Hooray!

Today I finally got my website moved over to my blog site so now I can start building up my content here! I had no idea it would be so involved but luckily I had the help of Nora Rubinoff from At Your Service Cincinnati to help me get everything set up. She’s wonderful a such a great business partner! If you ever need to do a Word Press move, I highly recommend her, she made it as painless as possible.

Coming soon we will have a lot more pages for you to sift through and more great information coming your way but for now I’m just glad to have everything set up the way I want so that I can move forward!

Note: If you are subscribed to my RSS feed (which I’m sure you all are…) be sure to re-subscribe because of my site address change! Also, if you have any bookmarks be sure to update those as well! I’m working on a 404 page but just in case get those bookmarks updated.

Have a Great Weekend!

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This week we continue our five part blog series on How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Book On-Line! Each week we will discuss a new and original way for you to use social media tools to publicize a new book, draw in a broader and more diverse audience and create a personal brand on-line. These tips will allow you to not only connect with your audience but they will help you bring in a new batch of fans that you may not have known existed!

This is it! The culmination of five weeks of social media promotion training! If you have been following the series you should have the knowledge now to build your own blog, post videos and book trailers with YouTube, and create a presence on Facebook and Twitter to draw in new fans and readers. With this final step we will combine each of these techniques into one major technique – a Virtual Book Tour!

In a normal book tour, an author visits libraries, book stores and other places that may be receptive to their new book. They may do a reading from their book as well as a book signing at each stop. In a virtual book tour, the author may visit websites, blogs or virtual book stores without ever leaving home! A typical tour would last for a week or two and the author would “visit” a different place each day. Each day could be a new guest post for a blog, an interview by a blogger or podcaster, or a question/answer session with a group on-line.

Setting up a virtual tour can be promoted and accomplished with all of the simple social media tools you have learned so far in this series:

• Blog: With your blog create a special series for your virtual tour. Update readers on where you have appeared and use it as a diary to discuss what happened that day on the tour.
• YouTube: Upload video of your interviews or create a video from the audio file if there is no video available. *Be sure to get the permission of the interviewer for this type of promotion.
• Twitter: Tweet about your appearances! One simple tweet about an upcoming interview with a website address could be re-tweeted several times over and draw in tons of additional followers!
• Facebook: Similarly, Facebook can be used to promote the book tour by setting up a web calendar with information on when and where you will be on specific days.

Always be sure to include your own websites and contact information when conducting interviews and guest postings so that your audience will know where to find out more about you and your books. Free stuff is always a good idea as well; free book giveaways, contests and early opt-ins for purchasing the newest books will be a great way to bring fans and new readers to your events!

Here is your summary for this week’s tip:

1. Set up a schedule for your virtual book tour. Warning: Blatant Self-Promotion – You could always hire a virtual assistant to help with setting up the specifics of your tour; contacting bloggers, podcasters, website owners and so on with dates, times and activities to create the actual tour schedule. Then you can begin spreading the word throughout your on-line social network!
2. Create events in Facebook and send out invites to your fans to find out who would want to attend your sessions.
3. Use Hootsuite and schedule the app to send out Tweets informing followers of your tour, as well as reminder Tweets before and informational Tweets during the activity!
4. Create a blog series and keep fans updated on when and where you will be appearing. Also, use your blog as a journal to chronicle your tour!

I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have enjoyed writing it! I have learned a lot about how to help authors and I hope I’ve taught you some ways to start yourself on the path of social media promotion. Stay tuned as I continue to share great tips and tricks to keep you involved with on-line promotion!

Have a Great Week!

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I am an organizer and love having my computer desktop clean so when I found this application I was super excited. The miracle application I speak of is RocketDock!

RocketDock is Awesome! The app takes anything you want, links, shortcuts, programs, files and docks them either on the top or on the bottom of you screen! Plus it’s rediculously easy to use.

Download the program here and run the program here.

Once you download the program you can customize the layout to what works for you by opening the “Dock Settings” icon.

