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Use social media to let your clients know who you are as a person. #vatip 
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In Words:
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, whatever time you’re listening to this podcast. You are listening to episode number 72, and we’re going to talk about wrapping up the year strong. This is the end of September and we are moving straight into the fourth quarter.
I went back and looked at some of my notes, the things that I’ve done since the beginning of the year. Specifically, looking for the things that I did consistently that I wanted to do, and also noting what didn’t get done consistently and what I need to improve on for the last quarter of the year. I want to talk to you about that same thing.
One of the things that easily falls by the wayside is things that are related to marketing and promoting ourselves. What goes in the marketing and promoting bucket? Well, blogging, social media post, paid advertising. That goes into the bucket.
It’s very easy to continue serving clients that you already have, because they’re sending emails, they’re sending you things. You already know what you have to do one week to the next, one month to the next, whatever the deadlines are. You are know what that is. That keeps you being consistent in serving your clients.
But have you been consistent in serving your number one client, who is you, your business? You see, if the existing clients decide that this is their last quarter, this is it, and they close up, where does that leave you? Where does that leave you?
We have to take care of our business and make sure that we are handling that marketing and promotions bucket. Why not start with the last quarter of the year to recharge, reignite, recommit, refocus, and get it right?
1) You can’t blog if you don’t have a website. If your website has been on your to-do list since forever, it’s time to change that. Go to Fiverr, go to Upwork, go to VirtualHiredHand.com, whatever you need to do to outsource your website. If you can’t outsource it yourself, go to TiffanyParson.com, click on Courses and grab my WordPress Course to learn how to set up a WordPress website.
Go to Fiverr. Get someone to create a $5 header for you, or go to Canva or PicMonkey and create your own header for your website to have something and get it done. It does not have to be perfect. You need a home where you can blog. That’s the first thing.
You can go back in the archives of the podcast to look for episodes where I’ve talked about what to blog and get that type of information. What I do plan to do for Black Friday is to release some of the sessions that we did in the VA Boot Camp a while back, break up those classes so that you can pull out what you need. Some of you may want the whole thing; some of you may just need a select number of the courses.
But that will be broken up and made available for Black Friday. It hasn’t been open in a long time, so it’s not something that’s just been sitting out and made available. It’s been a while since that was available, but the information is the same. That’s just putting a bug in your ear, letting you know that that is coming for Black Friday.
2) Social media – what are you doing on social media? Let your clients know who you are as a person. Let them know what’s in your head. Like what do you know? What’s your specialty? What are you knowledgeable about with something that will be helpful and encouraging to them as well as for their business? Show them how you can be a help to them.
Some people have no idea that they could use what you have until you paint a picture for them. We paint pictures using our blog. We paint pictures with social media. We paint pictures with our paid ads. That is how we can paint pictures for clients and let them know how we could be of service to them. Okay, so that’s all that.
Now, you may say, “Well, Tiffany, I’m not good at writing. I don’t have time.” I get it. Let’s go backwards. Don’t have time. It is your business. [Laughs] If you’re saying you don’t have time, this is what you’re saying, “I don’t have time for my business.” That’s fine. This time next time year, though, you won’t have a my business. It will be gone because you didn’t have time this year.
3) Writing. Every single week I talk to you. I used to think, oh, I love to write. I could hear the words in my head and write it all down. But it’s not always fast enough because, for me, when I write and I go back and I reread it and do draft one and draft two, I overthink it and overanalyze.
But when I talk and just send the audio to Shannon, I don’t second think what I’ve said because I’ve said it. I’ve put it out there. It’s done. I’ve said it already. Then she transcribes it, and I copy what she sends me and that goes on the website for the blog post. Because I know for me, some days I like to read, some days I want to just listen to something, and so we offer two. My recommitment to my Virtual Hired Hand blog, the solution for that was the Facebook Live weekly show.
When you put it out there that you’re doing something every single week on select day and a select time, guess what? That automatically creates an appointment and a schedule for you. So the days leading up to that, you’re already thinking, okay, what am I going to talk about this week?
4) Schedule – do you have a schedule for your blog post? Have you already thought, oh, I’m going to blog on this day or that day? Because if you haven’t, if it’s just open, then there’s no opportunity for you to start thinking about what am I going to write this week? If you know, in your mind, I’m going to put a blog post up on Monday or Tuesday or whatever your day is, it doesn’t matter, but you need a day and a time, a day and a time. If you know it’s Thursday at 3:30, it has to be done.
