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February Check-in

yelena — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:00:02 +0000

Wew, another month flew by and let me tell you, I’m making some progress at building a sustainable part-time social media support business that would provide sufficient supplimentary income for my family (that’s my goal for this year).

Financially, January was very slow for me. Even though I was working on a couple of projects, they started fairly late into the month and weren’t going to be finished (and paid for) until mid-February. There was also a whole big time-crunch issue. Between all my other obligations, I started to doubt the possibility of building a part-time business.

Ok, so, fast-forward to the end of February. Some time at the beginning of the month I made a major improvement to my goal-setting process, thanks to Leo Babauta’s terrific The Power of Less book. The change was as simple as it was profound – I divided my big goal (the one in bold above, only with a $ attached) into 12 intermediate goals, each with its own $ amount.

This meant, that in February I had to make X dollars; in March – a bit more than in February; in April – a bit more than in March, etc. I specifically chose a very realistic, very achievable number for my February goal. Not only was I able to make that X amount, but, based on my Quickbooks report, I made triple the target amount! That makes me feel very positive and a lot less stressed-out. Lesson learned: small incremental goals work better than one big goal.

Now, let’s review some of my other goals for February:

1. Subscribing to 5 more interesting and relevant blogs – I ended up doing just the opposite – unsubscribing from a couple of the blogs I used to follow. I needed to declutter my Google Reader to get it ready for my new project (yes, another Elance project). I still follow quite a few blogs, but do it through one RSS feed from Alltop.

2. Commenting on blogs – here’s something I don’t understand about some blogs – if you don’t want comments, then why don’t you turn them off? It might sound astonishing, but some blogs take over a week to approve a comment. Which is still not bad compared to others who don’t approve at all because you express slight doubt about or disagree with the original post. Weird, isn’t it? Moving on…

3. Write 1 guest post – done; I guest blogged in a Lifestyle section on a local blog, North Hills Buzz.

4. Develop a solution for my terrible time crunch – hmm, still working on it, but making some progress. Right now I’m trying a new approach and tweaking it as I move along. Don’t want to write about it until I get some more evidence that it works (or doesn’t). For now, I’d like to share this Lesson Learned: choosing projects that are basically the extension of my hobbies or interests was a great way of making the most out of the limited amount of time I have for both business and pleasure.

Feel free to brag about all the good stuff or share your concerns and problems right in the comments or by e-mailing me.

February Check-in is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Part-Time Business Owners Need Not Apply

yelena — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:00:12 +0000

As I was looking for a networking group to join, I came across one that basically advised start-up and part-time business owners to look elsewhere. I can’t say I totally understand their motives, but hey, it’s their group. So I’ll just move on.

But it got me thinking – is it even possible to have a part-time business? Let’s say, to be a full-time stay-at-home mom during the day and a successful entrepreneur for a few hours each evening and maybe some weekends? And what, in a situation like this, would be a measure of success.

It didn’t help that I got an e-mail from one of the most successful women in the virtual assistance industry, Danielle Keister, aka the GrittyVA, that said

Most of them [virtual assistants] are barely scraping by and making under $10,000 a year.

I mean, here’s someone very knowledgable about all things VA, someone who is the driving force behind annual virtual assistance industry surveys, who says that even working full-time, “slaving away”, I’d be lucky to break the 10K mark. (Yes, I’m not a virtual assistant, but I do use essentially the same business model).

Then I calmed down and said to myself that $10K a year, while not much for someone working 40 hours a week is not all that bad for someone working only 10 hours a week. It is also not bad if the main goal of this someone’s business is to provide reliable supplemental income for this someone’s family.

But is it possible for a part-time business owner to reach even this modest goal? I mean, the 10 (or ideally, 20) hours each week that I can spend building my business include client (billable) work, searching for more work, selling and marketing, and personal and professional development.

Clearly, some time budgeting is in order. Thankfully, I found a well-worn copy of Susan M. Drake’s Freelancing for Dummies at a library with a whole chapter deveoted to Budgeting Your Time.

Selling - all the activities associated with getting more business. For me these include following up on leads, usually via e-mail; sending proposals to requests for bids on online freelance boards, such as Elance; social media marketing, including this blog; and occassional good old face-to-face networking. According to Susan Drake I should budget approximately 25% of my time to spend selling. With my part-time schedule of 20 hours weekly, that’d be 5 hours.

Administration – that’s all the work necessary to run my business. For me it’s primarily project tracking and invoicing. This require about 15% of my time or 3 hours each week.

Personal and professional development – networking falls under this category as well as reading, learning new skills and attending any teleconferences, etc. While the estimate varies depending on “the requirements of your profession”, I find that I spend roughly 1 hour each day (or 25% of my time) on it.

