Why I Love Being A Virtual Assistant!

I did a similar post back in September. I am feeling grateful today and wanted to share.

I love being a Virtual Assistant because...
1. I am my own boss.
2. I get to decide who I work with and I only work with clients I love working with.
3. I can take my dog for a walk in the beautiful Marin headlands in the middle of the day.
4. If I'm feeling stuck on a technical or other issue I can post in VANA and get a response almost instantly that solves my problem.
5. I have made lots of friends through VA networking groups like VANA, The VA Revolution, IVAA and Virtual Assistant Forums and learned so much from them.
6. I get to go to the FoVA conference in Toronto in May.

Virtual Assistants in Entrepreneur Magazine!!!

Congratulations to Tawnya Sutherland from VANA and IVAA for being mentioned in this article in Entrepreneur Magazine!

Last Day of Time Management Month

I just learned an interesting tid bit in the VANA forum from Kate Verans that not only is February the shortest month of the year, "this February 2008 is a leap year, with 29 days in February and five Fridays. The month starts with a Friday and ends with a Friday and this only happens every 28 years, the last being 1980 and next in 2036."

Speaking of February!

Today is the last day of February which means the last day of our fabulous-you-don't-want-to-miss-this-offer-special-discount book sale!

Managing Your Thriving Business for Success walks you through easy steps to get organized and create more time in your day. In recognition of Time Management month the book that is helping business owners get organized is selling for only $19.95. This offer expires TODAY!

Go to http://www.thrivingbusinessmanual.com/managing/ and enter the code: “productive” to get this special discounted offer only available during the month of February to start getting organized today.

Social Networking

I was catching up on networking on Ryze tonight in the RWRS network led by Denise Michael's.

Denise posted a link to this video by Common Craft about Social Networking.

The video does a good job explaining how Social Networking works. Check it out: Social Networking in Plain English.


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Reminder: Only 3 days left on the "Time Management" sale of our book. Enter the code "productive" to receive a $10 discount. http://www.thrivingbusinessmanual.com/managing/

Virtual Co-Authors To Finally Meet Face to Face

I'm doing another round of the Get Client's Now! 28 day system. One of my goals this week was to write a press release about our book. I did it! Here it is.

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Virtual Co-Authors To Finally Meet Face to Face

San Francisco, CA
Virtual co-authors will finally get to meet face to face in May at the Forum of Virtual Assistance Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Sally Kuhlman, owner of Virtual Simplicity and Yvonne Weld, owner of AbleVA have never met in person yet they have co-authored a book together. Kuhlman lives in the US in California and Weld lives in Ontario, Canada.

Thanks to modern technology they spend more time communicating with each other than they do with their next door neighbors.

Kuhlman and Weld “virtually” met each other in 2006 through the VA Revolution – a private online networking/mentoring group for Virtual Assistants.

They communicate with each other on a daily basis via Skype’s Instant Messenger program. The call themselves: “accountability partners”. As “accountability partners” they share their goals with each other in addition to sharing their yearly, weekly and daily plans and hold each other accountable to those tasks they set out to do each day.

Both found success fast and had to learn how to balance work and family life while running a business out of their homes. They decided to combine their knowledge and experience to write the book, Managing Your Thriving Business for Success. The book has already seen much success since its release in November of 2007.

Kuhlman and Weld plan to celebrate with a toast to success and virtual colleagues that become real friends when they meet in Toronto in May.

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About Managing Your Thriving Business for Success
For more information about Managing Your Thriving Business for Success and how to start organizing your time better, visit the Web site at http://www.thrivingbusinessmanual.com/managing.

Reminder: Enter the Time Management Month discount code "productive" to receive $10 off the book now through 2/29/08.

Through my Google Alerts I stumbled upon this great article written by Kendall SummerHawk titled Women Small Business Owners: Is Hiring a Virtual Assistant Right for You? She talks about the importance of investing in your business. She hits the nail right on the head on how a virtual assistant can really help business owners.

Blog of the Week (Week 6) - Right Hand Man

This week's pick is Darrell William's blog, Right Hand Man. Darrell is always on top of what's happening in the Virtual Assistant industry and helps to keep the rest of us informed.


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Instead of having a long blogroll of all my favorite blogs I've started picking a blog of the week to feature over there in the right column. ------> (Where it says Blog of the Week).

I spend most of my blog reading time reading blogs by marketing experts, other Virtual Assistants, and some other miscellaneous blogs that inspire me.

Virtual Assistants Featured in The Newspaper!

Congratulations fellow VANA members Jaime Lee Mann and Darrell Williams on being featured in the PEI Guardian!

Google Knows I'm a Virtual Assistant

Google has finally listed me as a virtual assistant!

Who knows I may have been there for awhile. Okay, you have to dig deep to find me but hey at least I am there. Lately, I've been getting a lot of potential clients contacting me and when I ask them how they found me they said from typing virtual assistant in to Google they somehow stumbled upon my Website.

I want to thank Dusty Warren of JorrenCo for finding my Google listing. I didn't have the patience to click through all those pages - but with her keen eye she found my site listed on page 15. Woohoo! I didn't believe her but then I went and looked myself and found it.

I know... it's the little things in life that make me happy.

Do you doodle?

This must be the week of discovering new programs for me or something.

I just discovered another super cool program! It's called Doodle.

Have you ever had to schedule a conference call or meeting with numerous people and went back and forth trying to find the best time to fit everyone's schedule?

