After a wonderfully long weekend where I didn’t step foot into my home-office, I re-entered my virtual workplace this morning and visited several of my local hangouts.  One is VAnetworking.com.   We have an incredible forum where we can share ideas, ask any question without the fear of feeling stupid and on occasion, VENT! 

This morning as I weaved my way through the threads of the weekend, I came upon one by a fellow VA who had encountered a terrible experience with a client.  As most of us in the US know, this past weekend was Independence Day…July 4th.  We typically don’t work on July 4th.  Which is exactly what this VA had in mind.  Not to mention that she was feeling under the weather too.  However, she had a client call her at 11 pm on July 4th!  If she had been feeling OK, she would have been out enjoying fireworks at this time of night, but because she was sick, she was asleep.  But wait…the story doesn’t stop there.

The next day, she was feeling better and went to see a movie with her children.  This same client called her six times and the last time with some pretty colorful language included in the voice mail.

Needless to say, she is terminating the contract with this client.  What this particular client didn’t understand or appreciate is that Virtual Professionals are real people with real feelings and real lives!!  We are small business owners, who just happen to work from home.  We can be the best partner a small business or entrepreneur can have.  We are dedicated, hard-working, motivated and knowledgeable in our specific area of expertise.  We respect each of our clients, their time and their business, and we expect that same respect back. 

I’m very proud of my fellow VA, for taking a stand and not accepting this kind of behavior.  She has no regrets and by sharing her ordeal with us, we can better prevent this from happening in our business.

I work for several clients that produce an email newsletter, or better known as an Ezine.  I have helped them to set up the layout and design, and input content and images for publication.  But…I had never done one for myself and my business.

Oh my gosh, can I just tell you how much fun I had?  Of course I gave myself a deadline, which was yesterday, to have the first one out and that became a little stressful at 11 pm last night when I still hadn’t hit the Send button.  But I met my goal and it was out of my inbox and into the outbox of more than 300 contacts in just a matter of minutes! 

I searched for the best techology to use for my Ezine and I selected Constant Contact.  They have more than 300 templates to choose from, great reporting features to see who opens your email, how many bounced because of bad addresses and who just didn’t want to hear from you.  (That was a little tough, but I’m trying not to take it personally)

In addition to the excitment of fulfiling a goal and utilizing a great tool, I have received many compliments, one much appreciated critique and several inquiries for my services.  BINGO!  Feedback, just what I was hoping for.

I know the next one will be much easier and I won’t put so much pressure on myself to make it perfect (which it wasn’t).  But it was easy, fun and fast, three things we need more of.  If you need to boost your business, consider Constant Contact it’s a great tool to market your business and services and if you don’t want to do it yourself or don’t have the time to do it, check with a Virtual Assistant to take care of it for you. 

If you are a small business owner or a solopreneur, just how many hands do you have?  You have a great product or service and you are an expert in your field, but are you spending all of your time telling others about what you do and not really doing it?  That’s called marketing folks!  Congratulations, you have just become Director of Marketing for your company, but what about the work that needs to be done to keep the business going?

That’s where most of us get bogged down.  We have a great idea or product.  We decide to start a business to help others with our services and we begin the process of business cards, brochures, websites, networking groups, signing up for all the social media sites and talking to everyone we know about our great new business!   But wait…who is doing the work?  You are now in charge of marketing the business, AND doing the work.   After a long of day of marketing, you get to put on the worker hat and spend the rest of your night doing the actual work.  Sound familar?

There is a solution.  You can outsource those marketing tasks and free yourself up to do what you really wanted to do in the beginning.  You have an extra hand…just reach out and take it.  Visit www.avirtualbiz.com to review virtual services available and for many other resources that can put you back in your business.

As a virtual professional, I am very thankful that I can get up every morning and make the long trip down the hall to my office…and I don’t spend a dime in gas!!  When I first started this business gas was a mere $2.50 per gallon, which was bad enough, but to think of the millions of people whose job requires that regular morning fill up…I’m sorry.

Working as a virtual assistant or in some other type of home-based business is just one of the ways to relieve the pressure of today’s high gas prices.  Another one is the ability to purchase items online.  You can buy just about anything online, even greeting cards.

I have found an incredible system called .  I log into my account, select the card I want, write my heartfelt text to the person I’m sending it to, upload my personal signature and click send.  Taking maybe 5 minutes and no gas, out of my day!  I can even upload photos, attach gift cards to places like Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, and Starbucks, or I can attach a wonderful basket of gourmet treats, including a box of mouth-watering brownies!  It’s a one-stop shop!

I have found that I use Send Out Cards for my business to follow-up on leads, remind potential clients that I’m available to assist them and to thank my current clients for their trust in me and my business.  I also use it to send cards to family and friends for birthdays, anniversarys, holidays and when someone is under the weather.

You know, most people have a kind heart and would send a card if they could remember to pick it up the next time they went shopping.  With Send Out Cards, you can go shopping anytime; day or night and you have more than 10,000 cards to select from, right at your fingertips.

I love it so much, I’ll give you two free cards to send to anyone you wish.  Just click here Send Out Cards and see what you think.  And you don’t even have to start your car.