Then, guess what you’re doing? You’re making sure it gets done, and when it doesn’t get done, guess what? You’re thinking about it and thinking, gosh, I was supposed to do that. But without a day, without a time, there’s nothing to think about except, oh, next week. I’ll do it next week. I’ll do it next week. I’ll do it next week.
I’m telling you, because that was me. I want back in the archives to see when was the last time I actually did a blog post on my website, right. I did other things instead, which provided content and things like that, but the website, the blog. But that’s all going to change. We’ve got time to recommit. What I’m most proud of is this podcast and my commitment to you and being consistent with that. I went back in the archives and looked at the consistency in that.
Go in your own archives of your WordPress blog and see how you did every single month.
Go into your Dashboard. Click on Post. At the top of Post you’ll see an area for like all dates, and just go through. It already lists the dates for you. Start with January and go from there, and you can see how many times you hit publish. Because you might have a lot sitting in draft, but see how many times you hit publish for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. That will help you change how October, November, and December are going to look, right.
All right. This is not an episode to feel down about yourself. It’s about recommitting. It’s about getting excited about what you want to do. Maybe you fell off because you were in transition and weren’t sure what the heck you wanted to do, or you’re sick of talking about what you’ve been talking about the year before. I don’t know.
5) The next thing to do is evaluate your services. If there’s something you’ve been providing and you’re like if I have to talk about that, I’m going to scream, that’s a surefire indicator that it might need to be scratched off the services list, because you want to be able to discuss the services that you provide, right.
If you are a social media virtual assistant and you started out loving to schedule posts for people, and now you don’t like scheduling posts, evaluate why you don’t like scheduling. It may not actually be the scheduling that you don’t like. It could be the system that you’re using to schedule. It could be the timeframe that your client sends you their content. Maybe they’ve been late so now it’s time to let them know deadlines. If you get it to me by here, I can do it here. Clearly, if they get stuff to you last minute, you may not always be able to get to it when they need you to get to it. So time to reset and make some deadlines for that.
It may be your own system. Not your scheduling system, but your methods in how you are setting things up and getting the content ready to be scheduled. If it’s just been all over the place, maybe some is in a Word doc, some is in email, some is in a spreadsheet, some is on the Facebook, some is on the blog, and you just go from one to the other. That would drive me nuts. I would have to get it all in a central location and prep it for scheduling and then schedule it.
Maybe going forward, your next social media client, maybe you require that they get it organized for you, or maybe that is an extra fee that you do to pull that content and create it for them into that nice list that works for you. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s just a simple Word doc, whatever. Maybe it’s included so you raise the fee of the service and it’s all-inclusive. I don’t know, something for you to evaluate for you.
At one time, I was not liking doing WordPress websites. I lost my mojo and I had to evaluate why. One thing that I knew was that I liked working on my own website, and there were a couple of projects that I had done that I enjoyed, but then there were some that weren’t. So I had to look. What were the reasons? The majority of it, 90% of it, had to do with the fact that it took so long to get the content. The details of what I needed to do on the website took a long time, or I was getting it in parts. At one point I thought, oh, okay, I can handle it. I can get it in parts. But it depends on what the parts are.
So I evaluated. It’s not that I don’t like doing this. It’s how I’m getting the information, and it was on me. I had to communicate better to my clients how to send me the information – the format that worked best. The format that worked best, depending on what the project was, I would either need all the content to start, or a certain chunk if they all were related to each other.
Then have the pages in a Word document. So if there is a change for About page, About page has it’s own document. If there’s a page for Services, Services has it’s own document. That made it easier. For me, it was organized instead of some is in email, some is over here, you know, it was organized. Once I communicated that, it was easy. People can follow that.
Same for you. People can follow how you want them to send it to you. Keep in mind, they may have never worked with a virtual assistant before, or they may have never outsourced this particular task before, so they don’t know. The more you can help them, the better. Your evaluation at the beginning of the quarter is going to be very helpful for your clients and for yourself.
6) The last thing is language. That’s what you’ve been telling yourself, what you’ve been telling other people, what you’ve been writing and posting, whether it’s on your business page or your personal profile. The words that we say about ourselves and others, whether it’s related to our business or personal life, always self-check.
