So what will using Social Media do for me? (WIIFM)

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Kena Roth

When it comes down to it, the real reason why you need to engage in social media boils down to forming the right relationships and doing so the right way. Here are some reasons why:

You will find whomever you want to do business with somewhere online.
You will find whatever knowledge you need about any market or any person online.
You can reach your market by simply engaging in the right conversations with the right people. It’s more effective than just advertising.
If your business can’t be found, it isn’t engaging with your target market or, worse yet, ignoring your target market. You’re not going to likely be creating transactional opportunities while your competition is.
Communication through social media is a system to leverage your organization’s ability to communicate with your market.
Social media saves time and money if used correctly and for the right reasons.
If you learn how to use social media correctly then you will understand what your market is looking for and where they are looking. You want them to look for you, not you chase them.
When your customers and prospects are engaging about you, your industry, your products or your services, you need to be there listening. Otherwise, how will you gain the necessary market intelligence, be able to respond or even be aware of problems or needs? If you’re not present when and where the conversations happen, you’re basically out of touch with your target market.
Social media communication is about reach and relational dynamics about people. It provides the means to effectively communicate with your target market in human, rather than institutional, terms.
If you are not communicating (listening first, initiating second), then how in the world do you expect to create relationships with people and businesses that may want what you have to offer and communicate your value to them?

In the old days, when people needed or wanted something, they’d look up information in the yellow pages. Today, people turn to search engines to find what they want or need. Every day, Google is used an average of 235 million times for searches. The yellow pages’ days are over. People are going online more and more to find what they want or need and to find out what other consumers think or say about a product, service or brand. The relevancy that influences people’s buying behavior is other people’s conversation, yours included. That’s if they can even find your conversation and if it provides the value they are looking for.

To sum it up: These days, the Web isn’t a place to look for information, it’s the only place.

Nobody’s Perfect – A Chance For Growth

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Jennifer Gallaher

Do you ever have days where you feel like you are struggling just to keep up? I know I do and this week is no exception. I refer to my calendar often throughout my day so that I can keep myself on track and record completed projects for my clients. I do this for two reasons:

I monitor my free time so I know what blocks of time are available for future client projects or for personal appointments that may come up. These open blocks of time can also show me when I can sneak in some “me” time.
I monitor how much time each client and their projects require. This lends a better understanding of where my time can best be served and what time of day I am most productive.

However, this is not a fool-proof system. As a matter of fact, as of this writing, I have yet to accomplish ONE thing! I started out writing this article early this afternoon, but due to unforeseen events, my schedule fell by the waist side. Between a toddler not feeling well and needing his Mama, to a husband calling from work asking for help dealing with some banking issues, to a great new client needing a project completed today, my whole schedule shifted. Now, I am faced with a half-clean bathroom, laundry in a basket waiting to be folded, a wonderfully consistent client waiting for his projects to also be completed and this article to be written. Will all of these tasks be accomplished today? Probably not.

This is where flexibility comes in to play as well as a chance for growth. For whatever reason, I wasn’t supposed to accomplish all of my goals today. Yes, I am a VA with responsibilities to my clients, but I’m also a mother and a wife. Sometimes, those personal responsibilities override my professional duties. If you are anything like me, it’s not easy to let go of your professional responsibilities when deadlines are looming. However, my first priority is to my family.

With that in mind, I will do my best to get this article published tonight and start fresh in the morning with a newly updated schedule of goals and tasks that are due for the day. I know my clients will understand as they are also entrepreneurs.

Lesson learned: You cannot plan for the unexpected. You can “expect” the unexpected but inevitably, emergencies will come up. The best course of action is to accept it and do your best to get through the day. After all, tomorrow is a new day!

Keywords & Categories & Tags! Oh My!

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Amber Whitener

I like labels, don’t you? Search engines do too. It’s time we all learned how to use them and make sure our work is found in relevant searches. This article is for all of those amazing bloggers and copy writers who have fabulous content, but aren’t getting found due to a lack of or inaccurate labeling!

Think of a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo as a great big filing cabinet and within their drawers you find all the websites in the entire world. Wouldn’t you want your pages to be in the right drawer?