Working for clients – aha, the meat and potatoes of my business. After subtracting all of the above from my weekly 20 hours, I’m left with … 7 hours?! Wait, that’s like less than 50% of my time is spent actually making money!

Seems like I have two choices – either spend more time working for clients (pushing my part-time business into an almost full-time one) or resign myself to making almost no money. Neither one of these options sounds good. So let’s look for it from another angle:

Let’s bring time-tracking into the picture. Turns out that my administrative expenses (of time) are much lower than 15%. In fact, I spend only 1 hour or 5% of my time each week managing projects and invoicing clients. Things are looking up now with 9 hours weekly for working with clients.

Next task – re-evaluate the selling budget. Over the next month, I will keep track of time that I spend on all the selling-related activities as well as the ROI from each. Then I will eliminate the under-performing ones, replace them with the high-payoff strategies and consider how I can do those later ones more efficiently.

Part-Time Business Owners Need Not Apply is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

January Check-in

yelena — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:00:46 +0000

With all that’s been going on in January, I am seriously questioning the idea of building a part-time business. Is it really possible? How should I adjust my goals and expectations? How should I schedule tasks and manage my time?

But first, I think I ought to report on my January progress:

Just to remind you (and myself), my business goal for the first 6 months of this year is to “Create a sustainable part-time social media support business providing sufficient supplemental/second income for the household” (and yes, there is a $ assigned to this goal).

In order to achieve it by my deadline, I chose to take several steps, including marketing on-line and offline.

Step 1 – Promote through networking groups – attend 4 networking meetings each month.

I did put 4 networking meetups on my schedule, but ended up going to only one. I missed the other three because of, as they say, circumstances beyond my control – my son was sick and I stayed home with him instead of going to one of the events. The other one got cancelled (actually, the entire meetup closed down).

Finally, I chose to not go to the forth one and instead attend a meeting that resulted in substantial (and continuous) side-income totally unrelated to my OneClickVA business.

Step 2 – Increase my blog’s visibility

At present, I use my blog as part of my content writing portfolio when I present to a potential client, along with links to the various articles I wrote for other blogs and websites. And it works!

But I also decided to use it as part of my social media specialist portfolio to show how I can help other businesses build and promote their blogs. I don’t want to go by theory alone. Instead, I want to be able to back it up by solid data.

Remember how I decided to switch gears with my blog and post only once a week and use the rest of the time to look for interesting posts on other blogs and leave substantial comments? My goal is at least 3 comments each week, but in January I managed to leave only 6 comments, falling 6 short of the goal. Still, these comments brought some traffic back to my blog and, along with my HARO-related publicity from last year, made a sizeable improvement in my blog stats.

Almost forgot to mention, but I did a guest post on a local blog, North Hills Buzz, and was invited to be one of their regular freelance contributors. This opportunity came through Twitter.

Step 3 – Start conducting regular presentations and webinars

My original goal was to get 2 requests per month by mid-June, but I’ve already got my first 2 presentations lined up for March. Stay tuned for more on this one.

The one thing I didn’t write down in my Goalbox file was to not be afraid of second chances and to expect the unexpected. Well, I am adding both now and here’s why:

If It Didn’t Work the First Time…

When I just started as a virtual assistant, I tried getting some jobs on eBay and Guru. I was very disappointed with the results – I didn’t get a single project I bid on. And so I gave up. I was understandably disappointed with employers putting such a low value on VAs’ work and their apparent disregard for quality.

Don’t get me wrong – some of the requests on eBay still disgust me (like when an employer is looking for a “top-notch SEO guru” with a budget of “under $10/hr). But I managed to find and bid on a few projects that were more fair in terms of requests and budgets. And I improved how I respond to RFQs. As a result, I won 1 project (out of 5 I replied to) which turned out to be very enjoyable and a great learning experience to boot (if you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw me mention it).

You Just Never Know…

I must admit – I have my moments of weakness, when things don’t seem to go my way and when I have serious doubts whether I can make my business work. When it happens, I start thinking about getting a “real job” again. Sometimes I even end up sending out resumes.

That’s exactly what happened late last year. I was in a funk. Things were going nowhere (or so it seemed at the time). And then I saw a job ad for a project manager at a firm that develops online language courses and language learning software. It sounded exciting, very close to what I used to do before striking out on my own.

It didn’t work out (since the company is in NH and I’m in NC). But I got an unexpected and even more exciting offer from their chief content strategist (who, by the way, mentioned that his decision to contact me with this offer was based, in part, on this blog) – to become a regular contributor for one of their blogs. Yay!

