Thoughts by Your Virtual Ally

Dropbox - file sharing, synchronising and backup

I have been using a wonderful tool for the past few years called Dropbox. Dropbox is a file sharing, synchronising and backup tool.

Why is it so perfect for me? Well it fits my requirements for 3 main reasons:

1. There is an application and it is also web-based, allowing offline and online access
2. It is dual platform, so I am able to work from both my MAC laptop and my PC desktop
3. It works so simplistically that it functions without much assistance

Setup

To setup your Dropbox account you just need to go to http://www.getdropbox.com and click the Dropbox button at the bottom of the page. You are able to setup a fully-functioning 2GB free account with no time limitation, by just installing the application on your computer.

So it is an online backup of your files, but what makes it so special?

1.  Dropbox instantaneously synchronises whenever a file or folder is updated, added or deleted
2. You can install your Dropbox account on as many machines as you want and have access to the same files on all machines
3. You can share as many or as few Dropbox folders, with as many people as you wish
4. All your files and folders are secure.  
5. When you share a folder or file, the recipient can only see the folder or file that you have shared with them

Access

You can access your account online by going to the right-hand corner of the home page and enter your login details.

To access your Dropbox on your machine is simple. Either through your harddrive – in MAC just go to your home drive which is usually referenced by your name and you will see the Dropbox folder there or in PC just go to My Documents and the folder is called My Dropbox, or the next option is to click on the Dropbox icon that is on the top-right hand side of the MAC screen and bottom left-hand side (in the toolbar) of your Windows PC.

Sharing Files

One of the main reasons of accessing your online Dropbox account is when you want to send a share invite to a folder.  There is a sharing tab or you can just click on the dropdown arrow associated with the file and send a share invite from there.

To be able to send a share invite all that is required is the recipients’ email address. The recipient will get an invite via email and just need to click through to download the application and acknowledge that they want to accept the share invite. N.B. When accepting a share invite, Dropbox automatically sets up a free 2GB fully-functioning account for the recipient and then adds the share folder to this account, but the recipient now also has their own Dropbox account that is for their exclusive use and the share folder has been added to this account.

When viewing your account either in the online or offline version you can quickly see which files and folders are shared or not, as the share folders have a figurine (or several depending on the platform) and a folder that is not shared just looks like a normal folder.

Synchronisation

You will see that as soon as you add, edit or delete a new file or folder, the Dropbox icon will have a blue revolving circle in the corner to show that files are synchronising. Depending on the size of the file or folder the synchronisation happens instantly, but nonetheless you will be clear when this has finished because you will see a green tick at the bottom of the folder when complete.

 

Twitter Tips for the Small Business

You know I just love talking and learning new small business marketing techniques, and this past year it has nearly all been about social networking.  I have wrote several articles myself on the subject, after all regardless of how you think and feel about it, the knowledge is always really useful.

Well I came across this great free twitter tips ebook and just had to share the blog post (with ebook contained within) with you.  What a fantastic idea!  Ask the people who know – the tweeters – their best tips of how to use the tool.  What a fantastic idea!!

Don’t waste a moment, skip on over to this article and get your free twitter tips ebook.

Then come back here and let me know what you think about it.  Once I have read through I will add an addendum of my thoughts.

Self Publisher Book Marketing

I am in the process of helping one of my clients increase his book sales. He is a prolific author and has lots of books on varying subjects on sale. So my job has been to help him improve his sales. He is listed on Amazon, mobipocket, and lulu, so we have a good presence spread across many sales points. He also has his own website and separate pages for each of his books. Here are a few ideas that we have started with that have helped to build his book sales:

1) We took the approach that each book page on his website was like a typical sales page that internet marketers use to sell their products. So we set it out as a narrow page outlining the benefits of the book, purchase options, and reader’s testimonials. This originally improved sales.

2) Amazon testimonials. This was my client’s idea. He asked people to write testimonials on his book at any online book store, especially Amazon. They get a free copy of the book and he just asks them to write their honest opinion. The thing is you gotta have faith in your product that people will find it good, and my client has this faith. This has worked exceptionally well, because we had many people offer to write a testimonial and most (although not all) of the testimonials were positive. For this endeavour my client has many testimonials to use and a 4+ rating in Amazon.