Keywords

Keywords are the words search engines use to index your blog posts under the correct section. You must label each blog post as accurately as possible. The more accurately you label your work, the more favorable you appear to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This will result in your content being closer to the top of the search results for your topic.

According to the SEO Workers Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool, “normal web pages” should contain a maximum of 8 keywords. I like to use this rule of thumb for my blog posts as well. I max out at 8 or 9 keywords in the form of categories, subcategories, or tags. That doesn’t mean you can’t use more. However, if you use six categories and ten tags for one regular-sized post, then your readers (or indexing search engines) have to read through a paragraph of keywords and still may not know what information they are really going to get in your article.

CoCo’s Last “Tonight Show”

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Amber Whitener

I’ll be honest, I never really watched the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. His humor was always kind of lame to me. When the Tonight Show was taken over by Conan O’Brien, I started tuning in 3 to 4 times a week. After seven months, NBC has made quite the devastating decision to return the Tonight Show back over to Jay Leno. Are they crazy!?!?! He thanked his staff who is

He used the last precious moments of his show to remind us all to lend a helping hand to Haiti.

Steve Carell (of NBC”s “The Office”) came out to give him an exit interview and “shredded his employee ID”.
Tom Hanks came out and brought Conan a cup of scotch ( actually diet cream soda ) and reminisced about how he was the one who originally dubbed the Conan with the nickname: “Co Co”.
Neil Young came out to sing “Long May You Run” while he played guitar and harmonica.
Conan then said his closing piece of inspiration to his fans. He could have used this last moment to really slam NBC for their stupidity and unfairness, or anything he wanted. However, this is what he said:

“This massive outpouring of support and passion, from so many people, has been overwhelming for me. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy and outrageous creativity on the internet, the fact that people have traveled long distances to and camped out all night in the pouring rain . . . It’s pouring! . . . It’s been pouring for days! . . and they’re camping out to be in our audience. Really, you, here’s what all of you have done. You’ve made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. So to all the people watching ” he said with tear filled eyes. “I can never ever thank you enough for the kindness to me. I will think about it for the rest of my life, and all I ask is one thing. I am asking this particularly of young people that watch: Please do not be cynical, I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard and if you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

I am telling you, amazing things will happen.” (The audience roars.) Conan shouts over the crowd, “I’m telling you, It’s just true.”

Will Ferrell came out and jammed with Conan. Will sang and played his cowbell, and Conan played a guitar and very well. They sang “If I leave here tomorrow / Would you still remember me?”

Conan said during the show that he had no regrets. I am pretty sure that Conan will be just fine. I can’t say the same for Jay Leno, in fact, I won’t be surprised to see the severe drop in viewers. Who knows anything?

Good Luck Conan! You hosted the best seven month show in the history of late night. Nice work.

On the “Late Night with Jimmie Fallon” Jimmie began his show in NBC studio 6A – Conan’s Old Studio – and sang a tribute to Conan, “Its So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday”. The Roots made a tribute to “team CoCo” as well.

I Have my Facebook Fanpage Setup, Now What?

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Kena Roth

Facebook is a busy place. There are over 250 million active users on Facebook, and more than 120 million of them log in every day. Those in-the-know are taking advantage of Facebook and promoting themselves and their products using Facebook’s platform through one of the actual business applications-the business fan page. I have seen quite a few of these pages popping up around companies that haven’t had a social media presence until someone decided to put the page together. A fan page is a facebook page, similar to a personal profile, centered on businesses, organizations and people that have fans, such as public figures, writers, artists, etc.

Making a fan page takes just a few minutes – add some information about your company, your URL, upload your logo and you’re done. Then, when someone becomes a fan of your fan page, everything you publish appears in their News feed for all their fans and friends to read (unless they have this feature turned off). It makes someone joining your fan page somewhat viral.

The goals you want to have in place when using Facebook for business are:

To get found by people who are searching for your products or services.
Connect and engage with current and potential customers.
Create a community around your business.
Promote positive content, including webinars, blog posts or other resources.

Ok, so now what? I suggest creating Google Alerts with industry related search terms. Posting these articles and blogs to your fanpage will help your fans become more aware of what you have to offer along with building your business and brand.

