Archive for April, 2010

Question the Rules: Rebel with a Cause!

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Have you ever wondered what happened to that rebel who wanted to start their own business and live the life they wanted? Maybe they got crushed by other people’s opinions or maybe they wanted to blend in and make their business just like everyone else’s because that’s what they thought they had to do (That was me…).This week Johnny B. Truant and Lee Stranahan have put out a new program called “Question the Rules” geared exactly for that purpose; to help you bring that crazy dreamer/rebel back and focus on making your business kick ass! Both guys are hilarious and genius in their marketing so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this program is awesometastic!

Over the past few months I have been undergoing a transformation of not only my business but my mindset as well. As you might know I started my business as a Vanilla VA and planned to work with anyone and do anything that would bring in the money.  It took some time and some help from my coach to realize that I wasn’t Vanilla and I was not being true to myself. I am a wild and crazy awesome quirky person who also happens to be a kick ass Virtual Assistant! I chose to bring that to my business by rebranding and reexamining my marketing to include my quirky side in a professional way!

I am SO much more aware that what I think is “professional” – boring and stuffy – is fine for some people, but not for me. It took some times but I have gotten away from comparing myself to everyone and just living in my truth that I am a . This program has really cemented my philosophy that people will want to work with me because of ME not how many yellow highlighted text areas I have or how many cold calls I make! Of course you philosophy could be completely different and that’s ok; that’s kind of the point!

Johnny and Lee’s program takes it a step further though and goes into how to set goals that will actually work with my beliefs instead of focusing on what I “should” be working towards. My favorite section though is on networking outside of the box and how you can network yourself and your business without feeling like a creepy salesman which is my ultimate fear when surrounded by people at a networking event!

Right now they are launching the program at a crazy price break of $97 and after Saturday (5/1) it’ll jump up to its final cost of $397. So if you are ready to start putting some F-U-N into your business instead of boring and stuffy check out Question the Rules and starting running your business the way you want to! Being yourself and not playing by the rules could be the thing that makes you stand out and be memorable and ultimately get that sale or that new client!

Full disclosure, some of the links in this post are affiliate links but that doesn’t mean I’m a slimy salesman; I really LOVE this program otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you about it here! ;)

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Hooked on Phoenix, Part Two

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

I can’t remember the last time I was so energized to work on my business! It’s such a great feeling and I love all the great info and goals I have now because of the conference!

The opening and closing keynotes by Marsha Petrie Sue were great and really brought the conference full circle by getting me excited about my business! One of the quotes that I will be printing out and taping to my wall is “Is this the best use of my time right now?” I love this and really need to start thinking about that as I inadvertently spend an hour tweaking a blog post or getting sucked into Facebook!

Yvonne Weld had a great session on how to start attracting more clients by working on your systems and your follow through. There was a lot of information in that session that I’m still sifting through but it was a great reminder that just because I build it, doesn’t necessarily mean they will come! I need to do a better job of preparing before a meeting and then following up after a meeting. I tend to only worry about how scatterbrained I look during the meeting so preparing beforehand will really help me not be as nervous!

Karen Gridley led a session on embracing your rights and creating an excuse free life. The one point I liked was kind of a Duh moment, “Quit Taking It Personally.” I know that I have a big problem with this and will really be working hard at being ok with who I know I am and not taking it personally when Joe Sixpack doesn’t want to work with me.

Beth Caldwell did a session on success strategies that basically walked you through how to envision and go forward with your ideal business. One point I took away from the session was the idea to look at what my existing clients thank me for and use that to build and grow my business. It’s hard for me to say I’m an expert at X,Y and Z but by looking to my clients to basically tell me what I’m good at breaks me from feeling like I’m bragging; I’m simply building on how I’ve helped my clients in the past!

