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Referenced Links:
- Episode 82: Three Month Actionable Plan to a Profitable Year
- Episode 86: How to Stay Motivated When You Aren’t Seeing Results
- Upwork
- AWeber
Tweetables:
It’s perfectly fine to let people know you have a waiting list. #vatip 
Gotta Tweet!
There are ways to grow your business besides adding more clients. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
Your business is your number one client. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
In Words:
Hello and welcome to The Business of Being a Virtual Assistant. I am your host, Tiffany Parson, and you’re listening to episode number 87.
I wanted to give you a quick update on my ten things for the quarter. I am using this list as a guide of things I want to accomplish in my virtual assistant business the first three months of the year. Now, if this is your very first time listening to the podcast, I welcome you. The episode that I’m referring to is episode number 82. If you go back and listen to that, I laid out how you can create a three-month actionable plan for yourself towards a profitable year, so check that out.
On my list of ten things, I have two more things to add. I’ve got them listed as doing as opposed to done, and that is I needed to update my website, my Virtual Hired Hand website. I wanted to take some things off of it that were outdated because either it’s something we no longer do or it just needed to be taken off. So I was able to get that freshened up. I was very excited about that. There are a couple more pages I need to work on.
But I’ve narrowed my services down even more to two main things and that is continuing with WordPress website management and funnel services, and I really haven’t figured out the best name for that, that would communicate to clients. I’m still working on that.
But funnel services are when you see like a free opt-in form. Somebody puts in their name and email address. They get a thank you page or a thank you email. They get the link to download. That whole process, setting up the technical parts of that. So funnel services would include the free offer pages, product pages, and webinar pages.
It’s something that we have always done. I think it was listed under just webinar services and a part of website services, but wasn’t really broken out in focus. There’s software out there that uses the term “funnels” and different things like that, and so I realized that now is the time to separate it out so it’s communicated very clearly what it is and what is means so that can start rocking and rolling.
A tip for you in evaluating your services and what to provide, especially if you’re using Upwork and you’re looking through projects, take note of the things that you’re skipping over and the things that are getting you interested and excited about it, where you would really like to do it or even want to know more. That is an indication of what gets you pumped.
I started noticing that when people were inviting me to projects to set up new websites, to redo websites, that I really was not interested in doing that, and so that was one of the main things that I just decided take it off. Through the years it is something that I have wrestled with, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, you know, actually starting websites from scratch, and decided not to do it. It takes a lot of people so long to get content they want for their website and figuring out what they want and that whole process, for me, personally, I was finding it to be draining.
The best thing for me was just, you know, I like taking hold of it after the fact, after it’s done, after it’s built, and even to the point of if someone didn’t know how their website worked, going behind the scenes and figuring out the functionality of their website and communicating that to them. That gets me excited. I like under the hood stuff versus focusing on the pretty on the outside.
The other thing on the list is I wanted to get back to promoting my Facebook page using Facebook ads. That kicked off, I want to say, let’s see, I started that – let me see how long it’s been. I think it’s been two weeks or a week and a half. It’ll be two weeks this week.
My Facebook page has been sitting, like I was posting, but it wasn’t growing. If you’re looking to get organic likes on your Facebook page, it is going to take forever. I mean, I would get one like, two likes, three likes, but never more than that organically, and so I started going back to Facebook ads because I know they work. That’s part of how I got to the number that I had.
Anyway, kicked it back off and got – let me see what it shows right now is 131 likes this week, which is a lot to me, and I’d love to see it get down to where that 131 is per day. But I’m still tinkering and working out, figuring it out. It’s a process that you go through to figure out what works best. But I’m pretty pleased with the results that I’m seeing on that. That was on my list. Okay, so those are the two big things in regards to that.
Hopefully, you have created your list, those of you who listened to episode 82. You have your list and it didn’t have to be a set number. Mine just happened to be ten. Yours could have been whatever the number is. But hopefully, you’re using that as your guide and going through it and just getting some things done for your business.
If we’re not growing, we’re doing all this stuff for our clients but we’re not doing anything for our business, then our business ends up not growing.
