One of my favorite Web-surfing pastimes isn't so much reading various other blogs--it's the comments that follow the entries and the always-interesting insights within.   Recently I read an article about tips on working with a virtual assistant, and a commenter posted a sentiment I've heard over & over from business owners who've worked with VAs--her frustration with VA/client communication issues. 

The way she resolved it, though, really rings true--she got clear on her own goals and what she wanted.  To me this really rang as a true "a-ha" moment (although not my own, lol).  How can you tell someone else what you want & how to help you if you don't know what that is?

So, for all you business owners seriously contemplating working with a virtual assistant, take some time to make a list of all the things you need help with.  What are the things you really need to get done, nagging away at you--but you never find the time to do?  Whether it's research, organization, personal errands, event planning, etc.--it's something a VA can help you with.   Once your list is complete, you may see that most of the items fall into one or two specific categories.  You might want to look for a virtual assistant that specializes in these areas.  Google "virtual assistant+the specialty" for VAs that are listed under that niche.

Once you've done your search & contacted several VAs that you're interested in, check out their personalities & work styles.  So many people underestimate this that it's not even funny--but actually clicking with the VA that's partnering with you to further your business is important, to say the least!  Are you laid-back or rigid?  Last-minute or way in advance?  Fun, or serious?  Attracted to opposites, or do you need a "work twin?"  These are all things to consider when searching for the right VA.

When you finally begin your VA/client relationship, make sure you clearly define tasks & to-dos.  It's great to talk on the phone when able (live contact always lends that added "human" element), but follow up via email with detailed instructions whenever possible, so that your VA can go back & refer to them when needed.  Last but not least, make sure you & your VA have discussed a clear deadline--and whether it can be met. 

What communication methods have helped you while working with your VA?

Here's a tip on how you can utilize your virtual assistant's services, taken from a task I recently did for one of my clients:  In the ongoing search for blog ideas, she & I sat down together for an intense brainstorming session.  On my end, I scoured various industry resources for blog entry ideas, and ran them by her.  We picked the one she liked the most, and from there I did a "mini-interview"--asking her questions about the topic and taking notes as she shared her thoughts & expertise.

Based on your VA's writing background (and the amount of time you have), he or she can edit/proofread & post your blog post after you write it--or, they can ghostwrite & post it for you. 

Either way, another blog entry gets posted--whereas otherwise, your blog might have gone stale because you didn't have time to do it yourself! 

So, last week I posted an entry & article on how to discover your small business niche--and how it's key when it comes to maximizing your income & client demand.  But that was just the tip of the iceberg...

Once you do determine your niche, there are so many ways to work it. For example, how about starting a social networking site catered to your specific niche?  Sound like a plan?  In that case, check out the following article I found online--in which social networking guru Chris Bennett (founder & president of SEO firm 97th Floor) discusses all you need to know.

11 Ways to Market Your Social Networking Site by Chris Bennett

1. Identify your target audience

Who are you targeting — specifically? To help answer this question, think about the target age, gender, interest, and geographic location of who you want to use your new site.

Remember, social networkers are already busy on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and others, so the average person probably won’t add a “general” social networking site to their agenda. So, choose a niche and identify the relevant audience so you can stand out.

Once you know who you are targeting, figure out how many people are in your target audience and might be interested in your site. To do this, think about keyword searches this audience might do to find sites like yours, and then check out keyword search volume on Google and research data on sites like compete.com and hitwise.com. You should also visit Stumbleupon, go to groups, and find out how many people subscribe to the group or groups related to your topic.

2. Beta test – thoroughly

Social networkers have choices, and they definitely don’t have the time or willingness to deal with problems. So before you launch, you need a really strong beta site that’s been tested and tested and tested. And tested one more time for good measure. If you have the budget, consider private or third-party testing – not only will they do a thorough job, but they may notice problems that over time you’ve come to ignore.  The easiest way to turn off a potential customer is to deliver a sub-par experience.

In addition testing the user experience, be sure to include server and load testing: When sites go down, visitors are turned off and leave, most likely for good.

Remember that social media users as a group tend to be more technically savvy, and as a result, more likely to bail on you if they’re unsatisfied. The bottom line is that you’ll want to have your site in top shape before driving traffic to it.

3. Seed your site

Say you’re creating a site for interior designers and your goal is for thousands of designers to upload photos for the community to comment on. At launch, make sure you have tons of photos in place.

