BuildYourVASkills.com

The advantages of working with a virtual team and having virtual clients are many. Among those advantages are less idle chatter, no annoying co-worker popping by just when you are in a zone, and in general the quiet. That is also a disadvantage.

It is much harder to build a relationship with a team member and pick up on each other’s silent cues and non-verbal communication. The only solution is to use virtual tools and to probably in your mind over communicate.

Here’s some tools to avoid things being missed and to get everyone on the same page.

In the beginning- Setup and communicate with your team and with clients your best means of communication. Do you like email? Do you prefer the phone? Can you be reached only at certain hours? Make sure everyone knows how they are expected to communicate, how often, and when.

Email- While not perfect email is still the best method of communicating and documenting the work process. Make sure everyone “whitelists” you and adds you to their contact list. Make sure you add them to your contact list. Sometimes file size for attachments is an issue. Make sure you know if their service will block large files and find ways of dealing with it.

Telephone-Sometimes it is just easier to pick up the phone. I find it much easier to work out a complex question or if you feel you are not getting it. Frustration comes from not having all the information or not getting the emotions behind the written communication. Schedule periodic phone check-ins, preferrably weekly, so you can get that personal interaction and just clear the air.

Instant Messenger, Chat, Texts- These are great resources to talk out situations as well if one or more of you can’t be on the phone for whatever reason. It is still hard to get a handle on true feelings if it is a sticky situation but the communication is real time and may be better than a disconnected email conversation. There are several programs out there. Make sure you know which ones everyone uses and try to get a concensus on what everyone uses.

Snail mail and fax- While very “old school” it still is necessary at times. Check into online faxing tools like efax and it will save you a ton of time and resources, but will give you a professional look with a real fax number.

Now that you have the tools in place, communicate with clients whenever you work on their projects. In the email include:

• What tasks you worked on
• If needed the hours spent
• What you still need to do
• Any questions you have
• Any suggestions you have

When dealing with your team virtually consider these communication tips:

• Consider a weekly team meeting, via conference call or skype.
• Get a project planning software that everyone can update and have access to Basecamp, Microsoft Project, or another program will do the trick. This will foster greater communication and anyone can look at the project and know where it is at.
• Treat your team like clients. Make sure you are communicating with them regularly to make sure they know your piece of the puzzle is being worked on and moving forward.
• Let them know when you will be available, unreachable, and in general what your working hours will be.

Communicating virtually provides freedom and flexibility. It can cause problems if not done consistently, effectively and in a manner that really speaks to your team and your clients. Without the advantage of the spoken word and being present to pick up on non-verbal cues, you really have to make an effort to over communicate. What feels to you like over the top may be just right for the person you are keeping in the loop.

Susan Snyder
Founder/CEO buildyourvaskills.com

http://www.pcstraining.net

Go to http://www.buildyourvaskills.com and look at our current schedule of training. Find one that’s right for you and bring a friend!

Affiliate marketing is an on line marketing tool that you can use in tandem with other marketing tools to increase your exposure. Affiliate marketing is when you promote other’s products to your customers and get a commission off any sales that you generate.

Sounds easy? Well it is and it isn’t. Just because you are an affiliate of a great product won’t make you the big bucks. It has to be a good fit with your customers, you still have to promote it and you are still responsible to your clients to bring them reputable products.

Here are some tips to making your affiliate marketing into the best it can be for you and your customers.

1) Know your market. If you are selling fishing lures and you put up an affiliate link for a travel adventure to the desert, you better have a good reason and tie in or you won’t have any results. You must be tuned in to what your clients want and need.

2) Know the product. It is not enough to go find a product with a high sales rate, high commission offering and that sounds good. You must have knowledge of the product so you know if it is a good fit to your niche market. You must know you are offering your clients something that will deliver. If you aren’t going to use it, why would they? If it ends up being a dud and you recommended it, your credibility will go down.