Sally Kuhlman and Yvonne Weld did an excellent joint session on whether your business is thriving or just surviving. They talked about a number of ways to jump start your business when you’ve gotten to the point where your don’t even want to talk to your clients because you’re so burnt out. Thankfully I haven’t gotten to that point yet but I did really appreciate the section on how to set good goals and to follow through with them. Goals are a hard thing for me to narrow down so getting that conversation started in my head has really gotten the creative juices moving for me and I have some great goals now that I’ll share with you in just a moment!

Alyssa Gregory did a fun session on work/life balance and even though her PowerPoint slides didn’t want to cooperate it was a great time! It turned into a brainstorming session on how to separate your work and family time and space. I definitely realized that I need to start getting more organized because that seems like the key to getting peace when working from how with a 17 month old! I got another great quote to add to wall as well, “Do What You Can and Can the Rest!” LOVE that!

Coming back from the conference I had a lot to think about and a lot of things I wanted to get done in the coming year. Here are a few of my goals for the rest of this year. Some are easier than others but hopefully by putting them out there I’ll be more inclined to work on them!

  • Create worksheets and walkthroughs to help Creatives organize their thoughts
  • Create and FAQ for my website
  • Create a referral program
  • Create a personal database of agents, publishers and other necessary posse members for authors
  • Start writing articles and submitting them to online magazine
  • Create a new focus towards social media and internet marketing assessments. I want to be more of a partner for my clients going forward!

I am so excited to see how much I can grow this year and to see where I am next year at the IVAA summit in Portland, Oregon!

Posted in Random Thoughts, Virtual Assistant | 4 Comments »

Hooked on Phoenix: Part One (Updated)

Monday, April 26th, 2010

The 9th annual IVAA conference was amazingly awesomtastic and I can’t wait to start moving on my business but I wanted to share some fun parts of the trip with you. As I began to write this post I realized that there were two major parts of the conference: the networking and friendship making part and the business growth and learning part. In some ways the two intertwined but I decided to split them up so that I didn’t end up with a ridiculously long post!

Part One: Fun and Friends

Image courtesy of CandyTX’s TwitPics!

Imagine you walk into a crowded room filled with men or women who are in the same business as you, they have the same ups and downs as you and they may all be just as crazy as you. That’s how I felt this past week at the IVAA Live Summit in Phoenix Arizona! I was so excited to meet all of these amazing women and realize I wasn’t the craziest one in the bunch! It was great to meet all of my friends that I had never met in person and even meet some new friends that I can’t believe I didn’t know before!

I’m not going to be able to recount every detail of the four days I was there but here are some of the highlights:

  • Free drinks at the manager’s reception – Score!
  • The convo pit where the wonders of the VA world were talked about and solved.
  • The awesome omelet bar every morning. Seriously, a free cooked breakfast every morning. It was rather awesome.
  • Dinner at Rustler’s Rooste and getting scared to death by “snake eggs” from Patty Dost – she’s not as nice as she appears but we love her anyway ;)
  • Dinner with the Online Summit team at Zinburger and watching Sherra Scott freak out the waiter by wanting to connect with him on Twitter and Facebook! He was a good sport but it still made us laugh uncontrollably for a good ten minutes! Good times… :)
  • Getting to meet Jan King and some other Virtual Author’s Assistants at lunch one day – I might even get some SciFi clients out of it! ;)
  • Meeting Terry Green who literally lives 2 hours from me! Hurray for Ohio VAs!
  • Meeting some of the great new VAs (Brenda Briley, Susana Sifuentes-Prieto, Theresa Nelson) there and helping them (I hope) by talking about how I started and what helped me during the first year.
  • Getting cake from Justin Ryan of DuckDuckBlue for Administrative Assistants Day! It was SO yummy and a great way to get people downstairs at midnight!
  • Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention the Best roomates ever! Brenda Briley was so sweet and we had some great conversations over lunch and breakfast and even ended up on the same flight home! Cindy Opong is like a sister from another mother! We had way too much fun staying up until all hours of the night chatting about everything! :)

I know it sounds cliché but just being able to go and meet all of these amazing women and feel very included and part of the group has given me a confidence that I know is going to spill over into my business!

