Contact Management
January 31, 2007
Working as a virtual assistant, my clients often ask me about contact management and what my advice is on storing contacts. I think this tends to be a struggle with a lot of people who work in both the offline and online world. I hope that I can help clarify what my recommendations are for contact management in this post.
If you run a business where you are contacting people online as well as offline, your setup needs to have some form of resource for both of these types of contacts.
When choosing your online resource, I highly recommend thinking long-term. Think about what your needs are going to be down the road because moving your list from one resource to another is not a good idea. In doing so, you often have to have people double opt-in (depending on where you are hosting your contacts) and you will often lose a lot of people. So, think about your needs: are you going to eventually need a shopping cart? What about an affiliate program? If you begin to think this way, you’ll see that your needs go beyond just a place to store contacts and a tool to e-mail them.
Learning More About 1ShoppingCart…
January 30, 2007
90% of my clients use 1ShoppingCart (or a version of this web program - Cartville, Marketer’s Choice, etc.) and most of them are satisfied with the abilities and functions of this program. What I have found however is that a lot of the VAs that I work with are still trying to make sense of this web program and are pulling their hair out in the meantime.
I collect resources and in doing so, I now have a long, organized list of favorites in my internet browser which I refer to on a daily basis. One of those links includes a website which has video tutorials for 1ShoppingCart. This website has proven to be of great value to both myself, other VAs and my clients.
Back Up Your PC - You’ll Thank Me Later
January 22, 2007
Picture this: you’ve just left for the Thanksgiving holidays and you no sooner get to your destination that you remember that you forgot to turn off the PCs at home. “No worries†you think, they’ll be fine. That same evening, your home town is hit by a huge lightning storm and the power is cut out instantaneously and takes your PC hostage. The lights in your house go down and your PC gives up – it’s fried. All data lost.
Important things on your PC:
- pictures from every Christmas and family vacation since 1998
- your entire business including financial statements… hey, we’re in the 2000s now, who needs paper records!
Secure Your Domain
January 17, 2007
We all have ideas that come and go and as an entrepreneur, these ideas tend to come more often and they tend to stick around… You won’t find them leaving your brain as quickly as you would have hoped they would.
Since we have this innate characteristic of building new things and creating, it is only natural that we will eventually stumble across the next BIG idea. You know the kind I’m talking about… It’s not just something that comes up and you think, “Yeah, I could do that…†but it’s something that you think of that makes you think, “Wow! I NEED to do this!†When you get an idea like this, what is the first thing you do? Tell a friend? Tell a colleague perhaps? The first thing I recommend doing is registering an applicable domain name.
Tracking Your Time Efficiently
January 13, 2007
In your business you should be tracking the time you spend on client work.
I just have to share with you this new tool a fellow VA shared with me . It’s called MyHours and it simply is the greatest software to track your billable hours. I signed up for a free MyHours account (which they state will be going to a paid system at some point… I’m kind of keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll forget about that little note they’ve made on their website…) and I started using it immediately.