I was speaking to one of my wonderful clients today, Diane Wilkerson with Knoxville Insurance Agency and she told me about how her business had been experiencing a dry spell for about the last two months.  Which gave her some concern and made her re-evaluate why she was in business. 

Well, she found out why today!  Just this morning she has written four new policies and the phone has been ringing off the hook. 

We all go through those periods of self-doubt and wondering, “is this really the path I’m supposed to be on?”  And then we get that re-affirming phone call or sale that confirms that everything is fine.  We sometimes have to weather those dry spells until the rain comes and pours out those wonderful blessings on us and our businesses.

So if you are going through the dry spell today…the rain is just behind the next cloud.

What a great surprise when I received a congratulatory email from another virtual assistant today regarding my blog. The Virtual Assistant Networking Association (VANA) has recognized my Blog as the “Blog of the Week.”

What a great honor and I so appreciate the recognition. I love posting to my blog with helpful resources and tips to assist busy professionals, small business owners and Internet business professionals with their daily operational tasks.

Thanks VANA!

Don’t you love those long weekends?  Just looking forward to some time off, relaxation with the family or friends, going to the beach, lake or mountains? 

Don’t you just hate coming back to the office to find a foot of mail in your mailbox; 500 emails, 450 of them spam and of course the weekly meeting that takes longer than usual because of the long weekend stories?

I’m with you, except it’s my business to go through the mountains of mail, the never-ending emails and I have several meetings throughout the day with various clients.   I have one client that has re-routed her informational email account to me to monitor and moderate.  This alone had 150 spam emails in it when I came back into the office today.  And I Love it! 

The good thing is that I’m caught-up.  Not only with my personal emails, but with my client’s emails as well.  This is just one more way a Virtual Assistant can help busy people stay caught up.  By giving the task of email and calendar management to an off-site, virtual professional you don’t get bogged down with email messages that really don’t contribute to your bottom line.  Although email is very important in our society now (and I couldn’t personally live without it) it is a time consumer and before you realize it, you have spent 2-3 hours working on responding and sending emails.

Before the next holiday (July 4th, is just around the corner), think about outsourcing this task to a Virtual Professional.  We can help you stay caught-up and make coming back from those long weekends or vacations as pleasurable as the time-off.

I asked my local networking group that question last week and they look at me like I had said a dirty word!!  I really don’t remember how I stumbled upon Twitter, but after only being part of this social network site for a couple of weeks I have gained around 75 new contacts.  That’s pretty incredible, that I’m connected to 75 people that I have never even met, but we share that one simple question with each other every day, “What Are You Doing?”

I even have a “follower” in Australia.  And I’m following him as well.  With the new Social Media Boom, you are truly going to be left behind if you don’t join in.

I have connected my Twitter to my FaceBook page and I have a MySpace for the gospel group I sing with and I’m LinkedIn and need to update my Ryze page.  Whew, I’m dizzy, I can really understand why my networking group didn’t understand.  But I have made it my mission and part of my business to teach them about this social media “thingy.”  (More on that in the future)

If you really want to stay in touch, I highly recommend that you Twitter your Facebook and get Linkedin to your MySpace and Ryze, not to mention you should Digg, Flickr, and Pounce. Oh Wow, what would our grandparents say?? 

How many times have we said that?  How do you pronounce that? 

While talking on the phone with clients, I am always taking notes to make sure I follow-up and keep track of the tasks I need to do for them.   Many times they will communicate a word, that I am just not familiar with.  So the famous question pops out, “How do you pronounce that?”  And then the next one is, “How do you spell that?” 

Well, I have found the coolest site to help you out!  I stumbled upon this incredible website today and I love it!  The Free Dictionary.com  I was doing some research and typed in the word Mushroom and up came The Free Dictionary.  It not only gives you spelling, many different definitions, translations, thesaurus and the best part is that it Pronounces the word for you!!   Yep, it sure does.  I was blowned away!  I could play with the site all day, but that doesn’t make me any money.  However, it can save me a great deal of time now that I know about it and I thought you would like it too.

 Go check it out.  It will (mush·room To multiply, grow, or expand rapidly) your vocabulary!!!

Whew, what a difference a day makes.  This is for all of us Virtual Assistants, or any entrepreneur, who has been discouraged and fearful about starting or continuing our business.

I lost a very good retainer client recently.  He had been with me almost from the beginning.  I felt it coming and he was very gracious about it and hopes to hire me back at some point, but nonetheless, I lost him and the regular income.  But, I didn’t loose faith.  I feel strongly that I’m in the exact place God wants me to be and the next day I spoke with two potential clients and then someone called, completely out of the blue, for a potentially large project!

Then I was talking with another VA about maybe subcontracting with her, which would be great and later in the day I received a call from a direct referral that she had sent me.  That one call (about 15 minutes) resulted in an immediate Five New Clients!!   YEA!!  They wanted me to start immediately and it is a niche that I have been playing around with for a few weeks.  I am so excited!  I’ll be assisting Women Entreprenuers and Coaches with their Internet Marketing and building their online presence. 

So, no matter what field your in, stay in the game, it’s almost your turn to bat. (Can you tell I’m a former softball player??)  Don’t give up…that next client is just around the corner.