Virtual Assistants: Create Videos for YouTube!...

Creating videos on YouTube can mean awesome search engine placement for you and it can also give your website visitors a different medium to interact with you on.

To create a YouTube video, follow these steps.

1. Choose a topic / content focus. Determine what you want to talk about, promote or share before you start and lightly script it.
2. Grab a camera and create a nice focal point background. For your camera, something like a Flip HD will do just fine or you can even use the built-in camera on your computer. Just make sure the quality is decent – particularly the sound. For the background, choose to sit at your desk with your office in the background or setup a pseudo space with a chair, a room divider as a background and some foliage.
3. Film your video and edit it. Talk through your content and don’t worry about screw-ups, false starts, etc. You can always edit that out later (or hire someone to edit it for you). Instead, just move through the content and speak as naturally as possible. Once done, edit it down into a 2-4 minute video with the best parts included.
4. Upload your video to YouTube. If you don’t already, create your account and have a custom background created for your channel. If this is going to house your videos over time, you want your brand to be consistent. Upload your video and be sure to use effective keywords and a good video title with keywords in it as well. Also, add a description with your URL at the very beginning so it turns into a live hyperlink.
5. Add your video to a playlist and share it! Create a playlist for your channel on specific content topics. Add it to that playlist and then share your video’s link on social media, your website and wherever else it makes sense to do so.

By doing videos, you’ll reach a different market than you did before and you’ll also benefit from high placement in the search engines on searches for the content in your video.

Three Ways to Leverage the Power of Basecamp in Yo...

A lot of us use (and love) Basecamp for our businesses. However, a lot of virtual assistants aren’t harnessing the true power of Basecamp and are missing out on some great opportunities to get the most out of their experience!

Here are three things that we do inside of Basecamp that might really help you get your clients even more organized.

1. Effective subject lines for messages.

When setting up new messages, a lot of people just put a topic or a focal point for the content. However, it’s really important for the subject line to indicate to a client the status of a project without having to login and review the entire message all over again.

To communicate status, we generally do the following:

[In Progress] Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page

or

[Complete] Affiliate Banner Design for 1-2-3 Seminar

The in progress and complete indicators are really helpful for our clients. They are able to scan quickly and see what is outstanding, what is complete, etc. Sometimes, we’ll even add the team member responsible for the in progress work. For example:

[In Progress – Erin] Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page

We also make sure to use really good keywords in the titles so that when we are searching the project later, the right content comes up easily and without much effort.

2. Linked messages to to-do’s and milestones.

Once we setup our messages, as we explained above, we then setup a corresponding to-do and milestone with the URL of the message embedded in the to-do. For example, we might have a to-do list called “Social Media” and in it, I would put:

Setup Facebook Fan Page -

I would then assign that to the team member responsible. If the client is being assigned a to-do, this also helps cut down the time spent looking for the original conversation. They can just quickly click the URL and go to that message specifically.

We do the exact same thing for milestones. Everything is then linked up to that original conversation.

3. User names and passwords stored in a writeboard.

The writeboards are an effective part of our Basecamp. We setup writeboards for processes, operations and also, login information. This is a perfect place to put it because changes can be easily made and all team members have access to it (including the client).

To reassure your client that this is okay, be sure to remind them that Basecamp has SSL security – the same security that online banking sites use.

We’ll have more great ways to leverage the power of Basecamp but we hope that these three ways make using Basecamp even easier for you!

Taking Screenshots on Your Mac with Paparazzi!...