leaf out of Sharon Williams’ book, or should I say her latest blog post on a similar topic, I have to add my own concerns to this new ‘trend’ happening.

Over the years it’s not been uncommon to have Uni students ask to engage a member of our VA team to do things for them.  They’re often not upfront in the original request but once they’ve engaged a VA they’ll tell them what they really want. And often it means logging in under their own name and password to a Uni website to download lectures, listen to them and then write up on them.  huh!  Sometimes it would be new VAs who would score these jobs and it only happened a small number of times but once I got wind of what was happening I made it clear no member of the team should be doing this as it was unethical.  To add to that, I had someone from one of the Unis contact me because they too had heard that’s what was happening.  There are rules on Uni websites about the legality of students handing out their logins to other people.

Recently I was floored by a request by a mature age student and someone who should have known better.  Mature age = in this case someone who is married with kids of their own.  They were under the pump with their workload for their business and their studies and wanted to know if one of my team could [quote "I need to complete Part 2 of the assignment. My average attempt at Part 1 is attached. It’s at Masters level however undergrad standard would probably do the job. Naturally I’ve become time poor." unquote].

The subject matter?  Their own business!

I wrestled with this one but not for very long.  Instinctively I knew this was wrong but the person involved I knew personally and I knew they were desperate for help.  I wanted to help them but the reality was that what they were asking for was not ethical.

My response to them was: “Logging in aside, my team feel uncomfortable doing something for you that you need to be doing for yourself. They’re more than happy to type up your notes or reformat your assignment but not actually do your assignment for you. Sorry.”

They had to go off and do the assignment themselves after recognising that what they asked was indeed the wrong thing.

Ethics and lack of ethics can be easily intertwined or easily disguised when coupled with emotion, desperation, a need of urgency.  It’s easy for people to justify that what they’re asking is reasonable but the core needs to be looked at and assessed.

When it comes down to it, if you’re passing off work that someone else has done for you as your own then the ethics of what is taking place needs to be very carefully considered and assessed.  VAs, no matter where they live, or how much they’re being paid, should not add to the deception of a client passing on work as their own and especially when it relates to passing something in order to get ahead with their own worklife or whatever.

There are cases when it is ok: sub-contracting a job for a client, ghost-writing, etc but not when it comes down to someone needing to pass a test or course in order to get ahead with their own role in life or work.  In the end they will get found out when it becomes obvious they don’t have the skill or the knowledge it was assumed they had.