| eZone Secretarial Services |
| Virtual Assistant Services | QuickBooks Bookkeeping| Social Media Marketing |
Whether you have hired a virtual assistant or social media specialist to write your social marketing plan or if you have written it yourself, now is the time to start implementing it. The first thing that needs to happen is to create your branded profile at each social marketing site on your plan. It is very important to keep this profile consistent and attractive in order to gain recognition.
This blog post by @TimeOnTaskVA caused me to review how I spend my day. This is a very good thing to do in order to review if you are making the most of your time! I now consider myself optimized.
It seems every single week there is something new in the social media marketing world.
I had been making flow charts for clients social media accounts on what account was automatically linked to what account. Finally, my wonderful accountability partner, Kathy Colaiacovo, from Time On Task Virtual Assistant Services answered a question on VAnetworking regarding posterous.com. This lead me to an afternoon of exploring the features, logistics and setting up an account here. I will be moving some clients off of ping.fm and over to posterous. It really is a simple service.
One email to post@posterous.com and you are able to post to your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as well as a myriad of other sites. The biggest benefit that I see is that posterous sends your message as a Tweet and the characters that don’t fit end up with a shortened URL back to the main posterous site. Brilliant!
As a Virtual Assistant, I have been using social media for quite a while now and recently have found myself disturbed by other’s ideas of how to handle it. This is the first part in a series of blog posts regarding social networking and my beliefs on proper methods of success.
A well written social media networking plan is necessary to help guide you to success with minimal effort. You will be able to see on paper, (or the computer screen), what your needs are in order to reach your goals. A great plan should include: (more…)
I was very surprised yesterday morning to discover a Google Alert in my inbox indicating that I had won the VAnetworking Blog of the Month Award. How honored I am especially since my blog is so new! In addition to being new, my topics tend to be all over the board, depending upon what project I am working on at the moment or what is paining me or inspiring me. This just proves the support and family-like atmosphere that this group projects. I would not be where I am today without discovering Tawnya Sutherland from an article in Entrepreneur.com. (This link goes to an article about Tawnya but not the one that got me involved with her. That one is a number of years old and no longer posted.)
Are you an aspiring virtual assistant like me? Do you have an Insiders subscription to VAnetworking? I have found this group of VA’s to be the most open, addressable and helpful people in the industry! You don’t really even need the paid Insider subscription, if you don’t want to receive the valuable RFP’s or invitations to special classes and trainings. It is just a great place to tips and tricks of the industry. The response time is incredible. I don’t think that I have ever posted a question that wasn’t answered by the end of the day.
However, I do suggest that anyone that is starting up their own virtual assistant business check out Tawnya’s Virtual Business Startup Solutions package. There is also a Kick Start download on the website. I should have gone this route, but, I thought that I could start my business by myself. Yes, I was able to but it took quite a while and occasionally, I would have the horse before the cart and have to back up and improve my plans! It would have been a lot easier if I would have just followed Tawnya’s program.
And, if you are not a virtual assistant, but think you may need one or would like to find out more information about how to partner with a VA, first, read their blog and then join the forum! This is an excellent place to hang out. Once you easily discover the openness and honesty of professionals in the VA industry you will feel very confident by posting your Request for Proposal on this board. You can also find out more from my webpage “Why a VA?”
If you read and respond to blogs on the Internet, you should make your life easier by signing up for a free account at gravatar.com. This site allows you to create a profile including an avatar that will follow you on all the blogs where you post comments. This is another tool to use to keep your marketing message consistent.
Remember, it is important to keep your online profile as consistent as possible in order to create and maintain your brand recognition. If you use different user names and avatar pictures all over the Internet, you are doing yourself a disservice. You need to maintain a constant presence thus, promoting your personal brand.
Late last week, I was startled to find that people had been signing up as users on my Wordpress site. This was about the same time that Tawnya Sutherland of VAnetworking discovered that one of her websites had been hacked due to a security breach in an older version of Wordpress. Well, just before Tawnya made her announcement, I had posted my puzzling question on VAnetworking. The response that I received from member Crystal Pina was to go to my dashboard and then go to Settings>General there is a box there that was checked saying “Membership – Anyone can register.” (more…)
Well, I believe great progress has been made! I am very happy with my new site. If you are into reading, chatting with others, Tweeting, searching, more reading, more talking, re-installing about 8 times and reuploading everything, then learning WordPress is for you!
No, I’m kidding; if you have the patience, WordPress is learnable with a little bit of help from friends. There are many experts out there and they are willing to share tips and tricks. The thing that I really find amazing is the fact that one piece of software could have so many variables! Good and bad. While I was searching for the reason that I was unable to upload pictures to my blog, I came across so many different opinions and solutions. How do you know where to start? I had no idea where to start. So, it was trial and error, documenting each fix and what the results were so that I was able to either reverse the “fix” or pinpoint exactly what my particular problem was. It sounds tedious but it was, (and will be), a learning experience. You will be surprised by how much you pick up while trying to get one thing right; then you are able to use that knowledge for another step you are trying to take.
So stay tuned and let me know what you think of the site. I will be looking for constant improvement ideas and suggestions. Remember, my goal is to become so proficient at site design and maintenance that I may offer it as a service.
I am so excited that I was able to find and implement this bug fix by myself. Now I can embellish my new site with lots of images. I found the very simple fix at http://www.ibuyringtones.com/iblog/wordpress/wordpress-uploading-image-problem/. The one that worked for me was the very last post, suggesting that under the Miscellaneous Topic in the Settings Menu you change “Store uploads in this folder”settings from “wp-content” to “wp-content/uploads”. I think my setting was pointed to a really complex place. Lots of numbers and letters. I simply changed it to “wp-content/uploads” and viola!
Welcome to my new blogsite. eZone Secretarial Services used to have a really nice website that was for the most part, neglected by me. It was static – not too many changes happened there. That is all changing right now.
I attended FoVA09 in beautiful Niagara Falls, Canada this past June and it was quite a beneficial trip! I attended many learning sessions about such topics as a two part Social Networking & Blogging Workshop with Kathie Thomas, (all the way from Australia), Creating a Marketing Budget and Plan to Help your Business Group by Jeannine Clontz and another two part event titled Creating Websites using Wordpress led by Frances Palaschuk. It was the last seminar mentioned that got me into this project. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a whole lot and Frances presented it beautifully making it sound so easy. So here I am attempting to do this myself! Wish me luck and enjoy the ride!