Find It Quicker

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Amber Whitener

Learn these search engine “tricks”, and you’ll save yourself some time! These shortcuts work on almost any search engine, but they definitely work for Google. This information is helpful for market research, office calculations, personal and people searches, file searches and website backlink lookups.

Filter Searches

For words that have multiple meanings read the following short article: narrow-down your search results.

Perform Calculations

Read this next linked short article for a better way to perform calculations in the Google search field

Specialized Search Tips

Click here for more great Google search tips from Jenny Gallaher including:

Tracking flights
Locating packages
Movie showing times
Finding files (e.g. PDF’s, Excel spreadsheets or even PowerPoint presentations)

and more! Jenny wrote the preceding articles; and kept them short, sweet, and to the point. I like how she never rambles. She’s one of the best time saving VA for sure!

BackLink Search Tips

Find how many websites are linking back to your website.

On Google search for:
[links:www.yourdomain.com]

On Bing & Yahoo search for:
links: www.yourdomain.com

This will simply give you more accurate results than simple doing a search on www.YourDomainName.com.

Happy Searching!

Wonderful Book Review-Part 2

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Jennifer Gallaher

I have currently been reading a book called, “Making Work at Home Work” by Mary M. Byers. Last week I wrote about Part 1-Saving Your Sanity. This week I will be discussing Part 2-Preserving Your Profit.

There is a ton of information within Part 2. This particular section focuses on accepting the “At-Home CEO” title, taxes, equipment, subcontracting, boosting revenue and all things planning-yearly, reinvesting and retirement planning. Since there are so many important sections within this second part, I am only going to focus on a few of them. I encourage all of you to pick up a copy of this book for yourselves so that you can do a more in depth analysis of your business.

In Chapter 13-Accepting the At-Home CEO Mantle, Mary explores what it takes to be a CEO and where you are mentally. She shares an experience of her own about being paralyzed with fear about having to make some heavy duty decisions about her business. Couple that with feelings of inadequacy about her skills as a professional running a successful enterprise and the stress of not being the mom she wanted to be and you’ve got the makings for a disaster! What saved her? A bit of advice she had heard: “Ace like the person you want to be.” It’s pretty simple advice, right? It’s so simple in fact that most either forget about it or figure there has to be more to it than that. What we come to find out is that it’s the simple advice that seems to be the most helpful and direct, but the hardest to hear and follow. She goes on to suggest creating a list of characteristics you feel a successful at-home entrepreneur should possess, then start “acting” like those characteristics. Basically, how you think about yourself will inevitably determine your level of success. There is additional advice throughout this chapter to help create a successful business.

With regards to your taxes, Mary offers quite a bit of suggestions. I have listed some of the biggies below, however, for a more in-depth description; you’ll need to read her book.

Do not mix your business and personal finances. (the most important suggestion)
Know what’s deductible.
If in doubt, ask.
Realize that small deductions add up.
Keep your receipts.

The last chapter in the book, Chapter 22-Giving Yourself Permission to Make Your Business a Reflection of You, was great! Learning that it’s okay to give yourself permission to live life, to be a mother, to be work-at-home CEO, etc was empowering. To be able to embrace those permissions while learning to be flexible and knowing that things will invariably change with or without warning can be a challenge. But then again, we all knew that when we made the conscious decision to work from home, right? Riding the waves of success is never an easy thing and allowing ourselves permission to change the rules as we see fit (becoming more of a flexible individual) for not only our business lives, but our personal lives as well will, enable us all to achieve the goals and dreams we set out to achieve.

I would love to hear what all of you think of this book….so grab a copy and send me a comment. Happy reading!

Getting Started with WordPress

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Amber Whitener

This question/comment was from Dennis at insurance.webege.com:

Hi there! I wonder if you could please assist me? I’m new to the internet and have just set up my personal new web site, but I don’t know how to do the rest of the design and and all that stuff. I discovered that WordPress is good for this and you can simply get theme’s. I actually like your theme and was inquiring if you could let me know where you got your theme, or if it is a custom one? Do also maybe know of any other places to get nice themes? Thank you for the help!

Hello Dennis! I actually wrote this theme, and I also use a bunch of different plugins to add the “bells and whistles” like the navigation bar etc.

As far as using WordPress for your new site, I recommend you go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog hosted there. Only because you say you’re a beginner, and you should make sure you are comfortable with the dashboard and blogging platform.