Next time we’ll discuss all the businessy business things I learned while at the conference and some ideas on where my business could be headed!

Posted in Virtual Assistant | 3 Comments »

I Keeps it Real

Friday, April 16th, 2010

As you know I have switched up my marketing and business brand this year and it was a very scary thing for me to look outside of the box and not be like everyone else. Then I saw these new U by Kotex commercials. Freaking hilarious and SO right! Why does advertising have to be so unlike normal life? Lots of marketing campaigns are guilty of this; beer commercials, fast food commercials and even online marketing campaigns that promise big payoffs with their webinar series. Personally, I like to think that people work with me because of my personality and my hard work ethic, not on how long my sales page is or how many yellow highlighted areas I can fit into one paragraph! To me quality far out weighs quantity when it comes to business so I would rather have 5 amazingly awesometastic clients than 10 mediocre clients any day!

Marketing, whether you are selling a product, a service or just simple promoting your personal brand needs to come from a place of honesty or else your future clients aren’t going to buy what your selling; and if they do buy they won’t trust you completely.

So how do you find out if you are marketing in-authentically?

• Do you feel icky when you sign up a new client because you are promising things that you may not be able to deliver?

• Do you advertize only with the picture perfect, planets aligned kind of scenario?

• Do your friends think you should have grown up to be a used car sales man?

If you said yes to any of the above you are not a horrible person, you just need to take a step back and decide how you want to present yourself from now on!

Enjoy these videos and think about how you want to portray yourself out in the business world!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

8 Things – Learned/Learning/Learn

Thursday, April 15th, 2010


You Are Inspiring by beautifulphotography

I spoke with one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met yesterday. My call was supposed to be for 30 minutes and ended up being 2 hours! Here’s just one jaw dropper…

Her: “Then I flew out to Hawaii to see Elvis’s Comeback Special because my brother used to fly Elvis’s orchestra around.”

Me: “OMG that’s amazing!”

Her: “Yup, and you can even see me when the camera pans the audience.”

Me: “OMG that’s so cool!”

One exciting thing right after another!

It really got me thinking about some of the things I’ve done in my life and what I want to learn in the future. So here are my 8 things that I have learned, are learning and want to learn someday!

Learned:

1. How to crochet and knit.

2. Taught myself to create websites using HTML. Back in high school I was pretty awesome and even got my picture in the paper for having a website! ;)

3. To sing and dance and perform in musicals! Best time of my life. :)

Learning:

4. How to be a great mother.

5. How to fit in “me” time so that I don’t get overwhelmed!

6. Patience. I’m working on enjoying the ride and not just looking for the end result.

(Want To) Learn:

7. PHP coding. I know very nerdy, but I get so frustrated when I want to mess with some code and I have no idea what is going on!

8. How to sew. I know I did back in the day with my grandma but I’d love to be able to womp up some fun stuff for my daughter!

This post is part of the 8 Things Thursday series over at Magpie Girl

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April Fools Day Gift!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I love April Fools Day!

BUT instead of saying that I’m moving to Alaska to become a moose hunter I have decided to give you all a gift!

Have you ever wondered what the right social network was for you? Do you look at LinkedIn and cry from the boredom of it or wonder who in the world has time to use Twitter?!

Well I have a solution!

Starting today when you sign up for my VIP list you’ll receive a copy of my acclaimed* download,

Social Media for Noobs

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tweet

*By “acclaimed” I mean a few of my friends and family really like it so I’m banking on the fact that they’re not lying to me…

It’s packed full of goodness and will help you see the pros and cons of the major social networks! Click the link above to sign up or you can  take what’s behind door number two… click here! ;-)  (I couldn’t resist…hehe)

You’ll need to prove that you’re not a robot first by confirming your email address but once we know you’re a human you’ll get a link to the download! So much excitement for so little work!

Oh and by the way, if you have already signed up for my VIP list you should have/will receive a copy in your inbox without doing a darn thing! Man I’m good.

I hope you all have a fantastic April Fools Day and love your free download!


Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »