Make Use Of Guest Authors On Your Blog

For a blog to be effective, you need to be posting two or three times a week, but sometimes it can be a challenge to regularly come up with something new to say. 

One way round this is to use articles that other people have already written and include them on your blog. Please make sure that you have their permission to do this first, though!
 
Want to use some of the articles we have written for your blog? Take a look at http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-freebies/articles/ to see what you can use now.
 

Importance of Having a Target Market

Once you have identified what services you want to provide, you then need to look at the type of clients you want to work with. To begin with, look at the different people you have worked with in past jobs, look at people in your life you respect and identify the characteristics that these people have in common. This will then form your target market for marketing purposes. 

For example, I specialise in working with Entrepreneurs, Business Coaches and home based businesses. Why did I choose this target market? Because these are the people that I have experience with and have enjoyed working for in my corporate roles.
 
Some people may think that reducing the numbers of people you can market to will reduce the results. This is just not true. To be honest, defining your target market will make marketing a lot easier as you will only be marketing to a select number of people – a lot easier and cheaper than trying to market to everyone! This is called a niche and the idea is for you to become an expert for your chosen niche industry.
 
You also need to look at your unique selling point (USP) – what makes you different from your competitors? Why should clients work with you? By identifying your niche market and USP now, you can tailor your marketing materials to attract the right type of clients that you want to work with.
 
Do you want to go from start up to marketing success the easy way? Check out http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-online-courses/online-courses-bundle/ 
 

Financial Document Templates to Streamline Your Virtual Assistant Business

Do you have a system for recording your time and invoicing clients? What about account statements and invoice tracking?

One of the processes it is vital to establish early on in your virtual assistant business is that of invoicing and account tracking. Getting your bills paid on time is vital to the health of your business and having a system to record everything, and to follow up slow payers, will pay you dividends over time.

For everything from Time Sheets to a Standing Order Mandate and Collection Letters, the Finance Templates Pack from the VA Success Group has everything you need for the smooth finanacial running of your business.

For more information visit: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-document-templates

 

What Are You Going To Write About?

Suffering from writers block?

In this information hungry world, how can you stay ahead when you’ve a couple of hours to put together your latest newsletter and, uh-oh, no content. Sometimes when you sit down to write your latest informative piece it all comes flowing, and at other times, there seems to be nothing in the tank.

Welcome into your virtual assistant arsenal the prewritten articles from the VA Success Group.

We’ve written a whole load of articles about virtual assisting so you don’t have to. Add them to your newsletter, blog or website. Anywhere you choose as long as our author tag is left intact.

Get yours here: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-freebies/

Financial Systems for Virtual Assistants

Once you start your Virtual Assistant business, you realise that you have to wear a lot of hats in order to be successful.  You now become the Managing Director, Marketing Manager, IT Helpdesk, Finance Manager as well as a host of other jobs.

 
But one area that you must make sure you get right is your finance system as there is no point marketing to attract new clients if you don’t get paid on time for all your hard work!
 
Some things you need to decide are:
 
How will you invoice clients?
What will be included on the invoice?
How will you track all purchase and sales invoices?
How will you deal with clients who don’t pay on time?
Do you want all clients to pay you in advance of work?
How will you record time spent on client tasks?
 
Take the time now to answer these questions and get the systems in place to save you time and stress later down the road when you have lots of clients on board.
 
Do you want a head start in creating your finance system? Check out the finance templates on offer where you can enter your details and start using them immediately http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-document-templates/ 
 

Virtual Assistant Training – Who Needs It – Part 2

When making the transition from employee to business owner you suddenly realise how much there is to learn and the number of additional skills you need to adopt in order to become successful. The quicker you can learn all this information and the faster you put it into practice, the more likely you are to succeed. With a huge number of new businesses failing in their first year, quality information is critical to ensuring you get everything right first time.

At the very least you will need guidance about how to start your virtual assistant business. About all the basics of getting everything set up correctly, your systems and processes, registering yourself as a business or self employed, and what that means.

At that point, when you are all set up and ready to go, you will realise that clients do not actually come knocking at your ‘virtual’ door. You need to let the world know what you are doing and why they need it. This is where marketing and networking come in. All these are skills that can be learned so make sure you dedicate some time to educating yourself. Your determination and your level of knowledge will be the deciding factors in your success.

For more information about virtual assistant training visit: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-online-courses/online-courses-bundle/

 

Make Use Of Newsletters To Promote Your Virtual Assistant Business

 Sending a regular newsletter is an affordable way to keep in touch with your target market so make sure you use one to promote your VA business.

Some people find the thought of sending out a regular newsletter a little stressful as they don’t know what to write or can’t think of something new to say.  So why not make use of the articles we have already written.

Take  a look at http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-freebies/articles/ for a host of articles ready to use now.

 

 

Core Services for Virtual Assistants

Once you make the decision to start up as a Virtual Assistant, you need to identify the services that you want to provide to clients. To do this, a good start is to look at your previous jobs and identify the tasks that you enjoyed doing and what you were good at.

Some of the services to consider initially are:
 
Diary Management
Arranging appointments and co-ordination of meeting documents.  You can also be the point of contact for their clients.
 
Event Management
Arranging any type of large meeting or event – product launch, AGM, seminar, Christmas party or other celebration.
 
Audio Typing
Clients can dictate what they want and then email to their VA for transcribing. One thing to remember is the industry standard for transcription is that it can take up to 4 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio.
 
Marketing Support
This can include sending out mail shots, desktop publishing and sending out press releases.
 
Internet Research
The internet is a great resource that VAs can navigate very quickly and easily to search for relevant information for clients.
 
Database Maintenance
This can include creating a database from scratch, cleaning up a database or maintaining client database on a regular basis.
 
Travel Arrangements
Planes, trains and automobiles! You can arrange all travel requirements for your client and can include liaising with Travel Agents for family holidays.
 
Social Media Management
Help clients keep their blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts up to date.  This is proving to be a service that continues to grow in popularity.
 
Want to build and grow your own Virtual Assistant business with a little help from us http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-online-courses/online-courses-bundle/ 
 

Tracking Time and Invoicing Clients

There’s a lot to think about when you start your virtual assistant business. There are many processes and systems to put in place, your first clients to find and lots of new ways of working in a ‘virtual’ world.

One thing you really want to make sure you get correct from the outset is your system for tracking your time spent on client work and your invoicing process. After all, there’s no point spending hours and hours on client projects, if you end up not getting paid.

For a range of financial templates that you can adapt to use in your own business visit: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-document-templates/

 

Free Articles for Your Website, Newsletter or Blog

We all know the value of sending out regular information to our prospects and clients through newsletters and blogs. Informed articles on relevant topics promote us as experts in our field. But constantly having to write more and more information to send out to our ‘lists’ can sometimes take over our working lives. If we’re constantly producing articles for the sake of marketing, we’re not spending our time on client work, which, when all is said and done, is what pays the bills.

One of the best ways of keeping up with the information hungry, without extending our working day, is to reprint articles others have written. There are two golden rules here: you must never reproduce an article without permission, and you must always include the original writers author tag or resources box when you are allowed to reproduce them. This is the information at the end of the article that usually links back to the writer’s website.

At the VA Success Group, nice people that we are, we have written a load of articles for you. You are free to use them in your own newsletters, blogs and websites, provided that you leave any links intact and include the author tag at the end.

What are you waiting for? Get yours here:

http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-freebies/