From Tweet to Sale: A True Story

You’ve heard that social media is one of the essen­tial ways to mar­ket your small busi­ness, but are you con­vinced? I con­fess that I was a “Doubt­ing Thomas,” but no more. Here’s my story.

I wanted to increase my num­ber of Twit­ter fol­low­ers, so I decided to con­cen­trate on fol­low­ing my VA peers and coaches, my ideal client.

I tend to be VERY focused dur­ing work hours and don’t want to be dis­tracted, so I decided to review my twit­ter feed dur­ing com­mer­cials while watch­ing evening TV. (I can’t be the only one that does this right?)

It was a Mon­day night, so I was watch­ing House, and I saw this tweet:

VAs: Want indi­vid­ual sup­port as you cre­ate and price your pack­ages? Start TOMORROW LINK #vir­tu­alas­sis­tant

I had been notic­ing the trend for VAs to move away from charg­ing by the hour toward a more value-based approach of “I’ll do A, B, & C for $X amount per month.” I was intrigued but still think­ing. Con­tinue read­ing

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7 Must-Haves for Your Temporary Website Landing Page

Overview: If you’re an entre­pre­neur who has just pur­chased a web domain and you’re work­ing on your web­site launch, don’t delay putting up a one-page land­ing page so that your web­site can be work­ing for you while you’re work­ing on it. Here are 7 must-haves for your tem­po­rary land­ing page.


How many times have I seen this? (Answer: Many)

An entre­pre­neur starts a new busi­ness by pur­chas­ing a domain. Easy peasy. Then days, weeks, and even months go by and the web­site isn’t up yet. Mean­while the web­host uses the entrepreneur’s web real estate to adver­tise itself or place ads for oth­ers. It’s sort of like park­ing an old car in a vacant lot and putting a For Sale sign on it.

Don’t let them park their car on your lot!

Instead, why not cre­ate a land­ing page for your busi­ness to begin your SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion) imme­di­ately? When you even­tu­ally add your full web­site, you’ll already have some vis­i­bil­ity (think web­site rank­ing) from your land­ing page.

Here’s what you need:

Con­tinue read­ing

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Starting A New Business: What Do You Do First? Ezine or Website?

Chicken or Egg

Ezine or Web­site? Chicken or Egg?

Recently a poten­tial client with a sharp busi­ness idea approached me. She has a part-time job so she wanted to start small. She fig­ured that start­ing with an ezine (email newslet­ter) was the way to go to begin build­ing her list of con­tacts, and then she would add the web­site later.

Not want­ing to take on too much at once, she thought this made sense. On the sur­face it does, but let’s rethink this.

Even­tu­ally she wants to sell prod­ucts on her web­site because she has valu­able knowl­edge on vital top­ics for women. But how is she going to spread the word? Social media is an option (espe­cially for the future), but I still think that an ezine is the most effec­tive way to get infor­ma­tion right under someone’s nose.  So build­ing the list is paramount.

If she starts with the ezine, how is she going to get new sub­scribers? She might get some by word of mouth, but prob­a­bly not as much as she could.

If she starts with the web­site but doesn’t have a bi-monthly ezine to build a per­sonal rela­tion­ship, how will she stay in the minds of her list?

Which should come first? It’s the chicken or egg syn­drome. Con­tinue read­ing

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10 Top Virtual Assistant (VA) Qualities That Clients Love

Recently, a new client com­pli­mented me, “Thank you, Kristy. You’re the best. I so appre­ci­ate every­thing you do… and the way you do it.” Who doesn’t like to hear some­thing like that? Whereas I was delighted by so much praise early on, I was sur­prised as well. Why was my client so pleased?

I decided to do a lit­tle research online to uncover qual­i­ties of excel­lent vir­tual assis­tants (VAs). There’s a ton of infor­ma­tion on how to become a VA or how to con­tract with a VA, but I didn’t see too much about excel­lent char­ac­ter­is­tics beyond the obvi­ous. Let’s assume that every client wants some­one who is tech­ni­cally skilled, hon­est, detail-oriented, and per­son­able. Now let’s go beyond the basic, nec­es­sary qual­i­ties, dig a lit­tle deeper, and uncover what really pleases clients and makes them eager to pay their VA’s invoice out of grat­i­tude, respect, and mutual admi­ra­tion. (Like the way I feel when I write a check to my com­puter technician!)

Ten ways VAs can make their clients LOVE them:

1.   Care about your client’s com­pany as if it were your own. This isn’t always easy because you’re not an employee who is vested in the retire­ment plan. In fact, you’re an inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor who can be fired at a moment’s notice. How­ever car­ing for your client’s com­pany in sub­tle, but impor­tant ways builds trust, which is vital to the long term VA-Client relationship.

For exam­ple, let’s say that you com­pleted some work for a client, but she dropped the ball and will look bad if you don’t reach her so she’ll fin­ish the last step. Even though it is late in the evening, con­tact your client by any means possible.