A common mistake is assuming visitors will load your content for you, but in reality almost no visitor will commit to making that jump unless they see other people have already done so. Think about it — would you as a visitor upload photos, add descriptions, and comment on other photos when it is unlikely people will see what you’ve done?

The basic principle is that visiting a social networking site is a lot like using a forum – if there’s no activity, you’ll leave. So seed your site with the kind of content you want users to generate and interact with.

How can you do this? Get a beta group to help you seed your site – even if it’s just your friends and family. Not only will you be seeding, you’ll also be performing additional beta tests in the process.

4. Network to generate traffic

The key message here is that social networking requires online, not offline, buzz generation. Get in touch with online influencers during your website’s pre-launch phase and more general blogs and PR sites post-launch.

How? Use Technorati and Google Blog Search to identify the popular blogs that focus on your demographic. Then, after you’ve conducted beta testing and you’re proud of your site, contact the major bloggers and influencers in your demographic and ask them to beta test your site prior to launch. By reaching out early, you’re showing you respect their knowledge and you really value their feedback.

That’s a much better approach than contacting them after the launch. Why? Most will be flattered you sought their opinion ahead of time, and not only will you get valuable feedback, you’re more likely to be reviewed when you do launch. Reviews and mentions by influencers help create buzz – and buzz creates traffic.

Then notify influential blogs like techcrunch.com, mashable.com, and killerstartups.com. Keep in mind they get tons of requests, so make sure your pitch is to the point.

5. Consider traditional online advertising

If you have the budget, contact the large sites and forums in your demographic that sell ad space and buy a few ads (federatedmedia.com could be a good source). But do not delude yourself into buying just any traffic, and don’t focus on general-interest sites even if they get huge amounts of traffic. In the early stages of your website, you want your ads in front of the right eyeballs – not just any eyeballs.

6. Don’t forget SEO

Getting traffic from search engines is key, right? And getting free traffic is even better. To do this, one of the first things you’ll want to do is identify keywords and continually optimize your site and pages and get ranked for those words.

For example, if your niche is interior design, you’ll definitely want to rank for terms like “interior design ideas,” interior design photos,” “interior design community,” etc. Look for keywords that describe the content you offer instead of products and integrate that content into your pages. (Unless your site is devoted to product reviews or discussions, of course.) And remember, it’s hard to rank highly for general terms; it’s much easier to rank highly for specific and focused keywords.

7. Participate on sites related to your niche

If there’s a huge forum or a thriving group in StumbleUpon in your demographic, set up an account, link back to your site, and interact and become well-known in that community and you’ll generate traffic to your site.

When you set up your account, make your username the name of your social site to help further brand you. Make a name for yourself – actually, for your site – in your demographic. Here’s a guide to help you set up a StumbleUpon account and, if you like, becoming a top Stumbler.

8. Create spokes for your hub

Set up Facebook and MySpace pages that are extensions of your site. Then search and network with people who share your interest. Aggregating content from your social site and placing it on your Facebook and MySpace pages will give potential visitors a sense of what is on your main site.

You can also set up a Twitter page, with the name of your site as your Twitter username, and tweet all day about what you’re working on and what’s new on your site. You can also perform searches on Twitter to find people interested in your niche. Many influential bloggers use Twitter to alert their readers about new content – you can too.

Make sure you also link to all your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Stumbleupon profiles from your main site – basically, anywhere you’ve created an account related to your brand.

9. Analyze, analyze, analyze

The key to effectively marketing your social networking site is to understand conversions. A conversion in social networking terms is not a sale, it’s a sign-up. (Marketing is, after all, about spreading the word, getting the right visitors, and converting them.) A free tool on blvdstatus.com can help you understand where visitors came from before they signed up, whether based on a keyword, a site, or a blog.

Understanding where your conversions come from helps you determine where to focus your marketing efforts. If a mention on a particular blog resulted in a nice volume of sign-ups from the blog’s readers, you’re on to something. Analytics help you determine where it’s worth spending your marketing time.

10. Encourage your active community

Think of ways to get your community to interact with each other. The benefit is that ever elusive ‘network effect’ – when an active community creates buzz and word of mouth, yielding more users.

Things you should do to facilitate interaction: comment on user comments, create contests for things like adding content, allow users to vote, and let users submit questions.

