One of the common forms of business training that new VAs want and need relates to virtual assistant marketing. Yesterday’s post was all about the online and offline marketing tools that are available and the importance of not leaving out the basics; today, let’s take a quick look at some to the tools that you can call on for marketing your business.

1. A list of the ways in which businesses can benefit from using VA services is an essential marketing tool. If you need to convince others of why they should use your services, you’re going to need to be able to tell them what’s in it for them.
2. A list of the services that you provide. Now, it’s a good idea to look at what services you offer when you create a marketing plan for a simple reason: when you’re clear about what you can do, it’s easier for businesses thinking about using your services to know which questions to ask; they’ll have a chance to know right away what you can do.
3. Your contact information. When you’re marketing your VA business – whether with postcards or a website – a key element that you need to look at is whether or not it’s going to be easy for prospective clients to reach you.
4. A sense of what marketing materials you can use. Knowing when to blog, what to do with your website, when to use brochures and when to send out postcards: all of these are vital to marketing successfully.

When you collect your VA marketing tools, you’ll find that you just might be more prepared to market your business than you had thought that you were.

When it comes to virtual assistant marketing you’re likely to find that you need to do an interesting mix of things in order to get your business off the ground and up and running and to start attracting clients can be challenging. It’s not so much the marketing itself that may cause some stress, it’s the juggling and balancing part of the act.

Internet Marketing

Because your virtual assistant business lets you work for anyone anywhere – within reason of course, the same time zone or a willingness to work on another time zone’s schedule is a definite plus – a lot of the marketing that you’ll do for you VA business is going to take place online. That means that you’ll want to factor in article marketing, blogging, online press releases, forums and social networking sites. The plus side of this is that they are all marketing tools that you’ll be able to put to work for your clients, the downside is it can be a bit time consuming.

When it comes to internet marketing for your virtual assistant business, it’s probably best – at least initially – to be sure that you have a great website and a blog where you talk about the services that you offer, and to invest in a small pay per click campaign that can help draw traffic to your website. Once you have these things working for you, you’ll be able to network with other virtual assistants to get their advice on the best next steps to getting the word out.

Traditional Marketing

Even when you work virtually, one of the things that you’re going to discover is that there are opportunities close to home. If you don’t look into some traditional marketing materials – brochures, flyers, business cards – you may find that you miss a great big market that could dramatically affect the success of your business.

Think about it: aren’t there people in your area who would benefit from the services that you offer – people who may know you socially but may not know about your business? Besides, when marketing is one of the services that you offer, what could be better than using postcards and other materials to market your work? It gives you a chance to pass out samples of what you can do.

Mostly though, what you’ll find is that the marketing tools you should be using are the tools that work for you; while it may take a while to get the hang of virtual assistant marketing, once you do you’ll know what you need to do to get the word out.

Every virtual assistant sometimes needs a little bit of help – in and of itself, that’s a great reason to join a virtual assistant network – and that’s what gets us looking for VA tools that can make everything go a bit more smoothly throughout the day.

In some cases, those tools are going to be key pieces of software that help you to track the time that you spend working on things or alarm programs for your computer that sound reminders when you need to call a client. There are times when you’re going to need tools that will help you to manage your workflow and resources that you can fall back on to help you get things done the right way.

That’s why sometimes what you are going to find is that one of the best VA tools that’s available to you is the assistance of another virtual assistant.

When you’re the member of a VA network, you’ll find that you’re able to meet others who can bail you out when you’re in a jam – whether it’s by suggesting software, pinch hitting for you on a project or offering the encouragement that you need to keep things moving forward with a challenging client relationship.

Some days, everything goes smoothly. You get up in the morning and you are able to follow the schedule that you laid out for yourself the night before: you know that you will be able to do everything that needs to be done and to meet all of the obligations that you have to your clients. Other days it seems as though your schedule just blows up before you even get to it: and that’s where time management training really starts to come in handy.

1. With time management training, you will be able to learn a better way of prioritizing your days so that even if you need to squeeze in something extra, you’ll be able to do it without disrupting everything else.
2. You will be able to know that you can honor your commitments to your clients – and they will know that they are able to count on you.
3. Time management training can help you to recognize and identify those time wasters that need to be removed from your schedule; you may be surprised by just how much time you reclaim.
4. With a better sense of time management, you will be able to look at adding an additional client or two – or find that you have more time for your family and friends.
5. Time management can help you to understand the best way of grouping projects together so that you will be able to get more done.

If you could benefit from improving your time management skills, why not join us for a time management training session on February 20th?

Many people find that, while they are running a VA business, they tend to do a lot of writing. Many don’t follow that through with “righting” any of the spelling and grammar errors that they have made.