3) Know how to promote the items. It is not enough to put the links on your site, mention them once in and email and hope the checks start rolling in. Affiliate marketing has to be part of your overall marketing plan.

-How will these products be part of your product line?

-How long should I promote these items?

-How will I track the success/failure of these offers to my clients?

4) Have realistic expectations. I have clients all the time that are disillusioned with affiliate marketing. They have heard all the hype that someone put up a product and it has been generating $10,000 a month for them ever since. Well that simply is not the norm. It takes time to build a base of customers. If you are just doing affiliate marketing you have to build a great amount of content offerings, just like anything else, it takes work, it takes a plan, and it takes time.

5) Make sure you understand your part of the deal. You should not have to do any order fulfillment, tracking etc. That is the beauty about being an affiliate, you are their marketing arm. There are a few pseudo-affiliate programs that require you to do it all. Make sure you know what you are getting into and that your responsibility to the affiliate program is simply to drive customers their way.

6) Know that you are building your reputation. Don’t just put anything on your site as an affiliate. Your customers know, like and trust you. They are looking to you to weed through the bad stuff and deliver the good to them. Have high standards and only recommend the best. If you don’t know a lot about it be honest and say something like it was a recommendation to you, you are checking it out and would appreciate feedback from them as well. You are responsible for your recommendations. Take it seriously.

If you keep those things in mind you will be able to have a successful affiliate marketing program. You can generate income promoting other people’s products. You can get the best of both worlds for your customers and create joint ventures with some other great business owners like yourself.

Susan Snyder
Founder/CEO buildyourvaskills.com

Go to http://www.buildyourvaskills.com and look at our current schedule of training. Find one that’s right for you and bring a friend!

Where does it go? Like Sand through the hour glass, so are the Days…

Have you ever been in this situation? You are typing feverishly on your computer getting ready for a presentation, the phone is ringing, the dog is barking, you have to get the kids to your mom’s so she can watch them for the presentation…you look up…10:00! What! I haven’t even showered!

If you are a work at home professional I am sure you have been right there. Some of us more times than we would care to admit.

First let me assure you I am no time management guru. What with kids, my business, client projects, phones, Facebook, kids, laundry, kids… you know the drill. So what is a busy Work From Home Pro supposed to do?

I also know many of you may not have kids, but we all have distractions. There is no one looking over our shoulder to make sure we are on task. No clock to punch in and out. It is easy to look up and the time be much later than you expected and the to do list to still be much longer than you hoped.

While I still have sometimes major issues in this area, I have found some strategies that work for me. Here are some tips to making your work from home time as productive as it can be.

1) Schedule your time. I know, you work from home for the freedom of time it provides. You can make your schedule look like whatever you want. THAT’S the freedom, no one will tell you how to schedule your time. Nor will you have to have a committee meeting to decide what to put on the agenda. You don’t have to have it signed by your supervisor or any of the mundane hoops that contributed to your exodus from the traditional work place. But just like your money, if you don’t budget your time, it will be gone and you will wonder where it went!

2) Build in breaks. Gone are the days of your mandatory 15 minute breaks. However, they are still important. They can serve as a reset for your brain, get your muscles loosened up, and keep your tummy from grumbling. Take a walk, call a friend, play with kids, whatever makes it feel like a break for you.

3) Schedule “POWER” Sessions. Whether they are 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 5 minutes long, schedule chunks of time that you focus with intensity on a SINGLE task. You will be shocked at what you can accomplish in little spurts of time. Here’s the rules:

* Turn off all distractions- No phone, no email, no twitter deck, no facebook, nothing that will interrupt your flow.

* Pick a single task and a single goal. You may not complete an entire project in a 15 or 30 minute slot but you can complete a task toward the project.

* Make it a length of time you can stay undistracted, short and concise. Two hours is not a power session.

* Set a timer and do nothing but work on that task until the timer goes off.