Note: I’m sure you’ll be surprised by what can create interaction. We work with a best-selling author who, due to time constraints, isn’t easy for the average reader to contact. We asked site users to submit questions they’d like the author to answer, and then the community voted on the top ten questions. It’s so popular it’s become a monthly feature on the site and generates an incredible amount of participation and interaction.

11. When you reach critical mass, work on features to fine-tune the community experience

Once the buzz from the launch dies down, new features can build new excitement, both within your community and outside. So spend time adding features or tools. Then contact bloggers and influencers to let them know what you’ve done – not only will you maintain a vibrant community, but the buzz will help you generate more new users.

 

Ah, the process of finding one's niche. You hear about it all the time--yet it's easy to wonder, "Wouldn't staying 'general' help me reach a wider audience?" This is what I thought, also--and I've since realized (the hard way, lol) that it actually works the other way around.  It's a finely-tuned, targeted approach that brings in the business. 

So, how do you go about finding your niche? It has a lot to  reflecting on what your passion and expertise are, and determining who exactly wants what you have to offer.  This following article I came across by Herman Drost breaks it down.

Niche Marketing - How to Find Your Perfect Niche Market
 © Herman Drost

If you don't find a niche market for the product or service
you offer, you will most probably fail. Most newcomers who
wish to do business on the Internet often market to
everyone they can find with the expectation that everyone
will do business with them. This is the same as throwing
mud against the wall and hoping some of it will stick. They
have not yet found their niche market.

What is niche marketing?

A niche market is composed of individuals and businesses
that have similar interests and needs, which can be readily
identified and that can be easily targeted and reached.

Finding a niche for your business means finding a great
product or service for a highly targeted audience.

Here's the process to find your niche business:

1. Find a niche product or service you are passionate about
- this will greatly improve your chances of being
successful. Why? Because it's the only way you're going to
be able to devote the kind of time and effort to create a
meaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generate
worthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing.

2. Choose a niche product or service you are knowledgeable
about - reflect on what skills, hobbies or products you
know the most about. If you don't have the knowledge yet,
then choose a niche product that you would love to promote,
then spend the necessary time to research it, so you can
eventually become an expert in your marketing niche.

3. Define your niche market - do the necessary research to
see if there is a market for your niche product. To create
a profitable business for your niche product, you need to
ask yourself these questions:

a) Is there sufficient demand for it? - if you choose a
field that is too broad it may be hard to stand out from
the competition ie camping equipment is your niche product.
Well, unless you are a large corporation such as Sports
Authority (a large retail store in my town), you won't
stand out from the crowd. However, a more highly targeted
niche product could be Coleman Camping Equipment.

b) Keyword research - use keyword tools such as the
overture suggestion tool or wordtracker  to how many people
are searching each month on keywords related to your niche
product.

Here's an example:

According to overture (at the time of writing this
article), the keyword phrase "camping equipment" was
searched 76164 times in one month. If you do a search on
Google.com for camping equipment you will find 1,610,000
web sites show up - heck, that's too competitive.

However "coleman camping equipment" generated 1242 searches
in one month according to overture. Google.com shows 93,200
competing websites. That's much better though still somewhat
competitive.

Tip: Notice how not many web sites (even the top ones),
don't have "coleman camping equipment" in their titles.
This is just one way to create a high ranking on the search
engines for your newly targeted web site. This will then
provide lots of targeted traffic to your site.

c) Take a survey – you may already have products or
services that you selling to your customers. If so, ask
questions within your survey about what product/service
would help your customers business. If it can help them
save time by gaining more knowledge or automating tasks,
you could have a winner.

d) Create Your Own Unique Selling Position (USP) - study
your competition to find out what they emphasize about the
product which makes them stand out from the crowd. Then
decide on something that will make your business unique
from the others. It could be something unique about the
product (ie discount coleman camping equipment) or you
could choose a more highly defined target market
(ie boyscout organizations and clubs throughout the USA).

4. Build and promote your web site - to develop a
profitable web site for your niche product you need to
create a number of informative pages that will not only
attract visitors from the search engines, but inform and
move them to purchase from your site.

Read my article, "How to Create a Web Site That Sells"

Niche marketing is the key to developing a profitable
business that will make you stand out from the crowd. By
doing the necessary research and building an informative
web site, you will become an expert in your niche marketing
field.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Herman Drost is the author of the new ebook
"101 Highly Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site"
a powerful guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to your web site.

Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original
articles at: subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his
in-depth articles at: www.isitebuild.com/articles