FoVA Archives :: From the Desk of Janet BarclayFrom the Desk of Janet Barclay

The Wonderful World of WordPress

Categories: Blogging Bits, VA Vitals, Wonderful WordPress

Tags : Forum on Virtual Assistance, FoVA, frances palaschuk, WordPress

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It’s been many weeks since FoVA, and I just realized I haven’t told you about the last workshop I attended! I know quite a bit about WordPress, but I want to learn as much as I can, so I was pretty thrilled to learn that Frances Palaschuk was going to be doing a workshop on WordPress.

I knew from following her on Twitter that Frances would have lots of resources to share, and I was not disappointed. Here are a few of her recommendations:

Studiopress for professional WordPress themes
Jing for creating screencasts which can be used to demonstrate tasks to clients who are visual learners
123RF for royalty-free stock photos
Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet
Google Webmaster tools, which I knew a little about, but learned even more

I also learned that when creating websites (as opposed to blogs) using WordPress, it’s better to use a premium theme (as I did for the Golden Horseshoe Virtual Assistants Group and Maestro Quality sites), because most free themes are more suited to blogs. Furthermore, when using free themes that are not listed on WordPress.org, it’s important to watch for hidden ads which may lead to “bad neighbourhoods.”

Perhaps most valuable of all were copies of Frances’ Ultimate Blog Planning Workbook and WordPress Site Design checklist, which have already been very useful.

All in all, FoVA was a wonderful experience and I am so glad I went. If you avoid industry conferences because you don’t understand the benefit of networking with and learning from your peers, I urge you to reconsider – you just don’t know what you’re missing! For more on that subject, read The ROI of Attending a Conference.

Developing Standard Operating Procedures

Categories: Success Strategies, VA Vitals

Tags : Forum on Virtual Assistance, FoVA, SOP, standard operating procedure

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Kristi Pavlik - The Systems Chick According to Wikipedia, a standard operating procedure is “a set of instructions having the force of a directive, covering those features of operations that lend themselves to a definite or standardized procedure without loss of effectiveness.” Exciting stuff, eh? Maybe not, but it’s something we need to know about.

It’s been two years since I took a teleclass with Yvonne Weld, author of The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Thriving Business, and learned that standard operating procedures, or SOP, are just as important for one-person, home-based businesses as they are for large organizations. Even if you are the only person carrying out the work, if you don’t document it, how do you know you’ll do it the same way each and every time, ensuring consistency of service? And how will you remember how to do it if several months go by before you do that particular task again? Most importantly, how will someone else know what has to happen in the event that you’re unable to work?

Creating standard operating procedures for my business has been on my “someday list” ever since I took that teleclass, and now that there are two of us, it has become increasingly important to have a procedures manual. For that reason, when I saw that one of the workshops at the recent Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) was Standard Operating Procedures – the Who, What, Where & Why you should have one for your Virtual Business, I was eager to attend.

The workshop was facilitated by Kristi Pavlik, who is known in VA circles as the Systems Chick. (Kristi appears in the above photo with her very own Systems Chick which was presented to her at FoVA.) She explained that an SOP has two main components: a system, which is the overall picture, and the process documents, which provide the specific instructions for each task.

To illustrate a system, Kristi supplied us with a copy of the mind map she uses for her business. The business name goes in the middle, and each broad area of the business goes in a bubble around it. Next to each bubble is a list of specific activities related to that business area. Each bubble then gets its own mind map. As I began to fill mine out, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it actually was. Furthermore, I realized that creating a procedures manual for my business is not all that different than the procedures manuals I created in my past jobs.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Categories: Marketing Methods, VA Vitals

Tags : Forum on Virtual Assistance, FoVA, Jeannine Clontz, marketing plan

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Business Growth The second workshop I attended at the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) was Creating a Marketing Budget & Plan to Help Your Business Grow. The session was presented by Jeannine Clontz, the recipient of this year’s Thomas Leonard International Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award.

