VA Time as a Christmas Present?

Can you believe it’s already December 2nd? I don’t know about you but time flew by for me this year and now there are only 23 days left until Christmas! Does the thought of only a few more weeks of shopping time leave you stressed out? Do you find yourself wondering what to buy?

We all have those hard to buy for people but what if you’re an online business owner and you want to do something special for someone or a few people? Maybe you run an affiliate program and you want to provide a gift to your top affiliate or the top three affiliates. Or maybe you just want to purchase something for another online business owner but you aren’t sure what to get them.

Why not purchase some Virtual Assistant services? You can purchase just a couple hours of time or take advantage of 10 hour retainer package and split the time up amongst more than one person. There isn’t a better gift than ’time’.

By purchasing Tishia Saves Time services you’ll be putting a few hours of time back into someone’s life so they can focus on something they want to do and let them hand over the reigns on a project they don’t enjoy. Contact Tishia if you have any questions.

Does the Thought of Outsourcing Overwhelm You?

Have you been thinking about hiring a Virtual Assistant but the thought overwhelms you?

I hear it all the time when I’m speaking with a possible client. They know they need a VA but it’s too overwhelming for them. They don’t know where to start, what projects to outsource or how to even get a VA on board with them.

It can be overwhelming in the beginning. And depending on what projects you outsource there may be a learning curve involved. If you are handing over your email to a VA there will be some training that you will need to provide your VA.

I was hired by a client to take over her email. The first week we got on the phone every morning (I check her email twice a day – once in the morning and once in the afternoon) and she walked me through what to do with each email. I took notes for future reference. It was smooth sailing after that. She was comfortable in my ability to handle it from then on and I was confident in my ability to do it. Hiring me as her VA to take over her email saved her several hours a week. I do in 2-3 hours a week what she was doing in 2-3 hours a day!

If you don’t feel comfortable outsourcing something as large as email management in the beginning start with smaller projects. Make a list of the tasks that you do for your business – article marketing, press release submission, blog posting, website updating, keyword research, etc and narrow it down to the project(s) that you hate doing and outsource those.

A large number of my clients have hired me to handle their press release submissions and article submissions. I have also recently started doing blog posting for clients that just don’t have the time to keep up with their blogs.

It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small and work your way up. The idea behind outsourcing is to not only get off your plate the things you don’t like doing but to free up some time so you can work on incoming producing projects.

—
I currently have openings in my schedule for some hourly projects or retainer clients. Contact me at tishialee@gmail.com

CBC: What Do You Do When You Don’t Have Content For Your Blog?

The cross blog conversation between Tricia of Time Saver VA and myself continues. If this is your first time here please go to our first conversation and follow along.

First I have to apologize that it has taken me over a week to answer Tricia’s question. As we all know sometimes life happens and things need to be taken care of while we let something else sit on the back burner. Let’s just say life happened and I had to take care of some things and get myself sorted out. Thankfully I am blessed to work at home and can take some time off when needed.

But now it’s time to get back to the cross blog conversation and onto answering Tricia’s question.

Tricia Asks:

When you struggle to find content for your website blog what do you do?

One of my weak areas is adding content to my site on a regular basis. Before anyone attacks me with the “content is king” lecture let me defend myself and say that I have somethings up my sleeve to implement that will take care of this issue

Until I have my ducks in a row and start doing what I have planned I have been writing about products that I’m using, membership sites, etc. I’ve thrown in a blog post with a new customer testimonial…anything that comes to mind I blog about.

I’ve just recently set up Google Alerts for some different business related terms that I hope will also help inspire some content creation. And I’ll also be checking into some PLR items because I absolutely love rewriting PLR (guess you can imagine that’s one of my services I offer…LOL) and I also have thought about using a Ghost Writer as well.

I hope that gives you some ideas Tricia and answered your question.

A Question for Tricia:

We all learn from our mistakes. Think back to when you first started your business until now. What is the one mistake that made you cringe when it happened but you learned a valuable lesson from it?

Cross Blog Conversation Continues

My friend and fellow Virtual Assistant Tricia Gardner of Time Saver VA and I have continued our cross blog conversation. If this is your first time visiting, you can go here to read the beginning of our CBC.