The default location for the dock is on the top of the screen but you can also have it docked on the bottom, right and left sides as well.

I prefer to have it docked on the bottom but then I had the problem of the Start bar always being in the way. I solved that problem by simply moving the taskbar to the left side of my screen. To do that simply drag and drop the taskbar to where you would like! You may need to “unlock” the bar by right clicking on the taskbar the unchecking the box that says “Lock the taskbar”. You can also have the taskbar auto-hide in that same properties box.

After you have it docked where you want you can start adding icons to the dock. You can drag and drop from anywhere on your computer and place it in your dock. You can also add seperators to organize your dock even more.

For extra fun, you can change the look of your dock including the style, size or action type. You can download new templates as well as new icons from the RocketDock website. Sometimes you may drag a program or file to your dock and you don’t get a pretty icon so you can download an icon from the website for that reason as well. You can also create your own icon and use that as well! To switch an icon simply right-click on the icon you want to change and go to “Icon Settings”.

So there it is, the easiest (and coolest) way to organize your desktop that I have found so far! Now even though I don’t have a Mac I can FEEL like one of the cool kids!

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Welcome to Right Click VA: the blog! Hopefully with this and future blogposts I’ll be able to solve the question of “What the heck is a VA and how can using one help me and/or my business?!” Of course I’ll let you in on some ways you can help yourself as well! I have numerous ideas and tips to share with you, which is the main idea behind creating this blog. Word processing tips, organizational tips that will make your life easier and the many ways that social media and the internet in general can help you and/or your business are just a few of the ideas I have for future blog posts!

With this first post I’d like to introduce myself to you and let you see what I’m all about. There are several different hats that I enjoy wearing so I will introduce each of them here:

Sara the Professional

I received my BA in Criminology and Psychology from The Ohio State University but I started out my college career as a Computer Science major, so my background is quite diverse.  I have also studied Social Work at Capital University and Computer Programming at  Miami University.  I love learning and would probably be a lifelong student if I could but at some point we all have to get a job in the real world.

Beginning with my first job at McDonald’s as a Crew Trainer when I was 16, I have always had a steady stream of interesting and challenging positions including Student Supervisor for the North Commons at OSU, Loss Prevention Supervisor for JCPenney and a small stint as a call center associate.  Throughout my many positions though, including my latest position working at a large law firm in Cincinnati, there has been a theme. I have always seemed to discover my roles as the computer go to girl, the document publication creator and the project management associate when new problems sprung up. I should have known that I would end up starting a business that involved working on all of these projects and more!

Sara the Mom

On November 6th, 2008 I had my daughter, Aerith Marilyn! She has completely changed my life in so many ways and I can’t imagine my life without her! Once I found out that we were going to have a baby I decided to stay at home with her as long as I could and quit my position at the law firm. In many ways that was when I decided to start up my virtual assistant business because I knew there was no way that I would be able to stay at home full time and not have a job! So after months of driving my husband nuts I finally decided to take the leap into self employment and entrepreneurship and I created Right Click Office Services in February of 2009.

Sara the Virtual Assistant

OK, so what the heck IS a Virtual Assistant (VA)? Well here is the description taken from the IVAA website:

“A Virtual Assistant (VA) is an independent entrepreneur providing administrative, creative and/or technical services. Utilizing advanced technological modes of communication and data delivery, a professional VA assists clients in his/her area of expertise from his/her own office on a contractual basis.”

My practice, at present, is a general VA business that caters to all business owners and individuals who would like to do more business instead of more work. I work with several different types of clients and work on several different types of work that range from spreadsheet creation, proofreading, website updates, and social media organization. My hope is to continue to grow my business and hopefully discover my niche along the way!

So there it is! A quick snap shot about who I am and how my life, background and skills will enter into this blog in future updates.  Please be sure to introduce yourself using the comments box and tell me what you would like to get out of the blog in future updates or anything else you would like to share!

Have a great day!

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