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I am delighted to announce the safe arrival of my beautiful daughter, Imogen on Monday 15th June weighing 9lb 4oz. We are both doing very well and I must admit I’d forgotten how much newborns like to sleep!
As a small business owner you are a fountain of knowledge and you may be able to earn an income stream from setting up an email course. The idea is that you sell your email course on your website and then use an auto-responder application such as Aweber automatically sends your emails at the scheduled times. You may decide to offer a free short course in order to try and attract new clients or newsletter subscribers or offer a more comprehensive paid course in your chosen speciality.
If your Virtual Assistant is experienced in copywriting they may be able to assist you in writing the text for your email course. Or you may choose to provide the copy and have your VA design a template to match your branding and then insert the copy for each email. If your Virtual Assistant is involved in updating your website they can also add the sign-up box and link the payment system for you.
Newsletters can be a powerful marketing tool but finding the time to design, write and then send them can take up your precious time. This is an ideal task for your Virtual Assistant! Many VAs have their own newsletters so they are familiar with the popular newsletter software like Aweber and Constant Contact. If your VA assists you with your website they can also help you add the crucial newsletter sign up box to your site.
Once you start collecting subscribers you need to start sending them a useful newsletter on a regular basis. A lot of businesses opt for monthly newsletters as it keeps your business fresh in your subscribers mind without bombarding them with too many emails. The design of your newsletter is also important and your VA can assist you with fine-tuning the design so it matches the rest of your branding. Your newsletter doesn’t have to be too long – you may choose to have a short introductory paragraph with a link to an article on your website or a couple of short articles about recent developments in your business. A newsletter is also a fantastic medium for promoting special offers or discounts to your subscribers. Your Virtual Assistant can also track the results of your newsletters if you are using professional newsletter applications. This task involves analysing reports about open rates, click-rates and the unsubscribe options from each newsletter.
Websites are an important part of your marketing strategy but is your website up to date? Does it reflect the latest offerings you have available or the developments you have made in your business recently? Many small business owners pay a lot of money to professional web developers when they launch their website but fail to keep the site up to date. Websites can now be in many different formats from the more traditional HTML code to ‘Content Management Systems’ such as Joomla and WordPress. The beauty about Content Management Systems is that they are very simple to update without fiddling with complicated code (ie a foreign language to most SMEs!!).
A Virtual Assistant can help you update your website regularly and of course your choice of VA will be dependent on the type of website you have. You need to ensure that your VA will be efficient and accurate when updating your site and can do so without lengthy training.
You have probably heard about the benefits of writing articles for SEO purposes but how do you go about adding them to the many online directories that exist. It pays to be selective and this is where a Virtual Assistant can help you research and select the directories that are most relevant to your business. Your VA can then take care of submitting your articles, ensuring that the Copyright and Author box remains intact, to the directories that will attract relevant traffic and links to your website.
Once your articles are distributed on these directories your Virtual Assistant can also add those pages to the Social Bookmarking websites, therefore generating even more traffic for your website! Although you are paying for the services of your Virtual Assistant to complete this work your Search Engine Optimisation and Article Marketing Campaign will be completely organic and therefore the traffic which is directed to your website will be much more cost effective in the long run.