* Take a quick break

* Rinse and Repeat

4) Have realistic expectations. It will take some time to work out what works for you. In time you will determine how many power sessions in a day, how long they need to be for the tasks you do, and how many breaks you need. Don’t try to save the world and build the new stadium in one day. Break apart your tasks, schedule them out in the day, and pat yourself on the back when you get them done.

5) Be Consistent- When you do discover strategies that work for you, practice them consistently, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.

6) Be Persistent- When you fall off the wagon, get back up. You must evaluate what is working, what is not, and if you are being too hard or too soft on yourself. Ask for outside perspective if you are having a block in this area. Just keep trying.

7) Re-evaluate often- You don’t have a manager giving you performance reviews. Give yourself one. Ask yourself the questions a manager would ask. See what works, what needs improving and set things up so you have success and not failure.

If you keep these ideas in mind you will be able to get a better handle on your schedule. You work from home for many reasons. Primarily you are working to make money and to build a business. If your time is not productive, you will be frustrated, your clients will be irritated and your business will grow slower than you want. Manage your time wisely.

To your success!

Susan Snyder
Founder/CEO buildyourvaskills.com

Go to http://www.buildyourvaskills.com and look at our current schedule of training. Find one that’s right for you and bring a friend!

So how do you avoid a large webinar nightmare? Keep it simple and automate as much of the process as you can.

Here is an outline of the process facilitators put the customer through:

1) Go to the sales page and sign up by adding items to Shopping Cart.

2) Checkout

3) Pay with Credit Card or Paypal

4) Signup for updates with Autoresponder updates.

5) Confirmation in your email so you can receive those updates.

6) Get the updates. Register with the webinar service.

7) Remember to get there on time.

Know your Audience

Here’s a scenario: The audience is new to the concept of webinars, is a little bit older, and is scared of technology. There are a few that will navigate this maze quite well and have no problems. The others need pulling through the entire process.

If this is your first webinar, or your audiences, consider doing a few freebie talks to practice, and a few educational emails to help your audience before trying to pull off a 300-400 person webinar.

Keep the Instructions Simple

The tendency for facilitators is to give TMI (too much information). Keep the explanations to a minimum, especially with newbies. Bullet points, click this, click that, look for this, work much better than a whole “My Webinar for the Simple Minded” book. Take them step by step where you want them to go.

Provide the details with the big explanation on an FAQ page on your site.

Do Your Pre-event Work

Do everything you can before you start promotion.

1) Write all the emails, plan out the process

2) Test the shopping cart

3) Send out a few educational emails so they know what to expect

4) Anticipate questions and have processes in place to address them.

5) Make sure the dates are on everyone’s calendar that is involved.

Another important aspect is getting your email address and any vendors white-listed on your client’s address books. Decide the best method of getting that point across to your customers. So include it on your sales page, your thank you page and any other page you can.

Make one person in charge

If you are delegating, then delegate the whole process. Do not check up on every detail. It just complicates the process. Ask for reports at certain intervals or status reports if you are curious at any point but don’t get involved with the entire process if you have asked someone else to do it. They are the specialist in the process, that’s why you hired them. Let them deal with the customer questions so there is consistency and nobody falls through the cracks.

Keep the Process to a Minimum

Give all call links right away. If you wait this makes you out of sight out of mind. So get them everything they need up front. Have a checklist for them to print out if they like and check off as they go. Then they are confident in your process and they will be ready to go when they are thinking about it.

Follow these simple rules and your Webinar will go off without a hitch.

Susan Snyder
Founder/CEO buildyourvaskills.com

Go to http://www.buildyourvaskills.com and look at our current schedule of training. Find one that’s right for you and bring a friend!

I don’t know about you but are teleseminars getting more and more complicated for you to setup and manage? As clients are picking the “best” parts of products to use, several of them are choosing different platforms to fit the different activities involved in hosting an online event.