2.   Take Ini­tia­tive. It’s easy to fall into the trap of being the “assis­tant” and just sit­ting back and wait­ing to be told what to do, espe­cially when you have other clients to help out, or your own work to do. But remind­ing your client that you are there to help, prompt­ing them for tasks that are com­ing due, and remind­ing them when you don’t hear back from them are all ways that you show your client that you “have their back.”

3.   Bring Ideas to the Table. Clients often have set ways of doing things, but you, as a VA with many clients, can bring alter­nate ideas for your client to con­sider (with­out breech­ing client con­fi­den­tial­i­ties). Stay on top of tech­no­log­i­cal advances, try free tri­als of inno­v­a­tive new sys­tems, and sug­gest them to your client as ways to improve the bot­tom line or stay ahead of the competition.

4.   Be Flex­i­ble. When I first started out as a VA, I had rigid stan­dards such as inflex­i­ble busi­ness hours. Although I still pre­fer to take Friday’s off, in today’s econ­omy and the real­i­ties of the 24/7 inter­net, work­ing the occa­sional late night or doing a week­end check-in becomes nec­es­sary. Clients really appre­ci­ate this flex­i­bil­ity. For me, the key is mutual respect with a client. If you’re work­ing with an ideal client, then being taken advan­tage of won’t be an issue.

5.  Own Mis­takes. Mis­takes do hap­pen, and we hate it when they do, but they are inevitable as hard as we try. Recently, a client and I were scram­bling to fin­ish an ebook with a com­ple­tion dead­line, and mean­while, I was head­ing out of town for a mini-vacation. I fin­ished the last edits and sent the file to my client and I was happy and care­free, that is, until I real­ized that I had sent the wrong file and couldn’t make it right from my remote loca­tion. Ugh. My fault. I owned it, apol­o­gized, and made it right my knock­ing some time off my bill. It was the right thing to do. For­tu­nately, I have a won­der­ful client who rec­og­nizes that errors hap­pen, under­stood, and appre­ci­ated the break on the invoice. Con­tinue read­ing

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The Power of Twitter — Are you using it?

Real cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence:
I wanted to book a flight on Jet­Blue. When I reached the pay­ment screen, I real­ized because I was using gift cards (Thanks par­ents!), I would have to call in my reser­va­tion. That was a bit time con­sum­ing and clumsy, but reser­va­tion made.

Next morn­ing, no email con­fir­ma­tion of my trip. I like those, and they are handy to send to fam­ily. No prob­lem — I headed to the web­site. (Thank­fully I wrote down my con­fir­ma­tion num­ber.) I nav­i­gated to the “print your itin­er­ary” sec­tion, put in my email address, and hit sub­mit. Noth­ing. Try again and again. What browser am I in? Google Chrome. Okay try Fire­fox. Noth­ing. Try IE and try a dif­fer­ent email address. Okay, now I’m frus­trated that I am hav­ing to jump through all these hoops to give them my busi­ness includ­ing the phone call since it would have been faster to book on the web myself.

Okay the next step is to either call them again or access cus­tomer ser­vice from their web­site. I did the lat­ter and got an autore­spon­der reply that said if I was fly­ing imme­di­ately, they would get back to me real soon, and if not, it would be 14–21 days. Harrumph.

I had just taken a Twit­ter class (see ear­lier post), so I thought I would give it a try. It was a chal­lenge to be brief (140 char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tion). I had to rewrite the Tweet sev­eral times, but I came up with this:

Need email copy of my itin­er­ary for @JetBlue. Their auto email says I’ll hear back in 2–3 weeks. Hope it’s faster than that.

The speed of the reply was amaz­ing: 9 min­utes. I received a direct message:

Please Dm us your conf # and we can get that sent to you. Happy to help. ^kg

I received my email itin­er­ary within 30 min­utes after that, and I felt taken care of. They did not address my sug­ges­tion that their web­site was bro­ken. I’ll give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt that they’ll jump on that. Hope­fully they’ll con­sider chang­ing their autore­spon­der about their response time of 2–3 weeks as well.

The moral of the story for me is that if you need to get a company’s atten­tion, and they mon­i­tor their Twit­ter account, send­ing a tweet just might be the way to go.

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Review: Twitter Essential Training

I’ve used Twit­ter spar­ingly for a cou­ple of years. Dur­ing big, live events like an earth­quake in CA and an approach­ing tsunami for Japan, I find Twit­ter invalu­able. Day to day, though, I wasn’t quite into it until I got a smart phone and envi­sioned the pos­si­bil­i­ties a lit­tle more.

It was time to get more knowl­edge, so I turned to Lynda.com and their begin­ning class: Twit­ter Essen­tial Train­ing.” It’s taught by Maria Langer who is easy to fol­low, thor­ough, and has a very pleas­ant speak­ing voice.

The class cov­ers every­thing from sign­ing into a new account, retweet­ing, @mentions, and lists — one of my favorites for keep­ing who you are fol­low­ing orga­nized. It cov­ers sev­eral 3rd party prod­ucts includ­ing some for sched­ul­ing tweets, using Twit­ter with a mobile phone, or using it con­gru­ently with other social media.

