Take it away Eleanor…

Creating Visibility with LinkedIn

The main goal of a business when creating a company page on LinkedIn is visibility and to create awareness allowing companies to build relationships.

And what better way is there to create awareness then using and creating video to build relationships with your connections. Who better understands the value of building relationships and connections than LinkedIn? Paired with video hosted on YouTube, the two engaged together promise a beautiful business marriage.

By creating a company page you are allowing LinkedIn to promote the interests of your business. LinkedIn company page profiles have the ability to appear in Google search results, just like videos on YouTube. Maybe this is why LinkedIn choose to use YouTube to pull in videos for company pages.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Building Thought Leadership and Credibility

Using Video on your LinkedIn Company Page helps build thought leadership and credibility for your  business. By enhancing the valuable recommendations from followers that continually bring new opportunities to build your brand, secure new clients/referrals, and develop/improve your reputation.

Company pages from LinkedIn serve as a provision for business owners to promote their products or  services (visual aka video only enhances this promotion), and the only cost is the time it takes to create the page and videos, or what you pay your Virtual Assistant to create it for you (Shameless plug) or grab my new PDF guide, checklist, and video “Discover How and Why To Create LinkedIn Company Pages“ 

I Love this quote and now it not only includes people worldwide but companies worldwide. “LinkedIn connects talent with opportunity at massive scale, scale that was never possible before because we did not have infrastructure that enabled us to connect 100s of millions of people world wide.”- Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn

Grab your Report

You can grab your report here and let LinkedIn promote the interests of your company today!

(Guest Post by Eleanor Prior)

Becoming an independent business is not easy. It takes time until you have figured out what the setup is that works best for you. What type of projects, what type of clients. Through a process of trial and error you get to where you want to be, slowly. Allow time for this process to happen, and realize that you will be constantly moving direction (I still am).

• Small businesses tend to under-invest. Old software, slow computers, small screens. All this is a tax deductible business expense/investment, leverage it to do better work and compete with larger businesses.
• Optimize your workflow. Use Gmail with clever filters to make stay on top of email. Use Dropbox to access your files anywhere from any device. Use Freshbooks to track time and do your billing. Enjoy your freedom from the IT purchasing department and pick the right productivity tools.
• Cut yourself free from a specific location. Take your Laptop out of the house. This is a major stress reliever as you won’t be surrounded by stuff you need to clean.
• Pick your niche and aim high. As a one-person business, you cannot be great at everything. But you can dominate a niche. Digital content can now travel anywhere, so the entire world is a potential customer base. If the market is that broad, you can afford to focus, focus, and focus.
• Invest in a web presence and show your portfolio. By the time someone is contacting you, 70% of the sales work is done through researching you online.
• Fixed prices. As long as you are charging your time out by the hour, you are still an employee. Without a boss that is, but still, a resource that has an hourly price tag on it. The moment you let go of this principle, you become a business. Certain projects will give you large profit, for others you will lose money as you did not estimate the time it would take you correctly. Fixed prices attach a value to your service. The market will dictate whether you are worth the price or not. If potential clients are not accepting your proposals, your value is simply not (yet) there. If you are swamped all the time, you are probably not charging enough.
• Always do great work. Even if you are approaching your project budget, or your client somehow managed to get a really low project quote: deliver the great work and invest the hours at a lost if you have to. Clients do not understand budgets, they see the quality of the work, and they tell other potential clients about it. If you make a project time estimate, you take the responsibility. Do great work, or do not do the work at all if you cannot agree a price with your client.
• Not all clients suit you. When you feel that it is just not clicking with a potential client, let it go and focus on getting those that have instant chemistry. Also, there is nothing wrong with firing a client even after you have worked with them for many years. Maybe the relationship got tired and you can no longer get yourself to do inspiring work, maybe the client fit when you just started out the business, but not anymore, maybe the client cannot afford your new prices. Part as friends, it is better for both of you.
• Set your work hours. Do work when you are most productive. Turn work away if it forces you to work at times you do not want to (evenings, weekends, holidays). A fresh and rested mind designs the best presentations.

That is my advice to you so hope you will find it helpful.

Best,

My Client’s e-mail:

Michelle,

For me, the crux of the issue is that not all tasks/skills are worth $45 an hour. Some tasks require high-level skills while others require
low-level skills.

For instance:
Copywriting = $500/hr
SEO = $200/hr
Conducting interviews = $50/hr
Emailing/uploading files = $10/hr

So, if I paid you $50/hr for SEO, you’re actually losing $150/hr. Is that fair to you? The hourly-based billing system that’s so prevalent in the VA industry is flawed. Completely flawed. VA’s are leaving a ton of money on the table by charging a flat hourly fee. And this is a wonderful opportunity for you to revolutionize and dominate the market. Trust me on this. I’m a marketing specialist and pricing is a critical component in marketing. VA’s are NOT pricing their services correctly.

