Talking about Christmas on June 24th. “Are you crazy?”, I hear you ask.
Happy Father’s Day – How often do you see your kids?
A 2010 survey by Career Builder on work life balance for working fathers who are the sole breadwinners in their family reported that “close to four- in-ten (37 percent) of working dads said they spend two hours or less with their children each work day. More than three-in-ten (35 percent) reported they missed two or more significant events in their child’s life due to work in the last year”. Continue reading
Google Apps for Business
I recently signed up for the Premiere edition of Google Apps for Business with the expectation of being able to receive and send email wherever I am and thought, “for $50, it’s not a lot to lose if I don’t like it”
I discovered another feature that makes me absolutely LOVE this application – the ease and speed of sending large attachments. I sent off a message with a 6 MB attachment the other day and it zoomed out of my mailbox. I remember watching emails be sent from Outlook with large attachments and the painful slowness of it.
I highly recommend this product to anyone who is considering the switch.
Why not make your blog design reflect you?
I check out a lot of blogs and many are very interesting. More and more people are also building their website around their website blog because it is so much easier to maintain and update. Continue reading
A stolen laptop, potential loss of priceless memories
A laptop was stolen this week from a hospital. Luckily it was found and the person who stole it charged (http://www.newstalk1010.com/news/565/1132306).
This drove home the importance of backing up. Whether you back up your files to an external hard drive at your home or use an off-site service like Carbonite, please back up your files. A computer can be replaced, your family photos can’t.
Just a thought.
Why it makes sense to hire a professional
Some business people think it’s cheaper to hire a high school student to come into their office and do their email campaigns and other admin tasks. I’d like to present one example of why it sometimes can be a false economy.
I had a call this week from a lady who owns a little store who was totally panicked. She had hired high school students to do office work for her while she was out front selling. She trusted them to do their jobs and found out that her mail campaigns hadn’t been going out, that when they were sending messages, they were taking a very long time to send them out.
After a short conversation I was able to calm her down and offer her a solution to her problem. I gave her a service to sign up for an account to send email campaigns and when she gets her account set up, she’ll be forwarding me the information to import her list into the mail service and send out her email blast.
Sometimes it is more cost effective to pay a little more to someone who is experienced and professional versus an inexperienced high school student. This is one of them.
Some thoughts on Selecting a Virtual Assistant
I keep seeing blogs and articles in Google News Alerts about starting a virtual assistant business. They talk about how if you have a home computer, you can be a VA.
This concerns me, especially around areas of confidentiality. If you are looking for a virtual assistant, this should be one of your main questions to a prospective service provider, “what procedures do you take to ensure confidentiality of my data?”. The computer is a big one. Is the computer only used by the VA or is it a shared family computer in the kitchen or dining room? Do the Virtual Assistant’s children (and their friends) have access to it for games, surfing and Facebook activities?
For example, Prime Admin Solutions does the following:
- My computer is password protected and only I know the password.
- Our internet connection is protected by a firewall.
- I have a locked shredding box and only I know where the key is (many VAs like to say they are paperless, I readily admit that I am not, I don’t feel that you can proofread properly on screen, and when I receive instructions by email, I like to be able to print them off to check off and refer to while I’m working, saves time from switching between my email program and back to my work).
- My office is in a room of my house that is only used for my business.
- Only I have access to my computer.
- Does the VA take his/her laptop to a wireless hotspot to do your work or is it done at home?
Just a few things to consider when you are looking for a Virtual Assistant.
Is your recipe for success missing a key ingredient?
I love to cook. I know that if you add too much of one ingredient and not enough of another, a recipe will not turn out as expected. For example, if you make a loaf of bread and add too much flour and not enough yeast, you’ll end up with a lump of baked dough that didn’t rise well.
Compare your business to a loaf of bread. You spend lots of time on your document formatting reports, fancying up your PowerPoint presentations and even compiling the evaluation forms from a session you facilitated. That’s the flour. You get so caught up doing these things yourself that you miss out on networking and other business building opportunities or doing the more lucrative work that you excel at (and has a higher dollar value per hour). That’s the yeast.