For example:
AWeber for autoresponders
1ShoppingCart for the Shopping Cart
Add paypal as an option for payment
Build a custom sales page with custom buttons
GoToMeeting as the event host

While the end product is very good and as the client has picked the products for different features, sometimes keeping them all in sync and working together is a challenge. Add to the matter it might be a series of events and you can quickly have a lot of coordination to do.

The issue I want to address today is:

“How do you get the sales contact information over to aweber without having the client do another physical entry of their name and email address?”

Manual works up to a point but you want automatic and “brainless” whenever you can.

So Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s the email parsing feature of aweber!

To set it up:
Login to the aweber account.
Go to My Lists and choose Email Parsers
Pick your shopping cart service, membership service, or leads service and that will activate the feature.

But Wait! This is only the aweber side. When you click the checkbox a listed help topic will pop down. READ it! It will give specific tips, cautions and steps to setting up the shopping cart side.

Most of the time it will be a generic instruction like: Enter the email address of the list in the notification of order area of your shopping cart. So if your list is called mymainlist the email address would be mymainlist@aweber.com. Some services require a few more steps but most are that easy.

So what does that do for you? When a purchase is made in your shopping cart it automatically emails notification to your aweber list. Then the first confirmation email is sent to the recipient. Nothing could be simpler and one less thing for you to setup.

Now if they could figure out how to get my desk cleaned off automatically I would be all set!

OK, OK I am giving in… and for good reason!

I am not one to jump on the newest, greatest thing in technology. I like to let other people get the bugs out, see how the application and use goes and then use the best of the best.

What am I giving in on? WordPress!

I have been using Blogger for my main blog and while I like it, as I work with other clients on their blogs and websites I have been increasingly impressed with WordPress. I was looking for the best blog interface for my newest website, and am going to convert my buildyourvaskills.com site to WordPress.

There are several reasons I am doing that. Here are the main reasons.

Open Source Software

WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.

User Friendly

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Most hosting companies provide the utilities to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Themes Support

You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog. Also I have clients that change their theme to fit the season, a product launch, their mood, basically whenever they want.

Plugins (widgets) Extend Functionality

WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed quickly. For example, you want to customize the sidebar? Just look on Google and you can easily find the relevant plugin that will easily do the job for you.

Standards Compliant

WordPress is one software that follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website. They provide timely updates and remind you when a new update is ready to go.

SEO Friendly

I am no SEO expert. I find I have no time to really concentrate on all but the simplest SEO techniques when updating my blog. Let’s face it, I am doing good just to get it done. WP does it for you! Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

Large community Support

WordPress is used on more than 1% of the websites on the Internet in the world. There is a large user community backing the development of this software. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for all your questions.

You can customize if you are so inclined

If you just can’t live with the standard theme and plugin (widgets), you can hard code WP to do anything you want. I don’t suggest it but it’s possible. Once you start you are opening a can of worms, but if you like that sort of thing, you can certainly do it.

And just a few more quick reasons:
-Wordpress can automatically ping all the RSS sites.
-Wordpress allows the use of Categories (VERY SEO friendly, and automatically found by search engines.)

So, you see the benefits of using WordPress now? And, you can add to this list by providing your feedback in the comments.

Susan Snyder

Create Your Badge

By Jeremy Shaffer

A cornerstone of any organization’s overall social marketing strategy should be reliable web analytics – that is, accurate tracking of traffic coming from networking sites on which you’re conducting marketing efforts. This will enable you to slice and dice statistics for those visitors, and hopefully align those numbers with your marketing goals!

Google Analytics will automatically track referrals from other websites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networking sites. In your Traffic Source reports, you’ll see your social network visits grouped under referrals from that site – sources like LinkedIn or stumbleupon. However, these sites are grouped in with all other referring traffic! What if you want to track statistics for incoming traffic from ALL social network sites? It’ll be hard to do that if you have to sift through all your other referral traffic.

