A virtual assistant can initially set up a membership site on WordPress for you and then connect the website with management software . There are many membership management programmes but WishList is powerful and easy to use, integrating easily with a WordPress site. Wishlist enables multi-level access and moving of members between levels. The flexibility also manages free, trial or paid membership. Or even, a combination of all three!

They can create any number of membership levels you choose and connect the software to a product, shopping cart or auto-responder.

Virtual support can send ‘thank you’ notes, acknowledgements and website addresses via the membership management programme.

A VA can provide customer support to existing members while helping new members access the membership area.

They can place regular content updates to the area, providing members with a calendar of scheduled events, new information and products.

Virtual help can assist you with ideas on how to acquire and increase the membership.

A VA can ask present members for testimonials to use in future marketing events that you intend to produce.

Virtual support can record audio for you, for teleclasses, webinars and marketing audio messages and then edit the audio files to eliminate unnecessary background noise. They can add music to your audio files, providing intro/outro for your final broadcast.

When the file is finished a virtual assistant can post your audio in forums and other relevant places online.

In the same way, virtual support can help you to create videos, edit and add intro/outro for the final take. This can then be placed on the appropriate channels (e.g.YouTube, Vimeo). They can than edit your profile, description and keywords to help make the video easily found by the search engines.
Are you thinking of setting up a membership site? If so, we can help, email us or speak to Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

How a VA can help - Shopping Cart Maintenance

If you have decided that you would like a shopping cart on your site to earn a passive income a virtual assistant can do all the jobs from the initial installation through all the integral parts needed to run an efficient system. Creation of autoresponders in your shopping cart for all your products, and various types of sign ups, webinar or teleclass a va can integrate into the system.

A virtual assistant can customise your cart with your logo, address and contact details and link your merchant account too.

By categorising product types, setting up shipping tables and creating coupon offers, your virtual assistant can run regular reports which will identify the products that have generated the most revenue for your business. This will allow you to tweak coupons or offers and offer other deals to expand their appeal to your customers.

Order forms can be customised for various products, making it easy for your customers to find related products. Your virtual support can review recurring orders and check everything is running smoothly (cancelling orders or refunding when necessary).

For your shopping cart,your virtual assistant can draft and create autoresponders, whether it is for products or webinar, and then help to decide on the timing of autoresponders.

Your support can create and place sign up forms on your website and ensure tracking links are set up within them, so that reports, when reviewed regularly, will show the parts that are working, enabling changes to be made to pages and content, if needs be.

Need to run a webinar?

Virtual support can help create a master plan for your webinar, drafting correspondence for the broadcast, announcements , reminders and follow up emails. Information will include date/time, time zones, topic to be covered and webinar protocol to be used.

A VA can set up a webinar recording so that after the event recordings can be sent to attendees (and others that had signed up but couldn’t attend, either because of the webinar being full or other commitments.)

They can answer enquiries from your audience and advertise the webinar on various social media platform. If the broadcast is a joint venture, your support can contact them to promote, together with ensuring that all communications advertise your webinar.

Before the webinar begins your va can provide you with details of numbers attending, summary of topics, questions that attendees have emailed that can be addressed during the webinar and recording details. After the event your assistant can post the webinar recording to your website, follow up with attendees, send audio recordings to people who were unable to attend, completing the cycle and build a database from the event for your newsletter,ezine or next event.

For more help or advise, email us here, or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594

Google are permanently changing it’s search algorithm and this year intends to make as many as 550 changes. A direct result of a recent change has seen the Google rankings of some large websites plummet. Ezinearticles.com, Suite101.com and hubpages.com losing on average around 90% visibility.
For the small business this is a rather disconcerting figure and things are hard enough getting ranked on Google without the hassle of staying abreast of Google’s constant changes. For those publishing high-quality content that people want to share the changes should not be of concern.
Improvements by Google are a constant desire to provide high quality and relevant search results for the user. This recent change was an attempt to remove websites that are content farms, e.g. sites that are high-volume but low quality in content and those trying to play the system. After the changes a few sites got caught in the net that didn’t deserve to be there.

How to stay ahead of the game

Google’s aim is that an initial search by a user will provide the information they are looking for. To improve SEO and search engine rankings, look at you site from a users perspective and check that you are providing the best and most relevant information for a given search term. If not then change things so that it works for your user.