You know, we’re helping clients achieve their goals. What about yours? Keep in mind, your business is your number one client, and you’ve got to take care of your number one client in order to be able to serve all of your other clients.
Last week, I talked about how to stay motivated when you aren’t seeing results. I want to flip that and talk about what to do when things are exceptionally well in your business. What are your options? Things start blowing up. You get moving. What are your options? Obviously, you keep doing what’s working and do it even more, so keeping that going.
Let’s say you started out on Upwork. Now, you’re submitting proposals. People are awarding you projects. You’re knocking it out of the park. Where else can you market yourself? Is it time for you to start using social media to market yourself and keep it rolling that way? That’s what I mean by keep doing more, so broaden it.
Is it time to narrow your services down now that maybe you’re doing everything? You’re doing all kinds of different projects, but realizing there’s certain things that I want to only do. Is it time for you to start narrowing your services and really focus in on that so you can be the best you can possibly be in those few things?
Is it time to bring on other virtual assistants? Maybe you can bring them on as subcontractors. I have done that before, brought in subcontractors for different projects. Do you want to maybe now be the project manager and have your subcontractors do the work and you manage that?
We will reach our personal capacity. There’s only so much that we can do ourselves.
When you reach your personal capacity, or on your way to reaching your personal capacity, figure out do you want to grow it larger, adding more people, which I would recommend subcontractors, or maybe you want to have a firm and actually have VA employees. That’s something that you’d have to think about, or stay solo and just work at your max, not adding on, but being ready if a client drops out, being ready to fill in. That’s kind of the balance of it when you decide to just keep doing it how you’re doing it yourself, meaning the services for your clients where you’re the only one doing the work for them.
Let’s say if your max is ten clients, everybody’s max will be different based on your personal schedule, based on the services you provide, the demand that it requires, so it will look different. But let’s say your max is ten. If two drop out and you drop down to eight, do you continue to market yourself so you’ll always have people in the pipeline waiting?
I think it’s perfectly fine to let people know you have a waiting list. You can’t do that on Upwork, but people that come through directly, maybe through your website or social media, letting them know you have a waitlist. That way maybe it’s not ten ongoing clients, but maybe ten projects at a time. So if two drop off, you can bring some more from your waiting list. That could be a way that you do that. Keep it solo. Keep it within your max if that’s the option that you choose to take.
Or maybe you keep it at your max and add to it. Maybe now you want to add affiliate marketing and promote some of the services that your clients need. For example, in my case, clients need an email service, so I’m an affiliate for AWeber. They need webinar service, so I’m an affiliate for different type webinar services, and I know them enough that I can talk about them, write about them, recommend them, all these things.
There are ways to grow it besides just adding on more clients. Maybe it’s just building out, you know, what it looks like. Maybe it’s time for you to create an eBook and share with people the best ways to work with a virtual assistant or give different options, things like that. But that is a way to expand it and still stay solo.
If you decide to grow and add your subcontractors, get that piece flowing really well, finding the right fit for your team. Get everybody working smoothly, and then when you’re at a point where that portion has reached its capacity, then maybe you want to add on some other things to it as well.
The whole point is it’s easy to talk out, oh, what if it doesn’t work? Dah, dah, dah. But what if we flip that on its head? It is working so well, now you’ve got to figure out, okay, what do I want to do next? Where do we go from here? Do we grow big? Do we expand it out? What do we do? One thing I didn’t say was stop. You keep going. You keep going. It is a fun process.
I know there are many people that have started their virtual assistant businesses, started getting clients on Upwork and other places and realized this is not the business for me, and that’s because of what’s required. You are doing some work for someone they’ve outsourced to you and expect you to do that. It’s perfectly fine. It’s one of the reasons why I recommend starting with Upwork because you’re not fully committed. It’s best to do it that way, decide at that point whether this is the right move for you, and then grow it into your business.
One thing that’s important to note is to start, to move. That’s the only way you’ll know. You can research your head off, analyze your head off, plan your head off, but you still won’t know until you actually jump in and do it.
Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what you heard, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Tell me what’s going on with you. Come on over the Facebook page: facebook.com/tiffanyparsonbiz, or if you prefer a little shorter message, come on over to Twitter: @tiffanydparson.
See you next time!
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