Well, now Doodle can do this for you! All you have to do is enter in all the options for dates and times that the meeting could possibly happen on, enter you email and you instantly have a link that you can email to all potential attendees allowing them to check off which dates/times work best for them. Doodle then calculates the most popular date, it also shows you everyone's answers in a chart so you can see if you pick this time John can be there but Jane can't.

It's free and it's super easy.

All this talk about Doodle reminds me of Toodledo. I think I am on day 3 of using Toodledo and I am still LOVING it! I feel so organized and productive. It's helping me to keep my email in box down and life is good since I found Toodledo.

Search Engine Myths

I just downloaded this free ebook SEO report that Tawnya Sutherland of VANA told her member's about in the most recent newsletter.

Thought I'd share this special offer with you.
Click here to get the report: Search Engine Myths Exposed

It's free... the only catch is you have to download it by the 14th. What are you waiting for?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Toodledo Day 2

I'm on day 2 of using Toodledo and I LOVE it! I just entered in my very long to do list and it is so organized. I can view my to do list from any computer any where now.

I just discovered a new feature in Toodledo. You can download your to do list in to a pdf booklet, print it and have yourself a little pocket size to do list booklet.

This is the first online to do list manager I've found that is easy to use, logical and works with my way of organizing my tasks. Can you tell I'm super excited about finding the program?

Blog of the Week (Week 5) - Mann Made Time

This week my pick for Blog of the Week is Jaime Lee Mann's blog: Mann Made Time.

I love reading Jaime's blog she does a fine job balancing personal and business in her blog. She also shares great new software she has discovered.

In fact, after reading her latest post about Toodledo I went and tried it myself. So far I LOVE it! I kind of grew out of my Franklin-Covey System recently and needed more. The F-C system is great but when you have multiple clients with multiple projects things can start getting a little out of control. I love how Toodledo has folders so you can keep each client's to do lists in separate folders. Since I've only been using Toodledo for about 24 hours I can't justify writing a full review. Give me a few weeks and I may revisit this topic.

Thanks Jaime!

Alaska Airline hired a Virtual Assistant... Not.

Did you hear Alaska Airlines has hired a Virtual Assistant whose name is Jenn?

Check it out. If you visit Alaska's site: www.alaskaair.com and click in the top right corner where it says Ask Jenn you can actually type questions to Jenn and she talks back to you.

I tried to be nice and ask her some of the usual questions I might ask a new VA but she didn't seem to know the answers to any of my questions.

What are you Doing to Celebrate February’s National Time Management Month?

Did you know February is National Time Management Month? How are you managing your time or rather how are you utilizing the time you have in each day? Are you having productive days or are you feeling overwhelmed and not so productive?

I finally wrote a press release for our book! I'm posting it here so you can utilize the $10 discount code we are offering on our book through the month of February! The code is listed below at the end of the press release. Enjoy!

February is National Time Management Month

San Francisco, CA. Time wasting is a universal problem especially in this day and age of the internet. According to Salary.com, Inc’s annual Wasting Time (at work) Survey in 2007 the leading time-wasting activities were (no surprise) personal Internet usage (34.7% of respondents), followed by socializing with co-workers (20.3%) and conducting personal business (17.0%). Respondents also reported taking long breaks to run errands while on the job and making personal phone calls.

Sally Kuhlman, of Virtual Simplicity says, “You can’t actually manage time but you can manage your actions to create a sense of having more time.”

Besides wasting time on things not related to work most people also tend to focus on low priority tasks. They don’t take the time to prioritize their tasks in to what is important, what can wait and what can be delegated. Instead they run around in a disorganized fashion feeling under constant pressure and frustrated with their lack of productivity.

Yvonne Weld and Sally Kuhlman have come up with a solution for the time wasting Small Business Owner. Their most recent e-book Managing Your Thriving Business for Success walks you through easy steps to get organized and create more time in your day. In recognition of Time Management month the book that is helping business owners get organized is selling for only $19.95.

Go to http://www.thrivingbusinessmanual.com/managing/ and enter the code: “productive” to get this special discounted offer only available during the month of February to start getting organized today.

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About Managing Your Thriving Business for Success

For more information about Managing Your Thriving Business for Success and how to start organizing your time better, visit http://www.thrivingbusinessmanual.com/managing.

Blog of the Week (Week 4) - OffAssist

Being the time of the year when many of us have taxes on the brain, I am featuring Candy Beauchamp's OffAssist Blog as this week's blog of the week. The OffAssist blog is full of lots of interesting and important information we as tax payers and business owners need to know.

Candy - thanks for keeping us informed and educated on this not so fun stuff.

Women Business Owners Survey

I keep hearing about how bad the economy is doing. It actually hit home when I registered for the FoVA conference in May in Canada. My US$ didn't go so far with the conversion rate. The conference actually ended up costing me more than the stated price.

Being prosperity minded I try not to let the news about the economy get to me. I believe there are enough people out there needing virtual assistance to keep me going for quite awhile and I'm not alone in that belief.

According to The Women Business Owners Survey & State of Business Forecast 2008 sponsored by the Women’s eCommerce Association, International, "Despite the slump in the economy and the global economic outlook for 2008, most women agree that no matter what yesterday brought the future of business is looking bright."

Check out the rest of the survey results here: Women Business Owners Survey

Clutter... Junk... Stuff...

How much stuff do you have in your home and office that you do not really need?

Do you ever think about where your stuff comes from or where it goes after you throw it away?

Check out The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard