A big part of running a virtual assistance firm is trading time for money. In fact, for many virtual assistants, this is all they will do. If you aren’t implementing other opportunities (passive revenue, affiliate revenue, etc.) you will eventually cap out on what you can earn.

In order to diversify your offerings and earn more (without working more), you may need to consider expanding your virtual assistance practice to one that includes more people than just yourself.

Leveraging other virtual assistants can be done by bringing them on to your team to help with the client load or to offer services that you currently do not offer. When you bring on new team members, you want to make sure that their rates are lower than yours so that profit is made whenever they do work for your clients.

When diversifying your service offerings, you want to consider adding things you do not yet do. For example, if you do not offer social media, you may want to bring on a virtual assistant who is well versed in this so that you can offer that as a service.

When it comes to simply getting their assistance with the client workload, you want to bring on people who have various skills that will be helpful to you and your clients.

You can find your team members on social media or by placing RFPs through any of the major virtual assistance organization websites.

We’ll dive more into this subject but for now, review the posts we have on Multi-VA Businesses!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Increasing your rates is sometimes a very scary idea for virtual assistants. By increasing our rates, we risk scaring away potential clients and upsetting our existing clients. However, if we do not raise our rates, we may be underpaid and we may devalue the service that we offer.

What I want to encourage you to do today is to take a good, hard look at your rates. What do you feel about them? Are they priced fairly or do you feel that you are under earning your potential?

If you have any doubt at all about your current rates, I want to encourage you to increase them starting immediately.

There are two phases to a rate increase. The first phase is for new and potential clients. This phase is easy as it merely means updating the pricing on your website (if it exists there) and letting potential clients know, in your calls with them, about your new rates.

In the past, I would increase my rates incrementally by $5/hour with every new client. I did this until my rate was at an acceptable level for what I needed to earn.

The second phase is for your existing clients. In my business, for existing clients, I increased their rates twice per year until they hit the same acceptable level. You can do the same by issuing a notice a few weeks or a month before the rate increase. Let the client know that you are bringing their rate up to stay competitive in the marketplace and if they have any issues, to discuss them with you now.

If there are specific clients you really, really can’t afford to lose and they provide you with a lot of your income / revenue, you may want to keep them where they are and just apply the rate increase to new clients.

Either way, increasing your rates means you will earn what you are worth and be much happier providing the services you do.

Make some noise about your business!

How often do you let your potential clients and website visitors know what other people in the universe are saying about you? Often times, we forget to add this vital information to our websites and it can actually prevent us from converting prospects into sales.

Social proof means having feedback and testimonials from people who have raved about you via social methods – generally, social media. For example, if a client posts a very positive Tweet about you, he or she has just given you social proof.

Written testimonials posted on a website are not as powerful because there is not always a real person attached to the other end. These testimonials can appear fake and thus decrease their effectiveness. Social proof, especially unsolicited, is much more powerful.

To encourage your clients to sing your praises socially, invite them to share a few words on Twitter in exchange for a link to their website on your testimonials page. You can screenshot the testimonial from Twitter or direct people to the Tweet itself which will create a more powerful testimonial.

You can also mark Tweets as starred on Twitter which adds them to your Favorites section. You can then compile a list of positive feedback which people can go and check out at anytime. Again, this is more powerful because each testimonial or raving note is attached to a person that they can connect with.

So, if you haven’t already, begin marking positive Tweets as favorites and invite your clients to share their experience with your company on Twitter or Facebook in exchange for publicity. Remember, you have to make it a win-win or some people won’t act.

Most virtual assistants that I know do not build a list. Or, they start one a year or two into their businesses. If you aren’t yet building a list, I am going to encourage you to start today.

Building a list provides you with an audience that is interested in what you have to offer and will read what you have to write. This gives you a very powerful avenue for marketing your services and turning prospects into clients.

If you are not building a list, people could be coming to your website and leaving again without ever letting you know. By offering them a reason to input their name and e-mail address (providing a free offering of an e-book or an e-course is one way to entice them) you will have an opportunity to connect with them again in the future.

To start building your list, sign up for a free account at MailChimp.com. You can add up to a limited number of subscribers but at least you will have something in place as a starting point.

If you are already list building but find the process slow, here are some ideas to increase your list size.

• The first is to offer your free report or free giveaway on Twitter at least 2-3 times per week. Do the same thing on Facebook.
• If you have a Facebook fan page, create a custom landing page where people can opt-in to receive your information right on Facebook.
• You can also do more time consuming things like host a free teleseminar to grow your list. People will opt-in for the event and you’ll be able to market to them in the future.

Make sure to at least be directing traffic to your list. Make it obvious, accessible and interesting. Build your list and in future e-mails, we’ll discuss what to do with the list once it’s captured.

When you setup your VA business, one of the things you will quickly hear people talking about is the idea of a niche or a target market. There are two schools of thought when it comes to virtual assistance businesses.

The first says that choosing a niche is smarter – that you will be able to focus on a specific target market, industry or client type and attract more business.

The second says that targeting a wider audience will bring you in more business and that instead of diversifying your niche, diversify in your service offerings. For example, becoming known as a creative firm versus an administrative one.

I prefer a combination of both.

It is important to develop an idea of your ideal client and create an ideal client profile. That way, when you develop your copy, website offerings, etc. you can write it to a specific person versus an unknown person.

If you haven’t yet, create that ideal client profile and tape it or post it up somewhere in your office. Then, re-read your website copy and your marketing materials to see if it effectively speaks to that ideal client. If not, make some changes in your business now.