Amazon

Don’t underestimate Amazon as a business tool. It can help your business in several ways. It’s not just somewhere to look at when you’re buying presents.

As a northern lass I have an eye for a bargain and shop around for my stationery. I often find that Amazon are the cheapest when it comes to buying ink for my printer, memory and hard drives for my laptop and other business gadgets like my portable scanner.

Add to this that they have an affiliate scheme so you can actually have your own Amazon store on your website and you can’t go wrong. Sarah Bradley over at Help Ahoy has integrated her Amazon store into her website http://www.helpahoy.com/ and every time one of us buys something via her store she earns a few pence. Granted it’s not going to make you a millionaire but every little helps.

http://www.amazon.co.uk

Artisteer

Artisteer is a WYSIWYG theme designer that can be used for html sites and WordPress.  The software isn't free but you can download a free trial to see if it suits you.  It's perfect if you are struggling to find a WordPress theme that fits both your colours and layout requirements. The theme has plenty of options that can be edited by the end user, and once purchased you can download updates of the software for up to a year.

If you are stuck for ideas then the theme generator will either provide a full theme, or simply make suggestions for a header or background. There are various editing options available, including textures, transparency and sheet size which make this a really useful tool to have in your VA arsenal.

The beauty of Artisteer is that it allows you to have widgets in the header, footer and side bar and it gives you a lot more flexibility than some of the free themes that are out there.

The exclusive intelligentVA Members theme shown below was created in Artisteer. The screen shot shows the Artisteer software.

http://www.artisteer.com/

Audacity

Audacity is a free cross platform sound editor. It’s a great tool to record audio to accompany your presentations.

Audacity allows you to record sound clips, and re-record them if they aren’t quite right. Imagine trying to record an hour of audio and messing up in the last five minutes. Break it down instead into smaller sound bites and you only have to record a few minutes audio if you make a mistake.

To start recording just click the red button, then click it again to stop. You can then use the menu to save the file in a variety of formats. If you need to jump to a specific section of the recording use the selection start and end/length options as well.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Blogging

Blogging is one of the easiest things you can do to attract visitors to your website, and it doesn’t cost you anything other than your time.

There are several blogging platforms available, although you will see later on in this book that my favourite is WordPress (self hosted).

Blogging is a way of sharing your knowledge and expertise with potential clients. Show them what you know, and share information with them.

A blog is personal, no two blogs are the same, but remember to write in the appropriate tone. I wouldn’t use the same language in my running blog as I would in my business blog. One would be more light hearted and personal than the other.

Use images to enhance your blog post, always ensuring that you have the appropriate copyright. Invite others to guest post on your blog, then guest post on other blogs to build your reputation.

There are a lot of people willing to help you learn how to blog, I would recommend reading Nikki Pilkington’s 30 Day Blogging Challenge or her 299 Steps to Blogging Heaven guide. I found them very useful.

http://www.nikkipilkington.com

Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping is essential to keep track of the success of your business, and to keep records in order for your tax return.  Our resident bookkeeping expert Nicola Wilson, from Totally4Business, regularly keeps us up to date on the intelligentVA website about the easiest ways to keep records, and is also our resident Xero trainer as well. (we cover Xero in more detail later in this guide)

Bookkeeping can be done on a spreadsheet if you wish but we prefer to use the cloud based system Xero as this gives much more information at your fingertips. Set up automated invoices, have a bank statement or credit card statement import directly into your accounts and see at a glance the balance sheet, debtors and creditors or a profit and loss statement, all information which a spreadsheet system would struggle to provide as quickly or as possibly as accurately.

It’s a good idea to maintain a separate bank account, credit card and PayPal account for your business as this makes it easier to keep track of your transactions.

We have a resident tax expert on the intelligentVA website, Steve Knowles, from Knowles Warwick. Steve offers guidance on topics such as Self Assessment, Money Laundering, the Bribery Act and other similar areas that will affect your Virtual Assistant business.

One thing to remember about bookkeeping is that if you offer it as a service to your clients then you must be regulated under the Money Laundering Regulations. This can either be with a professional bookkeeping body or via the HMRC themselves. This applies whether you are outsourcing the work or carrying it out yourself.

http://www.xero.com

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/MLR/

Buffer

Have you ever come across a great article on a website that you wanted to share on Twitter but didn’t want to post just yet? Would you like to post your tweets throughout the day? Buffer is a great app for scheduling tweets and spreading them out so that they don’t all appear within a few minutes of each other.

You can choose which days your tweets will appear, so no need to worry about boring people with business tweets on a weekend either. You can even specify what time of day these tweets go out.

Set aside ten minutes on a morning to find suitable content, then add it to Buffer enabling it to appear over the rest of the day or week. This doesn’t overload your followers timelines. I would certainly recommend this to some newspaper and news channel twitter accounts who are silent for hours then bombard me with several tweets in the space of five minutes.

Using the browser add-ons that are available in Firefox, Chrome or Safari means you can click on the Buffer icon and compose a tweet containing your message and the relevant website link in seconds. There’s an app for Android and iPhone, or the option to email to your Buffer as well.

