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.

Small Business Owner’s Sanity Checklist...

For virtual assistants, it is sometimes difficult to explain to prospective clients why it is so imperative that they have a virtual team.  Having a list of questions to get us thinking or to pose to them is really valuable.

I recently received an e-mail from Virtually Successful that I thought was really helpful so I wanted to share it with you all via the blog.  I’ve posted their intro and the first 10 questions here but please visit their website to read the rest of the blog post.

This checklist is designed to help potential small business clients see the benefit of working with a virtual team. The point is to make you, the virtual support professional, look great, save you time and more effortlessly attract the right clients to you. It’s a took that you can print and use cleanly with your clients (pdf format is available at the link below).

May I suggest that you answer these questions as the business owner of your own business. Maybe it’s time you hired your own help?

Instructions: Circle the number of statements that are true. If more than 5 statements are true, working with a virtual assistant specializing in small business may be the perfect solution.

1. I am working long hours each day and still can’t get caught up.
2. I’m working mostly in my business instead of on my business.
3. If I wasn’t here, the place would fall apart within a month.
4. I want to delegate more so I have more time to pursue new revenue streams.
5. I’m doing tasks that I do not like or am not very good at.
6. Sometimes I wonder if I’m spending too much money doing everything myself
7. Our customers aren’t getting quality service and we’re losing money as a result.
8. I have family members helping in my business and they are unhappy about it.
9. I want to take more time off with family without guilt or stress.
10. Unnecessary chaos in the company makes it hard to build a team.

Visit Virtually Successful for the rest of this valuable blog post.