Grouping Social Network Traffic in Google Analytics

Google naturally defines traffic as being organic, direct, referral, etc – so what we’re doing here is telling Analytics to place certain sites within a certain category, or “medium.” Chances are, this is how your Traffic Medium report looks right now if you haven’t applied any custom filters – visits are grouped by 3 or 4 mediums. Organic traffic covers non-paid visits from search engines, (none) means direct traffic (IE, a visitor typed in your website’s address directly), and all your social networks are grouped under referral traffic.

We want a separate category for those sites though! Using a filter, we can tell Analytics to remove specific sites from the “referral” classification and group them under a new medium.

(Note: This technique involves creating a filter. Create a duplicate profile before proceeding – any mistakes can screw up your historical data. We’ll install the filter on the new, duplicate profile.)

Once you’ve got the profile set up, click “Filter Manager” from the Overview Screen (the one that lists all your profiles), then “Add Filter”.

Name your filter something descriptive, then select “Custom Filter” from the Filter Type drop down box. We are advanced analytics ninjas, so select the “Advanced” button and configure the filter like so:

Field A -> Extract A

In the first drop-down, select “Campaign Source”. In the second field, you’ll be entering which sites you’d like Analytics to automatically group into your new social networks category. For best results here, we’re going to be using the Regular Expression character (directly below your Backspace key), which means “or” – this allows us to select multiple domains that traffic would be coming from. If, for example, you wanted all your referral traffic from Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and EzineArticles to appear in this new, social-media-only category, you’d enter “stumbleupon|facebook|twitter|ezinearticles” (without the quotes) into this field. Adjust this to fit your needs.

Field B -> Extract B

These fields will be empty: in the first drop-down, select “-”. Nothing in the second field.

Output To -> Constructor

In the first drop-down, select “Campaign Medium”. In the second, enter the name of your new category – this can be anything you want, but make it simple and descriptive. “social” is always a good choice!

Radio Buttons

Field A Required: Yes

Field B Required: No

Override Output Field: Yes

Case Sensitive: No

You’re done! After you’ve applied the filter, you should see a spiffy little line in your Traffic Medium report – in this example, “social” would show up, and by clicking on it, all your visits from Stumbleupon, EzineArticles, Twitter, and Facebook are in one, social-media-only category, separate from your Google Image referrals (man, that’s a lot of cat pictures).

Now all your metrics in this category will accurately reflect social-media-sourced visitors only, without all your other referrals skewing the data. Analyze away!

Jeremy Shaffer, Web Marketing Specialist

BEM Interactive – Providing full-scope services in Website Design / Development and Web Marketing / SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeremy_Shaffer
http://EzineArticles.com/?Track-Facebook,-Twitter-and-Social-Networks-in-Google-Analytics—Social-Network-Marketing-Analytics&id=2657607

If you found this helpful and you want more great tips sign up for our free report on “Top 10 VA Skills Most Requested by Employers” at http://www.buildyourvaskills.com
or sign up for our Super Summer School Series to learn more skills to build your Virtual Assisting business. Join us on Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 10 a.m. CST for a great overview on Facebook. We’ll walk you through how to set up a Fan Page and a group page (and explain the differences). Plus, we’ll show you some quick tips to find potential clients!

Go to www.buildyourvaskills.com now to sign up for this course. Only $20 to attend. Can’t make it in person? Don’t worry! We’ll have the call recorded for you to review any time!

Plus, just announced, our Inner Circle program!

Visit our main website at www.pcstraining.net for a full range of our services.

Susan Snyder
Practical Computing Solutions, LLC

Help us spread the word about all the great things going on at http://www.buildyourvaskills.com! For the month of August, we will be having a referral contest where one of our members can win a great prize.

Here’s how it works:
1. Tell all your VA friends (or VA wannabe friends) about us, and encourage them to visit our website at http://www.buildyourvaskills.com!

2. Make sure you tell them to sign up and receive our free report on “Top 10 VA Skills Requested by Clients” and enter YOUR NAME as the code. This will entitle you to one entry in the contest.

