How HARO Can Make You a Virtual Assistant Supersta...

Today’s tip is a short yet super effective one. It piggybacks off of last week’s tip around helping your client promote and share their material only this time, it’s helping source them opportunities.

If you haven’t heard of Help a Reporter Out (aka HARO), you will want to check them out immediately. www.helpareporterout.com is a place where media comes to source out prospects for interviews, TV shows, radio spots, speaking gigs and more. By subscribing to their newsletter, you will receive three e-mails per day filled with opportunities.

What we do in our VA company, on a daily basis, is review these e-mails to see if any of the media opportunities suit our client’s businesses. If they do, we make the media opp known to them and we invite them to submit a response to the applicable opportunities.

Our clients absolutely love when we do this and it helps them gain more visibility and publicity. When we can provide value to our client’s businesses, it increases their revenue which in turn allows them to outsource more.

One note – do not bill your client for this time. Make it a value-add that you do inside of your business to stand out from other VA companies.

Using an RSS Reader to Promote Your Clients...

One of the hardest parts of being a virtual assistant is having multiple clients and trying to juggle all of them. To really provide value to our clients, it’s nice to be able to go the extra mile by helping them promote their events, share their blog content, etc. However, going back to the multiple client issue, it’s not always possible to keep it all top of mind.

If you find yourself struggling to keep up with your clients activities and struggling to actively promote and share your client’s work with the world, you may want to implement today’s tip.

What I did was setup an RSS feed reader first. This could be Google Reader, Newsgator or Feedly. Once you have your RSS feed reader setup, begin importing the RSS feed from each of your client’s blogs / websites. You can even add the RSS feed from their Twitter account.

Once you’ve added all of your feeds, make it a part of your routine to go into your feed reader, check the new posts and share your client’s posts via social networks or via your own blog.

By doing so, you’ll provide real value to your clients and you’ll create a stronger relationship with them where they will be more apt to promote the things you are working on.

Packages: How They Educate Your Marketplace...

I go back and forth on packaged services for a virtual assistance business. Sometimes I think they are helpful and valuable and other times, I feel that they are difficult to navigate as they have no real end date and clients often lose track of where they’re at.

There is one specific application of the packaged service that I do like however: the education aspect.

Putting together packages of your services basically means grouping together like services and setting one price for all of those services. For example, you might have a social media package that offers Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn setup as well as on-going maintenance.

The package is great because it can lock in recurring revenue for your company but more importantly, it educates prospective clients.

When clients land on your website, they are going through a process of educating themselves about what it is you do, how you can help them specifically and how they can engage your services easily. A list of possible services can sometimes be overwhelming to your prospective client.

By putting together packages that speak to your target market, you will help educate them on how they can engage you and work with you immediately. You remove the guesswork out of the delegation process.

Packages also let you be more prepared on the backend. You can create forms and systems and put them in place so that when a client purchases a package, he/she is put through your system. You could even build in some additional education along the way so the client feels even more helped.

So, if you haven’t already, consider putting together some packages that suit your target market and add those to your website alongside your list of general services. See if that helps prospective clients get more clear on how they can hire you.