Sincerely,

Client

My Response:

Client,

I see your point and I believe that Virtual Assistant rates and flat price or hourly is an area that could/should be up for debate in the industry but here are a few things that need to be considered.

When you quote a flat fee instead of an hourly rate you need to take much more time up front to scope out the full project and create a set of requirements and let the client know what is in or out of the scope of the work. That means when a client asks for things that are out of scope (such as additional research or changes) it is necessary to revise and renegotiate the price. I prefer to simply do the additional work and let the client know
how much time it took me instead of constantly reworking the bid price.

Yes, of course, there are some parts of anyone’s job that require low level skills and some that require high level skills and I have accounted for this in my hourly rate. Because I am a specialist with audio and video I should be charging closer to $65 or $75/hour for these skills. But since I also
will edit Podcasts or do Usability testing on your Website which are lower level skills (and not ask you to go out and find another VA for that) I feel comfortable quoting an average price of $45-$50.

I do feel that in many cases the flat price per project would work out in my favor but I prefer (and my clients seems to also) the flexibility of changing the project around and adding and deleting tasks as they see fit without having to renegotiate a new price every time.

Michelle

What do you think?  Is our pricing model leaving money on the table?

Best,

 Will Virtual Assistants want and benefit from having basic information about our industry available to us all? I think it would be interesting information to know more about Virtual Assistant rates, how many Virtual Assistants run multi-VA business and, perhaps, how Virtual Assistants market themselves. I did like Yelena’s last question about the biggest challenges facing Virtual Assistants today. I didn’t choose any of her responses because I didn’t see them as challenges. I added my own reply which was ” trying to learn everything you need to know to really succeed in this business. As an Internet Marketing VA it is incredible how much information there is to learn.” 

If you would like to participate and have a free copy of the report for doing so please fill out her Virtual Assistant Survey. Also, if you would like to comment, I am interested in knowing what sort of information do you think would be beneficial for VAs to know about each other?

Virtual Assistant Survey

Thanks for reading,

Well, basically that is what I am telling you and those of you who are interested in growing your business need to take a look at my latest demo of the upcoming “Hot VA Skills Training” course.

Tina Forsyth and Cindy Greenway tell us straight out that:

“We don’t often brag about it, but we’ve been in the Virtual Assistant Industry a combined 10+ years and our own businesses are full. In fact, they could probably be full close to 100 times over if we took on all the clients we’re forced to turn away, with no one to refer them to.”

Sounds like they have some good information to share and may be looking for some great VAs to pass on some of their extra work.

Check out my demo below where I go through the list of all the topics they will be teaching us in their upcoming 12 week long Hot Skills Training. I think getting to know and hear from these ladies would be worthwhile for any VA who wants to be in this business for the long term.

Click here to see the full description of the course Hot VA Skills and sign up for the free teleseminar taking place on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008.

During this FREE first-of-its-kind event, you’ll learn:

• What to look for when hiring a VA
• What tasks VAs can perform
• How VAs are paid
• How you can Recession Proof your Business by Using a VA
• How VAs who specialize can ADD even more VALUE to your business

For VAs interested in becoming a better Virtual Assistant the same team brings you a 3 day on-line Virtual Event filled with tons of seminars. See my demo of the event below. It is about 3 minutes.

See you soon,

You’re going to LOVE this video which details the development and the features of these animated Virtual Assistants. It is hard for me to believe that they can really carry on conversations with their clients like real people (and in a sexy Russian accent) but it seems they have these amazing voice recognition abilities. I wonder if these things can be trained to write. Perhaps I will consider outsourcing some of my blog posts to one of them. Just a test really.

On a side note, though, I think I will not let my husband see this video as I am slightly concerned he may get some weird ideas. Sort of “Stepford Wives” kind of thoughts. The only thing he would not like in the video, though, is when the hot VA tells her client to “clean the kitchen himself”.

Now I am inspired to go do one of my own, so as soon as I have a good hair day you will see mine up on Youtube and right here on this blog, although I am not sure exactly where it will go, but it will be here somewhere-definitely.

• referrals as a means to get their clients and to not to spend much on advertising.
• the amount of work out there(very encouraging)
• the isolation they face as VAs tend to just work by ourselves all day.
• their rates and how they charge
• how they organize their time
• how they handle getting paid

Most of the VAs on this call don’t do Internet Marketing task, as I do, and it is interesting to hear about all the other types of work Virtual Assistants can do to earn a good living.

Enjoy,