Using Twit­ter with images was com­pletely new to me and very valu­able. (I should know these things since a con­gress­man recently resigned over the mis­use of this fea­ture.) I now fol­low Maria, which is a great way to see all these var­i­ous fea­tures in action. She’s a won­der­ful role model for using Twit­ter to its fullest, and with 32K tweets under her belt (wow!), she’s earned it.

My favorite part of the course was when she talked about the friend­ships that she’s devel­oped, 140 char­ac­ters at a time, and how she uses it with busi­nesses to effect change…and gets results. Power to the peo­ple, man!

I really enjoyed learn­ing about Twit­ter eti­quette as well. After all, when one tweets to the world, no one may read your tweet, but every­one can read your tweet for ever more, so you don’t want to make a fool of your­self or offend.

There’s so much more than what I men­tion here. So if you want to learn more about Twit­ter from the ground up, this course is a great way to learn a lot.

Just one more thing (homage to the recently deceased Peter Falk)…if you take the course and you hear a men­tion of the Ven­tura pier, know that back in the 70s dur­ing my Jr. Life­guard train­ing, I jumped from that pier.

(To find the course, head here. You can sam­ple a few links for free, but you need to be a mem­ber to take the full course [worth it!])

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And the logo losers are…

I had a ball cre­at­ing the logo (just the It’s Vir­tu­ally Done part) for my new web­site. Although I really enjoy graphic design, I’m way to slow with the process and would starve if I had to make my liv­ing that way. I think it’s inter­est­ing to see how peo­ple get from here to there so I thought I would show you some of the logos that didn’t make it:

Peo­ple told me they didn’t like this one because the let­ter­ing was too bold. Fair enough.

I knew that this one wouldn’t be a win­ner, but I had this urge to cre­ate a check mark out of the “V” in vir­tu­ally and to make a suc­cinct logo. Well, I gave it the col­lege try.

I con­fess that this one was my true favorite, and I still like it more than my exist­ing logo. I was going to play up the sparkling effect with the wand a lot more with swirls and stars, but this logo didn’t get that far. Why? Because peo­ple didn’t get it. I took the sec­ond “l” in “vir­tu­ally” and turned it into a magic wand. “Clients expe­ri­ence the magic of work get­ting mag­i­cally and vir­tu­ally done.” This one was too clever for its own good apparently.

This goes to show that some­times the right logo is not your favorite but the one that res­onates with the peo­ple you are try­ing to attract. (Graphic design­ers: am I right?)

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Hats off to Morten Rand-Hendriksen at Lynda.com Online Training

Learn­ing Word­Press 3 (both the .com and .org ver­sions) has been a won­der­ful jour­ney, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen made it so thor­oughly fun! His Lynda.com course Word­Press 3 Essen­tial Train­ing was so clear. The amaz­ing thing is that I didn’t really have any hic­cups dur­ing the process, not even dur­ing the man­ual upload to my web­host. I now have both a local instal­la­tion on my PC and a live web-hosted site. The local instal­la­tion will come in handy if I want to try some­thing new before hav­ing it be live. Thanks Morten! (Check out Lynda.com here.)

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Do you know your webhost provider’s first name?

I’ve been with the same web host since day one of my busi­ness, about 8 years. I didn’t know the first thing about web­hosts then, so I just acted on a tip from a colleague.

My expe­ri­ence with Aaces.com has been won­der­ful. Here’s what I like:

* I send an email with low or nor­mal pri­or­ity, and I get a phone call in a few minutes.

* I know my web host’s first name, Ross, and he’s the only one that I’ve worked with all these years.

* I can con­tact him if I just have a silly ques­tion (how am I get­ting spam from myself?), or if I just want to run my web­site imple­men­ta­tion plan through him to make sure I don’t have any gaps in my thinking

* If I’m unsure about some­thing, he’ll walk me through the process

* The staff has nice, knowl­edge­able people

Look­ing for a web host with a per­sonal touch instead of the “800-number never know what you’ll get approach?” Con­sider Aaces.com. Tell Ross that Kristy sent you.

 

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Before, During and After

As those of you who have done it, cre­at­ing or updat­ing a web­site is a big job. Chang­ing from one web­site to another is a lit­tle more com­pli­cated (mov­ing files around, upload­ing and con­fig­ur­ing your new site, not let­ting your­self get con­fused that the images look like they are there, but they are not because Word­Press is read­ing the local file paths).

Any­way, it has been a fas­ci­nat­ing jour­ney of learn­ing, and I’m happy for the expe­ri­ence.
Here’s the jour­ney in pictures:

BEFORE:

Old It's Virtually Done site

Old It’s Vir­tu­ally Done site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DURING:

Maintenance Mode

It’s Vir­tu­ally Done is at the spa get­ting a makeover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFTER:

It's Virtually Done's new site

It’s Vir­tu­ally Done’s new site

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