Knowing when to delegate is another key ingredient to your business success. Everyone’s time has a value. Chances are, your time is worth more than the cost of outsourcing your admin tasks to a virtual assistant. You may even be able to build those costs into the rates you charge your clients. Writing a report and getting it typed up in the rough and then handing it off to a virtual assistant to polish for you also allows you to move on to other client work. You are able to satisfy two clients’ needs instead of just one. What could be better.
If you’d like to make Prime Admin Solutions one of the key ingredients for your business succes, contact me today.
Backing Up Your Blog
Many people self-host their blogs and build their websites around the WordPress platform. But what would happen if your web hosting company’s computers had a meltdown. Yes, they probably have back-ups, but how long would it take to get your website back up? I thought about this the other day when speaking to the company that hosts my primeadminsolutions.com domain. They are moving to a new cloud system and offered to move my account over to it (eventually they determined they couldn’t as it didn’t support Dot Net Nuke). I asked if the new system was so great, why not just migrate everyone and the answer was it would take a lot of time, it was easier to do a few thousand at a time. This concerned me as to how long it would take to get everyone back up and running if they had a serious meltdown.
Server meltdowns are not the only threat. Last year I knew one person who had their WordPress site hacked and her site was down for a while while she reinstalled and re-did the site. There was a rash of WordPress sites getting hacked around that time.
Another instance to backup your site is before you make any major changes to it. Upgrading to a new version of WordPress? Backup just in case. Accidents can happen. If you upgrade your WordPress and destroy your database in the process, you may incur charges from your hosting company to retrieve your data from their backups and reinstall.
The answer is to back up your own files. If you have a C-Panel on your account with a backup utility, it’s easy. You just run the utility and you get a zip file that you can download to your computer to keep in your back pocket, just in case. If your web hosting company doesn’t have a one click backup utility, simply copy all of your files (or zip and download if the option exists) to a directory on your hard drive. If you are using WordPress please remember to copy over your database too.
Below is a video that shows how to back up your WordPress database from within WordPress by using a plug in. I haven’t used this yet, so I can’t advise how effective it is, but it would be worth a try. I plan to install it and run it but I am also going to use the backup program on my C-Panel, just to be on the safe side.
An ounce of prevention is a very good thing.
Making a small world smaller
It never fails to amaze me with how the universe can send the right people into your life at the right time. Last year I took VA Classroom’s social media marketing specialist program and really enjoyed it. When VA Classroom offered an updated version for 2010 I signed up immediately. I wanted to learn more about what was new in the industry.
The requirement for completing the course was to create a social media marketing program for a business.
During the course I connected with a lady by the name of Lori Shandle-Fox on Linked In. She has written a fascinating book and is hoping to get it published – it will be the first of a fascinating series of books. Honestly, I can see it as a reality show. She had questions about WordPress, should she self-host or use WordPress’ site. Many people answered her question and she ultimately decided to self host. She then asked questions about themes, customizing them, etc. and again I offered by two cents. Over the course of emails we developed a relationship which ultimately led to a phone conversation. We bonded over the fact that she is a stand up comic and I am a comedy fanatic.
I felt comfortable enough with Lori to offer to do a social media plan to get reader interest, develop a following to hopefully attract the right attention that someone will publish it for her and generate pre-orders for book sales (whether she self-published or worked with a publisher). I told her it was a win-win for both of us; she’d get a social media marketing plan and I have a juicy subject for my VA Classroom assignment.
This morning I received word from Craig Cannings of VA Classroom that I successfully completed the assignment and passed the course. This has led me to definitely decide that I want to market my social media services to authors. Why? Their work is fascinating. I’m a fledgling author, working on my first novel and I love reading. So as they say in the networking world, “you never know who anyone else knows”, if you know authors who would like a social media action plan set up and implemented, please pass my website URL along to them.
I absolutely love how the social networking world has made a small world smaller and how it brings people together and removes boundaries. Craig Cannings of VA Classroom is in British Columbia, Canada. Lori is in Raleigh, NC and I’m in Ontario. Amazing, isn’t it?
Check out: http://www.vaclassroom.com and http://www.laughingISconceivable.com (content coming soon)