When you are marketing yourself as a virtual assistant, one of the best ways to get the word out is to work on creating a great mailing list. However, pay attention to that phrase: the important concept for virtual assistant marketing is creating a great mailing list. When you’re marketing yourself as a virtual assistant, it’s important to know that the people who receive your information will be interested in it.

Take this for example – from a blog post by someone who is a VA who isn’t necessarily happy about receiving unsolicited email:

(source)I’m getting some disturbing emails from Virtual Assistants, and I sincerely hope this isn’t the beginning of a trend. My personal email address has magically ended up on a few Virtual Assistants’ email lists. And when I get these emails, there is no option for me to unsubscribe myself.

This bothers me a lot – because not only is it annoying – it undermines the credibility many VA’s have worked so hard to build for themselves and for their industry. I suspect these particular VA’s purchased mailing lists with my email on it, instead of building their own.

It touches on a lot of great points. First, when you’re marketing yourself as a virtual assistant, it’s essential to reach out to the right people – and to make sure that they want to hear from you. When you set up an e-marketing list, always make sure that those who receive your message have either opted in or are able to opt out.

That’s a good practice too even after you’ve been developing your email VA marketing list: always make it easy for folks to sign up for your list and to stop receiving messages if they want to – it’s just a good business practice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Virtual Assistant Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.