Installing self-hosted WordPress sites require knowledge of web development tools like PHP, CSS, and MySQL database setup. If you are comfortable with these languages, you can purchase some great blog themes at Berries and Cream Blog Designs, I know the coders and theme builders there and their code is clean and they comment well so that it’s easier to edit a bit if you like to tweak your own layouts etc.

Good Luck! Sincerely, Amber

Life with a Smartphone

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Amber Whitener

When I am on vacation, I don’t usually work, nor do I recommend working. However, when you own a small business, the last thing you want to do is completely disconnect (disappear) for 4 or 5 days. With the new generation of Smartphones, you don’t have to.

After months of debate, I finally traded in my old trusty LG cell phone for Motorola’s new Droid cell phone that runs on the Android operating system. I needed a cell phone to provide me with a constant connection to my social network, search engine capabilities and a reliable cell signal for any unforeseen time of need.

Today, I am approximately 400 miles away from home and thanks to the wpToGo app; I am still able to post my little tidbit of wisdom to the virtual business world.

1. Android is a Google powered phone. It uses your personal Gmail account for storing and organizing contact information. It is even possible to sync your domain email address list if you use Google Business apps for your business email service!

2. For you WordPress bloggers, wpToGo is a fabulous application I downloaded for free to post directly to our WordPress.com blog. It is so easy to setup and use! However, when posting to a self-hosted WordPress blog, you’ll have to edit a .php configuration file and that gets a little trickier.

3. YouTube is, of course, another service owned by Google. The YouTube app came installed on the phone, so I had to share the new-ish viral video of the 62 year old American Idol General Larry Platt singing “Pants on the Ground”. (My ski buddies hadn’t seen it yet.)

4. Twidget Lite is a lot like twitterfeed, except it’s on your cell. It gives you a live feed of tweets and the option to retweet from your cell phone’s home screen. (This app does seem to crash more often than others.) I also installed Seesmic, a more efficient twitter app that even gives you access to your lists.

5. I have unlimited access to the weather, sports (Go Colts!), Google maps with GPS, traffic updates, Facebook (also came standard), MySpace, and even an app for a coin toss in case I don’t have any change!

The point in sharing all this information about my new droid is to try to introduce to you the mobile office capabilities-which are growing at an amazing rate. Even if you have a Blackberry or an iPhone, you can search some of these types of applications for your own business or recreational needs.

Loving Life Means Planning Time

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Kena Roth

Wow, this has been one busy week around here. With a lot of new opportunities coming this way, and some old plans being rekindled, I’m reminded that schedules are good. It’s fun to relax at the holidays, but routines make my work AND personal life flow so much better. What about yours?

Mondays are always my “focus” day. I plan out my work week, my personal week and everything that falls in between. They say you can’t have it all, but I find you can have a lot more if you plan carefully, choose your projects wisely, and enjoy yourself.

This was my first good “Monday” of the New Year. The kids are back to school for the first full week since Christmas break. So, we HAD to get back into a routine. Pick up. Drop off. Make time to get the boys to wrestling, don’t forget to call back the client, keep those social media pages updated and change the laundry.

Without a schedule, the day can get away. The dream can become fuzzy, and I’m less productive. When that happens, stress can start to creep in. Then, it can be tempting to forget the blessing of working at home, and to veer off course.

But, when I stick to a schedule I find I love my life. I’m able to enjoy the simple pleasures, like a few minutes to chat online with my fellow VAs or send a tweet to old friends. I feel great about the work I am able to accomplish. It’s meaningful work, where I get the reward. AND I remember to be thankful for the unending support of my husband, who believes in what I’m doing, and the blessing of small freedoms like getting to be with my boys at their wrestling meet.

A boring routine may be what you tried to escape when you decided to work at home. But don’t shy away from it now. This time the routine is YOURS! This is your chance to put what’s important into your day, to do work YOU choose, and have the freedom to enjoy it.

So, plan today. Choose wisely how you spend your time.

Then, enjoy where you are. Keep your eyes on where you want to be, and love this work at home life.

The Virtual Assistant Journal

Monthly Archives: January 2010

Nobody’s Perfect – A Chance For Growth

Keywords & Categories & Tags! Oh My!

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