3) Advertise with competitors!!! What I hear you exclaim, but honestly it works. You see what I found is that we have many established websites that offer competitive products that are identical. These websites also had advertising space on their website or in their ezine. I took a chance and approached them. To be honest I thought they would reject their product because it rivaled their own, but amazingly they said yes. When we advertised with these companies we were able to double our sales.

I am still looking and investigating further ways to build book sales. These ones above achieved nearly immediate results. I’ll keep you updated as we come up with more ideas that achieve results.

Ezine Services – iContact and EmailBrain

There are so many ezine services available, but I definitely think that the best ones to use are those that offer a bit more than the rest or offer some slightly unique. In my quest for services I have come across 2 services that I believe offer something different, something more.

iContact

iContact firstly has a great pricing structure. $9.95 a month makes the pricing very competitive. But more than this iContact has:

1) A survey creation facility. Why is this great? Because it is always good business to run surveys with your clients and prospects. By crafting great questions that finds out clients’ wants and needs allows the user to create tailored made products.

2) A public newsletter archive. This is fantastic and can be used in several ways in particular to offer new sign-ups access to past newsletters, or prospects a sampling of old newsletters to encourage them to sign-up.

3) An autoresponder facility. Again another fantastic add-on that allows the user to actually run an online course for a particular sign-up group.

Really I am most impressed with iContact’s range of services. I give this email service a WOW and a half.

EmailBrain

EmailBrain also has a great pricing structure at $9.95 a month that allows a massive 2000 emails to be sent out. This is a huge amount of emails and far better than most email services. The extras include:

1) An add-on feature of non-expiring credits. Simply explained a user can pay for extra credits (emails) that never run out. This can be great for one off campaigns.

2) Trigger autoresponder feature. Autoresponders that are triggered by specific actions. Someone purchases an item, requests a particular product, or even makes a query. All of these can have a personalized trigger email that is sent to them immediately or 24 hours later.

3) Microsites, which allow the user to store past newsletters. But they can be more than this and can be linked to a custom URL with a specific landing page. Their microsite facility opens up a doorway to use in many ways to market or showcase products and services.

4) Integrate with Google Analytics. This feature provides specific email and offer incentive tracking. This allows the user to compare all marketing efforts including their email campaigns and modify them to get the best results.

5) SMS messaging service similar to sending out emails, but using mobile phones as a way of offering products and keeping in touch with clients.

Again such an impressive array of services means that EmailBrain practically knocks most of its competitors out of the water in my opinion. EmailBrain gets a double WOW from me. In my opinion the only thing that is missing is a survey facility, but the EmailBrain team is so progressive that I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns up soon and there are free survey services out there, so in total they really have picked up the best services yet.

Car Rental Discounts

Renting cars on your client’s behalf is not as easy as it seems. One of my client’s has a corporate account with Avis called the “Chairman’s Club” and we always use this to rent his cars. Not only does he get a good discount but we also a high level car at a cheap rate. So it is all good right? You would think so!

The Quirk

My client is based in US, and the Chairman’s Club discount is not available outside of his resident country. So even though Avis is an international company their discount schemes are only nationwide based on the country your client is in.

On top of this I found out that because my client was outside of his country it was also mandatory that his rental came with collision damage cover, and we had a limited mileage limit of 1,250kim and a charge for each km after that.

The Workaround

Do not use a corporate discount outside of your client’s country. First of all it does not reap any benefits and your client is also hit with the additional collision damage fees. We were able to book a car without the corporate discount and it was cheaper for my client. Collision damage was an optional extra, and we had unlimited mileage.

Tip: My client also found out that his credit card provided collision damage for rental cars in Europe (where he was travelling) so he didn’t even need to stump up for this.

1 Shopping Cart Broadcasts

I love 1 Shopping Cart (let’s call it 1SC) because it is a catch-all service. But of course when a service tries to do too much it obviously fails somewhat in certain areas. My gripe today is about the broadcasting facility.

