Virtual Buzz Assistant

Just in case you are not able to make your new year goals, we have assembled a list of possible resolutions for virtual assistants to choose from.

1. Follow up with clients more
2. Document things better
3. Give 111%
4. Insist on clear objectives before beginning a task
5. Meet someone new every day
6. Speak at 3 local business events
7. Network with new people
8. Write 250 blog posts for my virtual assistant blog
9. Increase my billing rate
10. Become an expert in 3 new skills I can offer
11. Have a great attitude
12. Add 5 new products to my income stream that I can sell via the web.
13. Get testimonials and publish them online
14. Dominate search engines for my chosen keywords
15. Make two new friends that have nothing to do with my business
16. Increase my income by ____%
17. Read one business book per month
18. Do 2 important tasks every day before I start chatting on twitter.
19. Go on a trip to someplace I have not been
20. Create a process I follow that generates leads for me.

Is your business blog failing?  A virtual assistant can help your business blog be a big success.

Request a Blog Assistant Here

Blogging has some very tricky elements.  People fall in love with the idea but they fall short on execution.  Here is why.

Business blogs do not have as much personality.

Business blogs do not connect well with the audience.

Business blogs are often not updated enough.

Business blogs are too much about the business and not enough about what people care about.

—-  Enter the Virtual Assistant —-

If you hire a virtual assistant to help you with your business blog, you are making a marketing decision – not falling in love with the free blog idea.  Because it is a marketing decision, you are going to think about the results you want and how to achieve them.

Are you writing a business blog for SEO?  For relationships?  To keep clients up to date?

Your virtual assistant will have a clear set of tasks and clear outcomes they need to meet.  They can help you with a publication schedule, with proof reading your blog posts, with research for blog topics and with the actual posting, including doing search engine optimization on your post.

They can also get out there and promote the thing.

If you find your business blog is dying on the vine, you need to get a virtual assistant to water it, prune it, care for it and show it some love.  Then you will have a successful business blog.

On this Virtual Assistant Blog I argue that you cannot be successful as a general virtual assistant.  We help people become much more targeted in their skill set and become Virtual Marketing Assistants – or Virtual Buzz Assistants, as we call them.

But even that is rather broad.

You can specialize in just one expertise and be very effective, and very valuable to your clients.

For example, what about becoming a Virtual Affiliate Manager?

Affiliate programs are easy to set up, but not easy to make successful.  You have to create all the affiliate tools, interact with the affiliates and keep motivating them.  You are a marketing expert, sales coach and community manager all in one.

The upside of having a dedicated virual affiliate manager is that they will be responsible for many activities that will directly impact a client’s online income.

If you want to make good money from home as a virtual assistant, think about specializing in being an affiliate manager and it will only take a few clients to keep you busy full time.  And they will not dare part with your services if you are getting results.

A blog meme is something that goes VIRAL and is passed from blog to blog, creating much higher visibility and linking in a short time.  Two years ago I was included in a Blog meme called the z-list that shot my Buzzoodle blog to much higher readership.

And it looks like the gift that keeps on giving.

That meme just got relaunched – but it is old and out of date.  The person relaunching it added a twitter comment, but I took it a step further and added twitter activity as a requirement.  Here is the new list and post.  Copy and paste and add your own.

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Over on the Servant of Chaos blog there is a new post about the old z-list.

Instead of rehashing the old blog meme, I think it would more interesting to start something new that integrates Twitter and Blogging. – See Original

So here it is: You may copy this to your blog and add 3-5 people that you think provide the most interesting experience combining blogging and twitter. If they are not active on both, do not add them to the list. Feel free to add yourself, but don’t be a dork and do it if you are not using both tools.

I would suggest you follow everyone on the list in Twitter (since they are all added because of being interesting)

The Z-List TwitBloggers

Add your favorites and pass it along

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If you are wondering how this applies to virtual marketing assistants, it is simple.  Get a client on a list like this and they will love you forever if it takes off.

You probably think you are doing pretty well getting your website set up and all.  Congratulations.

Now for the painful part.  A website does not stand a chance in today’s crowded web.  What you have might have been impressive in 1999, but does it get the job done today?

Here is a check list of things you website must have, and Virtual Assistants can help you with any of these if you are one of those people that do not have time.

1. Fresh content, at least weekly – probably via a blog
2. Conversion – People signing up for a free download or course.
3. Call to action – have you joined our VBA network yet?
4. Search Engine Optimization – Forget hiring an expensive firm, have a keyword strategy and hire a good virtual writer or hire a blogger to focus on writing for your keywords.
5. Incoming links – if people are not linking to you, your site will not get found.

No, this is not a complete list.  This is the minimum just to get started.  This does not even touch Social Media, Internet Marketing and Personal Branding, which are all important to really developing a website that gets results for a company.

These additional things seem intimidating if you have not done them before, but to the people that work in the field, these things are natural.  So either spend some time figuring it out or spend some money having a Virtual Internet Marketing Assistant help you.

iLearningGlobal is an excellent iLearning sytsem that includes many top trainers in business, sales and even in life.  It is also set up as a resale opportunity that can earn you income.

