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?”

Trusted Email Marketing

The educational process should be a non-stop thing for everyone.  In our society, technology, information and processes are changing on an almost daily basis.  This is why I am always looking for new things to learn and new processes to explore.  Learning WordPress was one of those challenges.  I didn’t take a formal course to learn it; I went through the trial-and-error process, which worked for me.

My next challenge will be to learn all the ins-and-outs of Constant Contact.  I will be travelling to Chicago, on the Metra System to take their seminars titled The Power of Email Marketing and Getting Started with Constant Contact.  I am really looking forward to this.  I love taking the train to Chicago and the seminars are quite the bonus.

I have invited members of the two local chambers that I belong to: the Wind Lake Chamber of Commerce and the Waterford Area Chamber of Commerce.  I hope that a lot of people reply to me with interest in this event.  It would make the experience richer to share this knowledge with some friends.  So far, I have one friend that is going, along with my daughter and a friend of hers, (they are just going to shop, though).

Constant Contact has been quite the impressive program so far.  I downloaded their free trial less than a month ago and have sent out one email so far.  The really impressive thing was that within one hour of my download, I received a call from a tech support person, asking if I had any questions.  I almost fell off my chair!  It was a good thing that he called though; I did have a few questions.  Like “are you going to scrutinize every email and address that I attempt to send out; even to people in my personal address book?” 

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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!