This time Tricia asked me:

Name five sites where you have learned the most about becoming a VA and working from home. Why were these sites so important and what kind of information did you get from them?

Once again Tricia has provided me with a great question! And she’s gonna make me think this time around I should know this right off the top of my head but I can only think of a couple. So I might not be able to provide you a list of five, but I’ll give it my best shot!

Sites I have used & I recommend:

• Mom Masterminds – I can’t even begin to explain what information is available here because there is so much! It’s a paid membership site for moms and it’s worth every penny. In fact I just recommended this site to another one of my friends that is starting a VA business. I told her if she was going to invest any money into her business I highly recommend investing in a membership at Mom Masterminds. Not only is it full of learning resources but the mentoring forum is full of so many wonderful successful business owners that are willing to give you support, feedback, etc.
• Internet Based Moms – This isn’t specifically geared towards VA’s but it has a lot of information about working from home. It’s an interactive message board where you can ask questions and receive feedback. It’s free to join and has lots of helpful information. I’ve even picked up a couple jobs from other members that frequent this site.
• Just Online Jobs – Again this isn’t geared specifically towards VA’s but the information about working from home here is helpful. This site is more about telecommuting jobs but I’ve found it very helpful and just recently there was a section added to the site specifically for VA’s.
• VA Networking – I haven’t utilized this site as much as I should but the few times I have visited it and used the message board I was impressed. Unlike the other sites mentioned, this one is geared toward Virtual Assistants only. Although I’ve been impressed with the site I have to say that I also feel overwhelmed when on the message board. There is so much information there that I often don’t know where to start & just end up not reading any of the posts.

Well, Tricia I know you asked me for five sites but I honestly can’t think of a fifth one off the top of my head. I hope that the four I’ve listed give you a good idea of what each individual site offers and the type of information you can pick up there.

I leave Tricia with this question:

If you could have someone take you under their wing as an intern what thing(s) would you want to learn? In other words, what would be the perfect intern opportunity for you as a ‘newbie’?

Cross Blog Conversation with a Fellow VA

I’ve been talking with Tricia Gardner of Time Saver VA for quite awhile about doing a CBC. We both loved the idea of taking my experience of being a VA for the past couple years and her being a ‘newbie’ and interacting with some conversation. But, I kept putting it off and putting it off because of not having this site all set up perfectly and the way I want it yet.

The topic of co-promotion came up on Mom’s Morning Show where I’m one of the several crew members we have there. A challenge was thrown at me, that week, to get out of my comfort zone and contact someone about co-promotion. Instantly the idea of the CBC conversation with Tricia popped into my head so I contacted her and here we are.

Here is Tricia’s first question to me:

“When you decided to become a VA what was your thought process? How did you decide this was what you wanted to do?”

Tricia what a great question! And to answer that, it’s kind of funny how my thought process really went.

Kelly McCausey, queen of Podcasting, and I used to live in the same town (and my son and I even lived with her and her son for a couple years) and I watched her begin her home based business and always thought in the back of my head wow that’s so cool. One day after my hours had been cut to part time hours at my job, Kelly approached me and asked me if I would like to be her VA. Back then I had never even heard of a VA or what a VA did.

I honestly have to say that I didn’t have a big thought process going on about all this. I didn’t think I would leave my job as an Optometrist Assistant to work from home. As a single mom I never imagined it was a possibility. But the more I got involved in working with Kelly and working out of my home office, I started to wonder how it could become a reality.

Again I have to give credit and a lot of thanks to Kelly. She was pretty well known in the WAHM (work at home mom) community and when she started mentioning my name, things began happening and moving along pretty quickly! The next thing I know I was leaving my job and coming home full time!

To answer the second part of your question, how did I know this is what I wanted to do, it just felt right. I had peace about it. I loved learning new things, I loved working with all the other small business owners (all WAHM’s) and knowing that by offering my services to them I was saving them time and helping them to be able to focus on other more important aspects of their business.

So Tricia I leave you with this question:

As a ‘newbie’ VA what is the one thing you find yourself struggling with most?