A week or so prior to the conference, I received a marketing budget worksheet which I was to fill out before attending, so I suspected this wasn’t going to be one of those sessions where you just sit and listen to the speaker – and I was right. In fact, the budget was only one of seven sections of the worksheet which we completed with Jeannine’s guidance. The others were:

Developing your Ideal Client Profile
Locating your Target Market
Listing what problems our prospects have and how we can solve them
Listing the different marketing media we will use
Creating a detailed plan for each medium
Drafting response e-mails for different scenarios

The whole exercise was quite eye-opening, and I was able to come up with some great new ideas as well as expanding on those I already had.

Since having a documented plan makes it a lot easier to make decisions when various marketing opportunities arise and to respond to inquiries on a timely basis, it tied in very nicely with the workshop on Standard Operating Procedures which I attended next, and which I’ll blog about in an upcoming post.

In addition to the exercises, some of the interesting things Jeannine covered in the workshop were:

You should plan to spend 5 to 10% of your sales goal on marketing.
The best testimonials describe measurable results.
Most clients prefer to pay for individual services or packages rather than an hourly rate, so they’ll know exactly what they’re getting and how much it will cost.

To learn how to create your own marketing plan and lots more about starting and growing a home-based business, check out Jeannine’s book, Enterpreneurial Freedom.

Exploring Tolerations, Needs and Values

Categories: Motivational Moments, VA Vitals

Tags : Forum on Virtual Assistance, FoVA, law of attraction, Mary-Lou Ashton, needs, tolerations, values

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freedom As promised last week, today I begin sharing some of the valuable information I learned at the recent Forum on Virtual Assistance. My first workshop was with Mary-Lou Ashton, a VA coach and trainer who has been part of the industry in Canada since 1997. Her session, Your Professional & Personal Foundation: Tolerations, Needs and Values, was about identifying the little things we put up with in our lives that may not seem like a big deal, but can drain us of our energy and hinder our productivity.

The workshop consisted of a series of exercises designed to help us explore those issues, which I’ll describe below. I hope you won’t mind that I’m not sharing my answers, but I’m sure you can appreciate that a lot of it is very personal in nature and not something I’d care to publish online.

In the first exercise, we each made a list of things we are tolerating. It’s quite surprising how many things you can identify when you start to think about them in this way, and in many cases, they are things that can be easily rectified. For example, I often get frustrated with my computer not running as fast as I’d like. I realized not long after buying it that I should have requested more RAM, but nearly two years later I still haven’t got around to doing anything about it. That’s an easy fix!

From our list, we had to identify the toleration that would have the biggest payout if we found a way to deal with it, instead of continuing to tolerate it. Lastly, we developed a plan to address the toleration, including a completion date.

This exercise was very eye-opening, but it was just the beginning!

FoVA 2009 in Review

Categories: VA Vitals

Tags : Forum on Virtual Assistance, FoVA

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Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA). Being my first live face-to-face conference since I went to the POC Conference in 2006, I’d forgotten what a thrill it is to be surrounded by others with similar interests! An even bigger thrill was finally meeting some of the VAs I’ve come to know online, including Kathy Colaiacovo from Nova Scotia and Tracey d’Aviero from Ottawa, shown with me in the photo.

Janet Barclay, Kathy Colaiacovo and Tracey d'Aviero

Barb Lang did an awesome job of organizing the event, which was held at the Marriott Fallsview in Niagara Falls. The food was delicious and the dining room and meeting rooms all overlooked the Falls. Although I’ve been visiting the Falls since I was too young to remember, I’ve never seen them from that particular vantage point, and it was just wonderful.

All of that was great, but what was even better was the quality of the workshops. Every single one offered not just interesting information, but valuable worksheets that I can use to enhance my business, now that I’m back in my office.

Much of what I learned will also be of benefit to you, regardless of the nature of your business, so I plan to share some of it with you in future posts. Here is a list of the sessions I attended, so you’ll know what you have to look forward to:

Your Professional & Personal Foundation: Tolerations, Needs and Values, with Mary Lou Ashton
Helping Your Business Grow by Creating a Marketing Plan, with Jeannine Clontz (winner of this year’s Thomas Leonard Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award)
Standard Operating Procedures – the Who, What, Where & Why, with Kristi Pavlik
Creating Websites Using WordPress, with Frances Palaschuk

There was also a Lunch & Learn session on Personality Type and Organizing Style, which I heard was pretty good.