If you are a Virtual Assistant and you are focusing on Internet Marketing, I strongly encourage you to sign up and start reselling iLearningGlobal.  Within one week of signing up, I was using my Internet Marketing experience to generate sales.  You can see how we got off to fast iLearningGlobal sales success by signing up for the free eBook on Strategies to Sell iLearningGlobal.

Besides the iLearningGlobal Sales eBook as a lead generator, we also set up a private learning center to help our members learn more about how to be successful selling iLearningGlobal themselves.  Here is a screenshot of the iLearningGlobal Independant Marketer Dashboard.

This is a great example of taking what you learn in the Virtual Buzz Assistant network and applying it to a product that can generate passive income for you.  It only took a short time to build my team and now I am helping them sell.  Getting the lead engine developed was critical, and we are growing so fast that people on the team of Tony Alessandra and Brain Tracy have asked to talk with me.  I think we are having a big impact in a short period of time.

Be sure to read my iLearningGlobal Review if it is something you are considering.  This might not be the right product for you, but there are a lot of products out there and you can make some serious money if you pick the right one and build a lead generator like I did. iLearningGlobal just happened to fit well with me because I already sell training, so adding more high-quality training with iLearning Global is an easy choice.

When the decision is made to engage a Virtual Assistant it is important to recognize that person as your Virtual Partner. Having a partner presents a complex mix of interpersonal and business issues, and both need to be addressed for it to work.

If your primary interest is having someone to brainstorm with and to help your business move forward, a Virtual Marketing Assistant is an ideal choice. In that case you’d have the benefit of an objective, dedicated mind but would still make the final decisions. You gain another set of eyes and ears that are attuned to the internet marketing community and can advise you on items you may have overlooked. We also have the training and skills to navigate the most complex internet marketing set up situations.

Once you’ve made the decision to work with a VA, make the most of this association and don’t limit their tasks to mundane items that don’t best use their skills or their time. If you’d like to know how much a skilled Va can do for you, please contact me.

Article Submitted By: Kate LaFrance

Virtual Assistants can help clients set up and maintain free blogs.  My two favorite places to set up free blogs are blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Do not get me wrong – everyone should have a hosted blog on their own domain.  This is not a free blog, but it is not expensive and it can generate great marketing results.

The reason to also set up some free blogs is that they can help someone in many ways.

• Free blogs will help you lock up more search engine slots.
• Free blogs can help you with linking to important resources.
• Free blogs get indexed very fast.

When I post something that I want to drive traffic to on a blog, such as this post, I would also go out to some of my free blogs and write summaries (just a few unique sentences) and include a link with good anchor text in it linking to this blog post.  For example, I would use free blogs as the anchor text to this article.

The reason this is a perfect job for a Virtual Assistant is because it does have long term value, is often glossed over by time-strapped clients and because it is not something that takes a great deal of Internet Marketing Training to do.

Once the free blogs age some, they have high value and will help your posts rank higher for their keywords.

Virtual Assistants need to know how to do this and to understand the benefit, so they can convey to the client exactly why they are paying for this service.

How can Virtual Assistants help you grow your databases?

…and why am I saying databases?  Well, lists is too general.  For example, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) is much more than a list.  It is losts of lists with different percentages and categories.

So what can a Virtual Assistant do to grow your databases?

1. Design Squeeze pages – webpages that convince people to add their information, usually in exchange for a free white paper or eBook.
2. Design an auto-responder – much list a squeeze page, an auto-responder is where people sign up to get a series of emails.
3. Contests – A Virtual Assistant can help you design and promote a contest to get all kinds of traffic and information from people.
4. CRM management – have a virtual assistant manage your CRM – including, follow ups, prorogation and cleaning.
5. Data Entry – Simple data entry can be a great way to get value from your virtual assistant.
6. Followup call – Do you have some information about your database of customers but need more?  Have a virtual assistant do a follow-up phone call to collect more information.

I am sure there are more creative ways to use a virtual assistant to help you manage your databases of information about customers, contacts and leads.  There are just some ideas to get you thinking.

Working successfully with any Virtual Assistant, Virtual Buzz Assistant or otherwise, comes down to making your requests crystal clear.  If you are one of those entrepreneurs who thinks it is someone else’s problem to figure out what you mean, that is fine as long as you are OK with not getting what you want.

Here are 10 things you want to get confirmed at both ends before doing a task with a virtual assistant.

1. Expected time it will take for the virtual assistant to do the task.
2. Maximum time the virtual assistant can use on the task.
3. The rate it will run to do the task.
4. The exact outcome you expect the virtual assistant to achieve.  (What does the deliverable look like)
5. Who will be doing your task?  Is it the virtual assistant or an intern?
6. When will the task be completed?
7. What questions does the virtual assistant have before starting – make them repeat the project back to you in their own words.
8. How do they complete the task, step by step.
9. Are there any unexpected things the virtual assistant may encounter and how do they deal with them?
10. Billing and payment details – when will you get the virtual assistant invoice and what are the terms?  Do you need to pay a portion in advance?

This seems like a lot of stuff for one task, but most of it will be standard if you keep working with the same virtual assistant long term.  If the tasks are something you request frequently from multiple virtual assistants, consider using camtasia or another screen capture software to demonstrate how to do the task.  Then you can host it on Amazon S3 for pennies per month and send people to the video whenever there is a question on how to do something.

Crystal Clear Projects that are well thought out and defined rarely let you down.