Content -it’s about quality not quantity. Using blogs to increase the number of pages indexed by Google achieves a higher ranking but ensure high quality content on all pages. Don’t keyword stuff, publishing text that is optimised for keywords. A blog is still a great way to rise in the search engine rankings and an efficient way to add high-quality information to a website. If you have a low ranking, check your pages and if some appear to be lacking in good content, remove them from your site and check your ranking after removal.

Again its quality over quantity but this time it’s in relation to links. Google have always liked links and by generating a high number of incoming links, which point to a specific web page, it is a way of moving a site up the ranking list. As Google aim for higher quality content in websites, links are not effective and if overdone it can be detrimental to ranking. Good news for the small website designer is the lack of a need to generate a multitude of links to sometimes substandard content they can now concentrate on providing quality instead of quantity.
Guest posts will generate high-quality links and links supported by strong keywords will benefit websites. One downside of the new Google update is that previously press releases generated good back-links but these links are not as valuable now. However, a well-written press release can be very effective if picked up by a major publication or journalist.

Social media, social, social!
Google have introduced a +1 button to join the social media,sharing and search world. It’s there for you to share with friends sites you have found interesting or useful, places you like and provides users with the ability to block sites. All the more reason to keep you content high-quality.

Let people know you are there Tell Google about yourself so that users can find you easily. With good content in place make sure that meta titles and descriptions are in line with your content . Making these parts differ widely, will hurt your rankings likewise keyword stuffing has negative results. Use the SERP (the short paragraph that shows in search results) wisely and write a clear description so people are curious to learn more.
Google’s intentions are to provide the most original and relevant results and duplicate content is not shown. Users can view omitted results but in most cases they are ignored. If your content quality is high and original this shouldn’t be of concern. Duplication of content occurs when RSS feeds are directly published from other websites and content is copied, resulting in lower rankings and removal from search results.

Advertising – Google looks at sites with too much advertising and rates them as low-quality or spammers and lowers their ranking accordingly. Too many adverts and any content you do have may appear lower on you page (where people can’t be bothered to scroll to if their attention isn’t gripped in the beginning) or the view obstructed.
Google continue to change things so that the user has the best possible experience and if your content is of quality rather than quantity and you use the tips above, you should rank well in the search engines.

Can we help? Email us or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

A virtual assistant can really help you when it comes to customer support and admin, relieving you of the worry of dealing with day-to-day jobs. They can provide customer support in many areas leaving you free to concentrate on building your business.

They can handle voicemail messages and respond to enquiries where they are able and provide you with details when necessary. When handling phone calls a VA can take notes of important items raised and pass this information on to you.

Customer support in the form of setting up billing, and scheduling appointments are easily dealt with, together with assisting with your group membership.

Support can be set up an online calendar so appointments can be scheduled with you, informing you of time, date, place and who the meeting is with. You can then be fully prepared for an appointment.

With an online calendar in place birthday cards (and any other card) can be sent out for you. Never miss that birthday or anniversary again! You can then be reminded of important dates and deadlines.

Reports of monthly sales and expenses can be correalated for you, so at a glance, you can see how the business is running.

Virtual support can put in place all manner of online systems, an online calendar, membership software and shopping cart are all within their remit, building your online presence without the need for you to learn all manner of programmes which are required to manage them.

They can offer help on how to organise document folders and your email, screen email to reduce time wasted on things that your assistant can handle, sending you only the email that you need to see and action.

A VA can set up recurring payments and pay your bills online. They can manage projects and tasks offering an all round support for your business.

Just recently I had cause to use an online plant company and thought what a grand opportunity it would have been for them to have introduced a virtual support team into the business to have helped handle customer enquiries during what is obviously a frantic time of the year for them. They only need the extra assistance for a small period of time during the year and a virtual assistant could have helped without the need to employ extra staff, and the time would have been billed accordingly. Customers need to have a response within 24 hours to any enquiry they make and not be told that the answer will take four days! One of the advantages of using virtual support, you only pay for the hours worked, reducing your wage bill considerably and keeping your customers happy with a timely response.

To find out more of how we can help in your business, email us or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

Are you thinking of sending out a newsletter to your subscribers? Or do you have various projects that you would like to see published on line? A virtual assistant can help you with many aspects of the procedure and get you published and circulated. There are any number of programmes available to broadcast your newsletter, and your support team can help you get your words into print.

The various social media platforms will require updating and notifying of your latest ‘publication’. Postings to Digg,  StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy and others or on a system like Onlywire, will broadcast your newsletter to a wider audience.

We can help you get published. Do you need to know more? Please email us or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.