In general the broadcasting facility is a great one, because you can choose who it is from. You can choose whether to send out just a text email or a text and html email,and you can also choose which autoresponder to send it to or the entire database – pretty cool.

The Quirk

My gripe is that although you can choose the day that the broadcast goes out, it is not possible to choose the time. All broadcasts go out on midnight EST (or thereabouts) on the day that it is scheduled for. So for those of us in England this is 5am in our morning, and that is not great.

The Quirk’s Workaround

So what I tend to do is set-up my broadcasts and save them as drafts. I run tests broadcasts to my various email addresses to ensure that it all works the way I want it to and then on the day and at the rough time that I want the broadcast to go out, I go into 1SC and send it out. Of course this means that ongoing client communication cannot be automatic, but that is the best I have come up with.

I can see why some people would use Aweber or some other dedicated autoresponder/ezine service to be able to have more control over this aspect, but for me the issue is not big enough to warrant signing up to another service. But for this kind of decision I always defer to my clients.

Have you found a better way to deal with the broadcasting facility in 1SC?

VA Blog Getting Started

I wasn't sure how I was going to start today.

I so desperately wanted to set up a blog and at the same time didn't want to sound geekish, boring, over-exited - blah, blah, blah - Just be cool - you know!!! So I thought - hey ho just get on with it.

My name is Petra Boucher and I am a Virtual Assistant.  Not any Virtual Assistant mind you!! A part of the cream of the crop group of Assistu Virtual Assistants.  Why do we consider ourselves to be top brass?  Well because we trained hard to graduate with Assistu and then became part of a fantastic supportive community.  We qualify to become certified professionals and to requalify we must continually educate and develop our skills.  You don't just fall into or somehow become an Assistu VA.  You make a considered, deliberate and, definately in my case, enthusiastic choice to be a part of this group.  From my perspective our particular breed of VA consist of those who take immense pride in their business and are prepared to invest so that they can provide an outstanding, ever-evolving, limitless service.  Yes I may be gushing, but we do we aim high and I love it.

Because we aim high for ourselves we also aim high in the type of client that we want to work with.  Now, of course, here I can only talk for me and my personal wishes, so let me start to describe my ideal client.  Someone who:

• Is going for big goals and realises that they need fantastic, NO not mediocre and therefore A GUARANTEED NO not cheap, support to achieve those goals
• Sees their Virtual Assistant as a business partner (always must stress here not in the legal sense) and not an employee
• Eagerly wants to work in an equal working partnership and see what grows from there
• Is open to new ideas and suggestions
• Is enthusiastic about their business and what they do

I stop there because I think I have named my top five criteria.  I could really list forever but I try to be open in my approach and only look for core requirements that to me would make a fantastic working relationship.

I suppose I need to qualify the A GUARANTEED NO not cheap comment from above.  All businesses have budget constraints.  They have to, that is just good business sense.  I believe and agree with budgeting how much is spent on all and any overhead. But when a client wants fantastic, top-notch, 100% support that is going to allow them to reach for their dreams.  Then why oh, why on do they insist, and in many cases aggressively negotiate, to pay a mediocre salary and then complain about the service their assistant provides. 

IMHO if you are only want to pay a mediocre salary to an assistant then you are going to have 1 of 3 results:

1. Mediocre salary = mediocre service.  Shall I say out loud here FULL STOP
2. An able assistant who is:

at best resentful = a mediocre service OR;

at worst pissed-off as hell = a bad service which if they are smart, you may not notice, but your customers will

1. A fantastic assistant who is happy and provides an outstanding service.  This is rare and I say hold onto him or her for your dear life.  And, I say, "Shame on you increase their fee".  Because if I ever meet them I will whisper rebellious ideas of self-worth, impart moxieful thoughts and insight empowering changes.

Well it looks like I have started off one of the themes of my blog.  The nuances of building a successful VA practice.  I have already gathered many funny, dark and just plain ridiculous stories to share.  I do know that I also want to use my blog to educate, so I will be providing tips and techniques for software use and ideas for online services.  And you know what I suppose anything else that may takes my fancy.

It's been real!!!!