The free account allows up to 10 tweets to be stored in your Buffer account at any one time, 1 Twitter account and 1 Facebook account. If this isn’t enough to meet your requirements then paid plans start from just $10 a month and allow a lot more options, including a larger tweet count, more social accounts and team members.

The analytics show you how many clicks your tweet received and the reach that each message achieved.

Once you have added content to your Buffer you can even re-order them to ensure that the messages go out at the most appropriate time.

Buffer even sends you a polite email reminder when you need to add in more content so you don’t run dry!

http://bufferapp.com

Capsule

Capsule is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that will allow you to integrate your accounts, newsletter and website contact form in one place.

Contacts

You can import your existing contacts via .csv spreadsheet, .vcf file, from LinkedIn or Outlook. It’s a good idea before you do this to really think about what you want to get out of the system once it’s up and running. Add tags or notes at this stage, it saves you a lot of time on updates later on.

Cases

You can use cases to manage specific projects or events. This creates an area where you can bring different contacts together, for example, a client who is a builder creates a case for each building project. We link this to the client, then add contacts such as the plumber, carpenter and plasterer. This way if we have a query relating to the project we know exactly who was working on it, and can have notes and tasks related to the project in one place. We can then view this case from any of the relevant contact records. We have also used cases for event management to monitor who attended events. You can send one email to everyone involved in the case, so this is a great time saver.

Opportunities

This is used to manage your sales pipeline. You can keep an eye on the proposals that you have submitted, track the likelihood of the proposal being accepted and also assign tasks to a particular opportunity.

Email Dropbox

Using the email dropbox function you can copy all your emails into the contact record, be they incoming or outgoing.  You can set up your email client with a forwarding rule so that all incoming mail goes into your database but take care that all your personal mail doesn’t end up in there as well.

For Google Apps users there is a contextual gadget add in which makes it even easier to create or update contacts from your Google Mail inbox.

Tasks

You can choose to receive a daily reminder of your tasks in your email inbox.  If you wish you can assign tasks to a contact or just set a personal reminder, and you can view your outstanding tasks on the task calendar as well as from within the contact record.

Mobile

There is a mobile phone application which is accessible via any mobile phone with a web browser. This allows you to view contact information, history, make calls and send emails, you will also be able to add, snooze or complete tasks whilst out and about.

Integration

Capsule allows integration with other tools such as Xero, MailChimp and your website contact form. All of which reduces the amount of data entry and duplication. There are several other add ons or integrations available.

Free Trial

It's simple user interface makes it easy to learn, and you can sign up for a free trial.

http://www.capsulecrm.com

Collaboration

This is one of the most important tools on your Virtual Assistant journey, and the best thing is its free. It can be very lonely setting up your own business, particularly if you’ve come from a bustling office environment. The way to combat this is to collaborate with other Virtual Assistants.

The VA industry is stronger for collaborating rather than competing against itself.

What we find at our intelligentVA coffee mornings is a mix of experience; VAs just starting out on their journey chatting to VAs who have been in the business for several years. We all have different skill sets, we often work in different markets, some purely virtual, some working from clients offices, and others a mix of the two.

Yet what we offer each other is that shared knowledge and experience. Sometimes you can be too close to a problem to see the solution, yet chatting it over while having a coffee often leads to ideas you hadn’t considered. We see it at every meeting.

It’s not just about sharing knowledge though, sometimes it’s nice to know that you have someone to listen, who understands what you are going through, has perhaps been through it themselves.

Collaboration can be online through groups like our intelligentVA Facebook group or LinkedIn group, through informal meet ups like our coffee mornings or more formal sessions like our learning days.

Seek out others in your industry, get to know them, build a relationship and your business will be all the stronger for it.

http://www.facebook.com/groups/intelligentva

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/intelligentVA-3906866

Cloud Computing

Throughout this book you will hear me talk about cloud software and cloud computing. But what are they?

I tried to find a non technical definition for you but they were all very wordy, so here is my attempt:

“Cloud Computing is a service that is available over an internet connection as opposed to purchasing a product that can only be accessed from the machine on which it is installed.”

If you go to PC World and buy Office 2007 on a disc, bring it home and install it on your computer you have installed a ‘product’. If you log onto a website and use Facebook using your user name and password you are using a ‘service’.

Cloud services are not dependent on any particular machine, and this is one of the reasons that we like them so much. You can work from any compatible computer, Smartphone or tablet with an internet connection. The data is not stored on your device but in the ‘cloud’ - the service providers own data centre, often meaning it is backed up for you as well.

If you are able to access the cloud you are no longer tied to a static workplace. You can work from your local coffee shop, hotel lounge or even a clients office subject to an internet connection.

The ash cloud that grounded thousands of flights the other year would not have stopped my business working, so long as I was able to access a computer with an internet connection as I could still access my emails, my client files and the relevant cloud services I needed to carry out my work.

Purchase this book or download sample versions for your ebook reader.
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