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Referenced Links:
- Virtual Assistant Survey
- Facebook Live Show Announcement
- How To Submit an iTunes Review
- Pat Flynn Episode
In Words:
Hi! You’re listening to episode number 68. I’ve got a variety of things to talk about in this episode. Let’s just get into the show.
On the last episode there was a survey. Did you see the survey? Did you get to fill out the survey? Okay, if you haven’t filled out the survey, we’re going to include the survey again in the show notes for this week as well because I want to make sure that I am serving you well and speaking on things that you are interested in. So that’ll be linked up in the show notes.
The episode before that, I talked about – it might have been last episode. You know I’ve been on vacation for the past couple of weeks, so I’m not really sure. One of those two episodes, I talked about Facebook Live and that I hadn’t tried the software that allows you to share your screen and your webcam and be on Facebook Live. It’s free software that lets you do that. I got a chance to play with that this week and it’s awesome.
You will see me using that on the new Facebook Live show on my Facebook page. If you follow me on Facebook then you’ve seen my little announcement already, but it’s going to be called Tips & Tech with Tiffany. I will be sharing behind the scenes of what happens with Virtual Hired Hand, what I do for my own business, not in serving clients, because I like to keep that stuff confidential, who my clients are confidential, what I do for them confidential, you know, specifics. I wouldn’t dare show behind the scenes of doing things for them.
But I want to show you how I do things for Virtual Hired Hand, getting the podcast together, doing social media, the things I do from my phone. I think that will be fun and hopefully it will cause you to start doing things more on your end, and maybe you have some tech questions for me. I don’t know.
The Facebook Live show is going to be for everybody – virtual assistant business owners as well as business owners who outsource to virtual assistants.
That’s going to be cool. It doesn’t affect the podcast at all. The podcast will be the same, all that good stuff. It will still be just our hangout for virtual assistant business owners. But I want to make sure you come check out the Facebook Live show because I will get a little techie on you and I know that’ll help.
The tips part comes in is in showing people how they can utilize my tech information and use that with their virtual assistant. Like how I do my social media and how I communicate with my team, all that good stuff. We’ve got it down pretty smooth. Every week things get better and better. Usually the glitches are with me trying to figure out – I’m always testing things. My team is phenomenal. But me, I’m always testing things.
Then staying on a strict schedule. I have them to tell me their deadline so that I can stay on a strict schedule. It keeps everything going regular, and so I’m happy with that. The podcast has been going regular. Instagram and Twitter have been going regular, so that has been great.
But anyway, I will link up the post that I posted so you can at least see the screenshot of a little behind the scenes. The show goes live the day after Labor Day. September 7th, we’ll go live. Let me check my calendar. I’m pretty certain it’s September 7th. Yep, September 7th at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Yay! I’m excited. I can’t wait. I came to the realization that I love audio and video, just talking.
I grew up an only child. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that on the podcast. But I did, and one of the things about being an only child is you play by yourself a lot and you end up making up games and talking to yourself a lot. I would line up stuffed animals and dolls. I’d teach them. I’d write on the chalkboard. I mean, that was so fun to me is to teach them.
A little secret, I did that, I would say, until the 10th grade. Not because I was playing, you know, imaginary friend and playing school, but I found that it also helped me remember information for the test. If I could teach it, then I could remember it and be ready for tests. 11th and 12th grade, I don’t remember taking tests in 11th-12th grade. I’m not sure how that went, but I know for sure it went up to 10th grade.
When I’m doing podcast and I’m doing videos, it’s easy to imagine you sitting right in front of me because I’ve been doing that all my life. I can even remember sitting in front of the mirror in the bathroom and imagining that I was speaking and moving my hands. You know how speakers move their hands. You have speaker hands where you move them. Now that I have fingernails, I’m like, oh, speaker hands. But that looks really goofy on video, so I have to make sure that my hands aren’t flying all over the place when I do my Facebook Live shows.
Anyway, I’m excited about that and I hope you’ll come check it out, be a regular viewer. The way the Facebook Live will work, it will automatically have the replay so you’ll see it on the Facebook page. If you aren’t able to come the night of while it’s live, you’ll have the reply. You can watch it and still post your comments.
Have you been listening to the podcast for a while, or are you a new listener? I want to hear from you.
I went to iTunes. The podcast has been going on for a while. When I moved it outside of BlogTalkRadio, I don’t even know. It may have been 2014, I think, 2015. But for the longest time I listened to all of my podcasts and I check on personal podcast on Stitcher, so everything from the Stitcher app.
Funny thing is, I was playing with some other app and I was trying to see if I could pull in my music directly from my phone, but had to go through iTunes. Then I thought, well, maybe I can pull in my podcast to try to do it that way and it still didn’t work. But what it did was led me down a path where I hadn’t gone before.