Admit it, it’s happened: you’ve been so anxious to get a blog post published that you haven’t put it through spell check or looked to make sure that you aren’t using “there” instead or “their” or “its” instead of “it’s.” Most everyone running any sort of business – including virtual assistant businesses – is going to have done it. And if it didn’t happen in a blog post, it happened in email or a newsletter or on your website or. . .

When you are running a VA business, proofreading is important. First, this is because you need to be sure that your writing comes off with professionalism and that you are able to show that you’ve got a handle on spelling and grammar. Second, proofreading needs to be important to you because it is going to be important to your clients: if they are using your services, your writings are likely to be sent out as their writings; if you make a mistake, they look bad. Neither of those things is going to help you to get and keep clients for your VA business.

While a lot of the business training that you’ll find to help with running a VA business focuses on marketing and time management, today’s suggestion is this: train yourself to proofread your writing so that you can right the mistakes that you’ve made before they go public.

Some virtual assistant skills can be developed with business training; unfortunately, there are some skills that, well, simply cannot be learned.

For example, most virtual assistants can learn to use Photoshop, but not everyone has the creative eye to really design great logos or take fantastic photos.

Many businesses are looking for creative services from their virtual assistants:

(Source) Before you hire a virtual assistant, you will want to make sure that they understand if you have any creative needs. This can range from anything to putting together a flyer that is visual to placing a logo or graphic design that you may need for a special event. There are several virtual assistants who will focus on the visual side of businesses, giving you the ability to use an artistic eye for your business.

If you have these skills, that’s great. If you’re committed to developing them, it’s not to say that there isn’t hope. However, if you don’t have an interest in developing a creative eye or you know that you want to focus on the elements of your business that you do have a knack for, it’s okay: being an active member of a virtual assistant network can make sure that you can find the right person to help you out when the situation arises.

This is why virtual assistants should come together: we all have the things that we’re great at and things that we could do a bit better. One of the reasons why business owners work with virtual assistants – one of the reasons why we become VAs – is because they know that someone could do a better job at a particular task.

Focus on the skills that you have – they are the foundation of your VA business. Get business training and learn a bit more about things that interest you that can benefit your business and get to know other VAs with different skills who can help you to get ahead and reach your goals.

Virtual assistants use technology each and every day. We email. We blog. We work on websites (our own for marketing purposes and the sites that we work on for our clients). We create databases, spreadsheets and presentations. We type correspondence. We create logos and edit photos and do other graphic work.

Unfortunately, there’s something that’s very true about technology that we do not always want to think about: computers sometimes crash.

Many virtual assistants offer data backup services to their clients: in addition to helping to create a more effective customer database, we offer to burn it onto a CD or DVD so that they can get back to that point if something happens. Many others who offer web site services back up the files that they create before and after editing.

Any VA who has ever lost data, however, will tell you that you need to be backing up your own files as well. Business records, timesheets that you’ve used to track work for clients, marketing materials: it’s important to keep a backup copy of all of your important virtual assistant business files. You never know what could happen; it’s important to be prepared.

The technology that you need to backup your files is readily available – chances are good that you already have it; shouldn’t you be using it?

When you focus on starting and running a virtual business, it’s important to know what you have to offer. In part, that means taking a look at what your experience has been, but it’s also about looking at your prospective clients and knowing which services they may be looking for (even if they are services that your clients may not know that they need).

In other words, when you’re going to be running a VA business, you may want to consider offering different “packages” of services – here are a couple of options to consider:

1. Accounting and Bookkeeping Services If helping to keep the books is a service that you will offer as part of your virtual assistance business, you’ll want to consider packaging services like creating invoices and sending payment reminders that go together.
2. Client Management Services If you are going to offer services to help your clients organize their client database, consider grouping them some: offer a package that enters their information into a database and lets you get in touch with those leads and customers whose information may be missing.

In other words, you’ll find that by organizing your services into packages, you’ll be able to run a more efficient VA business by grouping services together.

While reading an article on an Australian site that was talking about virtual assistants, this was the opener that caught my eye:

Ever wondered what you could achieve if you didn’t have to spend two days in a row fiddling with powerpoint slides? Or hours creating a spreadsheet?

Mundane tasks like these are particularly frustrating because someone far more junior would be perfectly capable of doing them for you.

Now, the rest of the text was focused on a corporation that was sending their “mundane tasks” to virtual assistants, but after reading just those two paragraphs – three sentences – the thought that struck me was simple: is this a reasonable approach to virtual assistant marketing?

Sure, there are a number of administrative tasks that virtual assistants can take on that will help business owners to get through the day with a bit less stress. Sure, there are many businesses that could benefit from having a virtual assistant who was able to answer calls – at least for a few hours each day.

But is it really good for your own morale – and, the success of your virtual assistant business – to say that what you do is “take on mundane tasks so that business owners and their associates won’t have to”?

Marketing your virtual assistant business is something that takes a lot of work, and that begs the question: won’t you be able to market your business more effectively if you feel great about what you do?