3. If your referral signs up for one of our Summer School Classes, you will get 2 additional entries.

4. If your referral signs up for our Inner Circle Program, you will earn 10 additional entries.

5. The person with the most entries WINS!

6. Contest runs 8/1 – 8/31/2009 (Winner announced September 1)

Prize:

Winner gets their choice of the following prizes:

• Excel 1 training E-Course. 4 weeks of video, assignments, feedback ($50 value) or

• One Month of the Inner Circle membership FREE($37 value) or

• 30 minute consultation with Susan! You can pick any topic and pick her brain. She’s all yours for a whole 30 minutes! (priceless )

Special Note: Once your referral signs up for the free report, they will also be eligible for this contest. So make sure you tell everyone you know to have the best chances to win!

Any questions? Please email me: ivette@buildyourvaskills.com

GOOD LUCK!

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Yuwanda_Black]Yuwanda Black

Twitter use is proliferating among small business owners. However, most don’t fully capitalize on it, for a number of reasons. Following are three specific things all small business owners should keep in mind to fully harness the power of this popular social media marketing site.

Twitter Marketing Tips and Strategies for Small Business Owners

Twitter Use Rule No. 1: Create a Plan. Many small business owners err in the initial stages of using this site because they don’t put together a plan of how they’re going to maximize their time there.

Think about it in these terms: would you spend $100,000 on an ad in a national magazine without first knowing who your target market is, the offer you’re going to make them, how much it’s going to cost, how you’re going to deliver, etc.?

Of course you wouldn’t. Then why would you tweet without knowing these specifics? It’s a waste of time, money and energy.

You need a specific Twitter marketing plan before creating your account in order to capitalize on the time you’re going to spend tweeting.

Twitter Use Rule No. 2: Stay on Topic. Once you start on the site, you’ll notice that many of the message sent out are personal. Someone may tweet about their dinner plans, how ill their child was the night before, a hysterical (to them) phrase their pet parrot just learned, etc.

All of this is perfectly okay — if you’re speaking to your target market and this is what they expect to be hearing from you. HOWEVER, this is not the case for the vast majority of small business owners.

Remember, most prospects will follow you (your business) because they expect to receive useful tweets from you that have something to do with your area of expertise. They could care less about your [http://TwitterProductReports.com]Twitter use relaying dinner plans, info on your sick child or the babblings of your pet parrot.

Create a personal account if you must relay this type of information. But, keep your businesses’ tweets about business. Specifically, relay information from your area of expertise that helps your customers achieve their goals.

Twitter Use Rule No. 3: Actively Seek Followers. Many new users of the site fail to do this. They send out tweets and wait for followers to come to them. But using Twitter is no different from any other type of marketing in that in order to make money (sales, generate leads, etc.), you must be proactive.

This means actively seeking out followers. This is the quickest and easiest way to increase your Twitter following.
Want to get more Twitter followers quickly and easily? Learn how in the article, [http://www.twitterproductreports.com/twitter-use-for-small-biz-owners.htm]Twitter Use – 3 Lead-Generating Tips for Small Business Owners, on TwitterProductReports.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Yuwanda_Black http://EzineArticles.com/?Twitter-Use-For-Small-Business-Owners—3-Ways-to-Get-More-Leads-From-This-Site&id=2604304

If you found this helpful and you want more great tips sign up for our free report on “Top 10 VA Skills Most Requested by Employers” at http://www.buildyourvaskills.com
or sign up for our Super Summer School Series to learn more skills to build your Virtual Assisting business. Join us on Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 10 a.m. CST for a great overview on Twitter. We’ll walk you through how to set up an account, how to start following people, and getting others to follow you back. Plus, we’ll show you some quick tips to find potential clients!

Go to now to sign up for this course. Only $20 to attend. Can’t make it in person? Don’t worry! We’ll have the call recorded for you to review any time!

Plus, just announced, our Inner Circle program!

Visit our main website at www.pcstraining.net for a full range of our services.

Susan Snyder
Practical Computing Solutions, LLC