I hadn’t looked at my podcast on my phone from iTunes before. I’ve seen it on the desktop, but not on mobile. What I learned – and you may know this because you’re listening to mobile. But I learned about my own podcast is that the whole article is there. You can read it directly from iTunes. That is pretty neat. I was fascinated by that.
What I also saw was this podcast has zero reviews. Aw zero reviews. Normally, I don’t get caught up into that stuff. I know you’re listening because you guys will email me. I’ll see you retweet. You’ll say something to me on Facebook. I also see the downloads in my analytics and all that stuff and there are hundreds of you out there, but there are no reviews. I thought, you know, there are probably no reviews because I have never asked. I’ve never asked you for any reviews and it’s like, well, how will they even know if I don’t ask.
So I’m asking you today to review the podcast. Not so I can be on the New and Noteworthy in iTunes, but so I can hear from you so I can know that you’re there, and so that when other virtual assistant business owners are searching for a podcast, your review will let them know if this worth my time. Is this worth me listening to, before they actually listen to it?
How many times do you go searching for a podcast and you look at the reviews first, or how many times do you go to Amazon and you’re searching a book or some other thing and you look at the reviews first? Same thing. This just helps our virtual assistant community in knowing whether or not this podcast is worth their time.
I created a video to show you how to do a review from your phone using the podcast app. It’s pretty cool. It was also the first time I did a recording from iPhone using my desktop. This week was just like, oh, I was in tech heaven this week learning all this stuff. Yes! Things that have been on my list and now I actually get to do it and have a reason for it. It’s going to all be really cool when it comes together because I can even share my phone on the Facebook Live show – share the screen.
We’re going to put the video to show you how to do an iTunes review with the show notes. The video itself is going to be right there in the show notes, so you just can hit play. It’ll be there in the midst of the show notes, make it easy for you. Anyway, post a review. Let me know your thoughts. It’s not only helping me; it’s helping other VAs in our community. I’d like to hear from you. I want to know. It’ll also help me improve or even know I’m doing things right.
Okay, I’m going down my list here. I saw this great question. An email came through. I don’t know how many of you are on Pat Flynn’s email list. Pat Flynn is one of my favorite podcasters. I listened to him way back when I first got into podcasting, even before when I thought I may do podcasting. That probably was 2009-2010 and I would listen to him. I liked his style. He just seemed normal like he could be a neighbor, a friend, a brother, I mean, it was just really cool, relaxed, and I liked that. You could tell he was really natural with his podcast.
On his email list, an email came through, and he’s like, oh, you guys can use this question. I thought this would be absolutely perfect for the podcast this week. The question is what’s the one thing you wish you knew before you started [blank] and why? Obviously, the blank for us:
What’s the one thing you wish you knew before you started your virtual assistant business and why?
So I’m making a list of things. He says the “one thing.” What is the one thing? There are lots of things, but the one thing I wish I knew before I started my virtual assistant business, I wish I knew that what I offered to clients was not average, that is wasn’t common, that people didn’t sit at home on Friday night getting excited about learning new software, or doing a podcast, or whatever the things was. That was something different and special that I could offer to my clients. Not just knowing how to do the stuff, but being able to translate to them how they could use it and how it could help them improve what they do in their business.
Most of my clients are non-techies and they need help with tech, and that’s where I come in. But I’m not just a geek or a techie or nerd, whatever people call it, which I’m cool with. I can translate it to regular plain English and why you’d want to do it this way for your business, or give options and why A or B is better than the other.
If I had known that what I was doing when I started wasn’t a common thing, that would have helped my confidence at the beginning. I also wouldn’t have been trying to do all these other things for services, and I won’t go down the list. Whatever service you could think of that a virtual assistant could provide, I’ve done it. But if I had known the value that I brought to my clients early on, at the very beginning, even before I started, I wouldn’t have been doing all that stuff. I would have been technical out of the gate.
But I was mixing it all up because, surely, you guys know about blogging and your WordPress and your hosting and your webinars and your teleseminars. What I found out was even though they may know it, they can’t do all that and the thing that they do best, the thing that they bring value to their customers. They’d probably go crazy if they tried to do all of that stuff.
That’s my one thing that I wish I knew before I started my virtual assistant business, and I’ve answered why. It would have tremendously helped with my confidence. On the low days, I wouldn’t have been thinking in the back of my mind, oh gosh, should I start back looking for work? Should I brush off my resume? Or peeking at Monster.com every now and then, you know, back then it was Monster.com. I wouldn’t have done any of that. I would’ve just been focused, smooth sailing. I made it, but that’s the answer to the question.
Anyway, we’re on episode number 68, still going strong here on the podcast. Head over to the website so that you can check out the video on how to do an iTunes review. Do a review for this podcast. Do a review for another podcast. Do both. Now you know how to do it from your phone, and I would imagine it would be the same whether you have an iPhone or an Android. You would have the podcast app.
If you have questions, you know where to find me.
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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