Question:
I am working full-time and trying to get clients for my business. The hardest part is marketing and writing a blog.I’ve started a blog but what topics can I write about? What about marketing?

Answer:
It’s got to be tough working full-time while trying to start a business. On the other hand, that gives you an income you can count on while you work on building your business.

Since you have such a busy schedule, it’s important to make an appointment with yourself to make time to work on your business, write blog posts and market. Then keep your appointment as though you were meeting with a new client!

Here are some suggestions from the Action Guide, Building Blocks: Succeed as a Chief Virtual Officer:

• Write a “how-to” article or a “ten tips” article
• Answer questions you get from prospects and clients as a blog post (much like this one)
• Invite prospects to write guest blog posts.
• Write about a client’s success
• Post a list of relevant links with a short comment on why you found each valuable
• Share a recent experience you had

It’s very helpful as part of your marketing strategy to also visit other blogs and post comments there that will link back to your own blog.

More tips on blogging and marketing can be found in the Action Guide, Building Blocks: Succeed as a Chief Virtual Officer.

What topics do you write about on your blog?

Do you have a client that seems to be constantly unhappy? Perhaps they honestly feel you haven’t been taking care of their tasks and projects the way they’d like you to. Even when you’ve done all you feel you can they are still unhappy and loudly and unpleasantly let you and others know. It may be time to let them go.

If you’ve done all you can, it doesn’t matter if they are right or not. You will do more harm to your business keeping them as a client. As we state on page 39 in The Commonsense Virtual Assistant – Becoming an Entrepreneur, Not an Employee: ” If you decide that an ongoing relationship will do more harm than good to both of you, calmly, politely let them know that you’ve done all you can. Apologize that you haven’t been able to make them happy. Express a genuine hope that someone else who offers the same product or service will be able to do what you can’t. And that’s all.”

Have you had to let a client go? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Client Communication Clinic we hosted in Vancouver last Friday was great! We finally met Renee Shupe, The Redhead VA, in person. We also met an aspiring virtual assistant and are meeting again this coming week while we’re still in the Vancouver area.

Joel and I will be in the Vancouver area until August 23rd at least. We’d love to meet other local virtual assistants in person and chat with you about your business. If you were unable to attend the Client Communication Clinic and would like to receive the instructional materials, we’d love to meet with you and provide you all the materials for the same cost as the Clinic.

We will meet with you in person anywhere within the Vancouver area at a time convenient to you for up to 3 hours and provide:

1. Client Communication Clinic CD package ($100.00 Value) – over 5 hours audio and 7 Special Reports on the following topics:

• Identifying Your Ideal Client and Target Market
• Networking Creates Word of Mouth Referrals
• Converting Prospects to Clients
• Effectively Marketing With Your Newsletter
• Bonus Tips: Grow Your Business as a Chief Virtual Officer
• 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success by John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing

2. Building Blocks: Succeed as a Chief Virtual Officer, a 72-page action guide. ($19.95 Value) We use this action guide during the Clinic. You will also receive an Implementation Checklist to help you implement what you learn from the CD and Action Guide  in your business right away!

3. Personalized business advice and answers to your questions about your Virtual Assistant business.

All this for $100.

If you’d like to take advantage of this special offer, use our contact form and let us know where and when you’d like to meet and we’ll work out all the details.

Everyone wants more business. We want more prospects to become clients and buy from us. We attend networking events hoping to find good leads. As we meet new people, we tend to come right out and ask, ‘do you want to buy from me?’ Do you like it when someone approaches you at a networking meeting and tells you all about how they can help you but never asks you about your business? Of course not! This is a great way to turn off prospects.

Instead of approaching people at networking events with the idea of pushing your business, attend with the thought of getting to know other people and their business. You start to develop relationships that build to a point where you can know what the other person actually needs and if they need your services.

We’ll talk about this in greater detail in our group coaching calls in May. Learn more at the Chief Virtual Officer website.

A business broker I know suggested I write about the danger of a virtual assistant having only one client. Many virtual assistants would agree that they want more than one client. However I do know of VAs that only have one client because they get 20-40 hours work each week from that one client. That’s wonderful!

The one drawback to having just one client is – what happens if you lose that client? You’ve just lost your entire business. So even if you are working 20-40 hours per week for one client, consider adding a couple of smaller clients to your client base.

You may think you can’t take on additional work when you’re already working 20-40 hours per week for your one client. This would be a good time to get to know another virtual assistant that would be willing to sub-contract for you. There are other advantages to building a relationship with another virtual assistant also and we’ll discuss that in a future post.