I see what people write sometimes about their businesses or themselves, and when I cringe, it’s usually a time when they’re saying things that they can’t do or what they’re not good at, or their situation. It makes me cringe, because we can only see what we can see. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next second. So to label something as not working, to label ourselves as not being able to do something, to say that there’s not enough of something, or there’s a lack of something, or you can’t afford something, I mean, you don’t even know what is going to happen in the last second. How can you say that? You don’t know. We only see what we can see.
We’ve got to start putting positive spins on things.
We’ve got to start putting a positive spin on things and see things through God’s eyes. I recognize everybody listening to the podcast may not be a Christian, may not believe in Jesus Christ. I get that. But we can all put a positive spin on things, regardless of your situation right now. Whether it’s good or bad, because what’s up goes down, and what’d down goes up, right? We have ebbs and flows, highs and lows. So we can’t gauge it by what’s going on right now, right? But just have faith and believe in you and what you’re capable of, and speak those things in a way that says, “I believe in what I’m capable of. I have faith in what I can do.” Communicate that. Say that.
You know, if you’re having a bad day, things aren’t going right, it sucks; you don’t have to tell anybody. You don’t have to tell anybody. Better yet, think about somebody that’s in a worse off situation than you are, because there’s always somebody in a worse off situation.
I live in Charlotte, North Carolina and our city is in turmoil right now. When I walk outside my door, it’s not something that I can see. It’s something I can feel. We’re not the first. We won’t be the last. I’m sure you guys have seen it all on the news, all this stuff, and it’s just – I don’t know. I’ve never felt like this before, and I don’t know. I don’t know. We just have to stay prayerful. All of us. The World. I just pray for peace and love and justice and truth, and you’ll see that on my Facebook page, and for everybody to come together in unity.
The wonderful thing about being a virtual assistant business owner is that you have the opportunity to work with everybody from all different nationalities, from different countries. Because we work online, we have that opportunity to work with everybody. In a corporate job, it may just be limited to the people in that area or wherever the company is if they’re in different locations.
But for us, we have access to the world, and what we do in our business, how we treat people, we can change it. We can change it in our area, meaning our virtual assistant business area, the people that we come in contact with. We will not come in contact with every single person in the world, but we’ll come in contact with people who are parts of the world. If I do my part, and you do your part, somebody else does their part and on and on, it’s like a quilt. All the pieces connect in some way for us to be unified.
Oh, I hope that’s not too corny, but if it is, it’s corny, whatever. [Laughs] If we were having coffee at my house today, that’s what I would be telling you. Let me share this other thing and then I’m just going to end the podcast. I don’t want to get emotional on the podcast.
You guys know, you’ve heard me talked about selling different things in direct sales. I just want to share this one thing because it’s something that happened this week, and it goes along with when you feel like you’re in a lull or a low or you can’t do it, you know, think about somebody else who is in a worse off situation, but they’re still pushing.
There was a young lady, and I won’t give her name. A part of one of the direct sales companies that I have a business with, and she also was a consultant. She had ALS, which we know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease. You can look it up. My understanding is that it slowly shuts down your body.
For a while, when I first learned of her, she was on a respirator and the only function that she had really was her eyes. She was running her direct sales business with her eyes. She had a special computer and she was able to, I guess, look at the letters and somehow the computer knew. I don’t know all of the ins and outs of that. But she would run Facebook parties with her eyes from her bed because she had this terminal debilitating disease that she fought, and she’d do her parties.
I only knew her through Facebook, but whenever I felt like it’s too much, I can’t do it, I’ll think about her. Well, this week, she took her last breath this week. She passed away this week, and her husband posted on the Facebook page that she didn’t want anybody to mourn her loss, but celebrate her life. I won’t ever forget her story or her.
I share that with you so that you will always know you can do it. It doesn’t matter what you have. If all you have is your eyes, you can fulfill God’s purpose. You don’t know whose life you touch because of what you do, in your business, outside of your business, just a simple post on Facebook. You don’t know. You don’t know, but keep pushing.
Keep moving. Keep going forward and end this quarter strong.
I didn’t mean for this episode to end on an emotional note, but hey, I give it to you live. You get where I’m feeling. I love you and appreciate you for listening to this episode. Go forth with your business. You know we’ll have the show notes so you can read all the stuff that I said.
Have a wonderful, fabulous, and profitable week.
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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