My February goals are

to find and subscribe to 5 more interesting and relevant blogs (social media, virtual assistance, small business, time management)
to continue commenting on blogs, aiming at an average 3 comments per week
write 1 guest post (do you want me to write for your blog? drop me a line at yelena@oneclickva.com)
develop a solution for my terrible time-crunch (and of course write about it)

And how are you doing with your New Year goals? Feel free to share success stories and otherwise brag.

January Check-in is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

5 Time-Saving Twitter Tools For Busy Business Owners

yelena — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Twitter-related work, helping out some very busy business owners to organize and manage their Twitter accounts. Which, ironically, left me with very little time or energy to keep up my own tweeting - a typical case of “shoemaker’s children”.

Dealing with a social network notorious for sucking up all the free (as well as not-so-free) time while in a terrible time-crunch made me appreciate some of the fantastic Twitter tools out there. I know, I know, there are plenty of lists out there that list dozens of great Twitter tools:

If my list seems a bit underwhelming, remember that it is mainly for very busy entrepreneurs who have less than an hour to spend on ALL their social media of which Twitter is just one part.

1. Finding New Friends on Twitter

Twellow – a directory of public Twitter accounts that is easy-to-search (if sometimes slow to load). Armed with some keywords or categories, you can find and start following a lot of people in no time.

2. Scheduling and Keeping Up with Tweets

Hootsuite – while for some tweet scheduling seems like robot behavior, others (including myself) use it from time to time. Due to my schedule, I can tweet only late at night when most of the people I follow head off to bed. Scheduling tweets on Hootsuite gives me and my tweets a chance to be seen during the day.

But Hootsuite is more than a scheduling service. I use it to create lists of people by interest which makes it easier to track who said what about what and when. Plus it makes planning DMs and other messages a bit easier. I may decide to contact people from my virtual assistants list on Mondays; from my content writers list – on Tuesdays; from my Inspiration list – on Wednesdays, etc.

3. Discovering New Conversations

Twitterfall – I just started using this tool a couple of weeks ago and it’s been great (I do have to change the speed to Lower from Default). The idea is you enter your keywords, phrases, or hashtags into the Search and watch relevant tweets appear on your desktop in real time.

Except it’s more useful than that. When and if a particular tweet caught your attention, you can choose to DM, Follow, or Reply to the author or to Favorite, Retweet, Report or View the tweet (notice how there are 7 actions you can take, like 7 colors of the rainbow! this kind of stuff just makes my inner geek feel warm and fuzzy)

4. Doing Twitter Housekeeping

Refollow – I use it whenever I need to do some maintenance work, such as figuring out which of the people I follow don’t follow me back yet; who hasn’t tweeted in a while; find people I followed previously and then unfollowed, etc.

You can set up a lot of different filters and view information about your friends, fans and followers at a glance (sorted every which way). You can also do mass Follow, Unfollow, and Block.

Sometimes, when Refollow is unaccessible or when I only need to do “light dusting”, I use FriendOrFollow. It’s similar to Refollow, but with fewer options. Although, they do have an option of exporting results to a CSV file, for easier analytics and tracking. Which brings me to the next and final tool…

5. Getting Measurable Feedback

TwitterAnalyzer – does anyone read your tweets? How many RTs do you get? How big of an audience to do reach, both directly and indirectly? That’s the kind of questions that can be answered and graphed with this tool.

It can also show you, in a pie-chart format, the top subjects and hashtags you tweet about (they might not be what you think). And that’s just from the User menu. There are also menus that show you stats related to your Friends (I particularly like the Disregarded Friends graph), Mentions, and Groups.

These 5 tools have been huge time-savers for me. Of course, since each of these tools is very interactive and social, there’s danger of spending hours playing with them (or is it just me). So don’t forget to have your business goals in mind, your daily task list in front of you and your kitchen timer next to you before you start.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, social networking, Twitter, small business

5 Time-Saving Twitter Tools For Busy Business Owners is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Pros and Cons of Business Networking

yelena — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:00:00 +0000

One of my goals this year is to attend 4 real-world face-to-face networking events each month. Why bother with offline networking at all? After all, several virtual assistants I spoke with told me they do all their marketing and networking strictly online.

Face-to-face Networking Builds Trust

My personal experience with online-only networking is a mixed bag. I met all my past and present clients online. The problem is that some of my business relationships soured in large part because of their virtual nature. For example, dismissing an overdue invoice with promises of payment at a later unspecified date is much easier to do via e-mail than through face-to-face contact.

From the client’s point of view, they might want to deal with someone local because hopefully it would ensure higher level of customer service and greater ease of communication. Plus, it turns out that many solo entrepreneurs and small business owners are a fairly conservative and cautious bunch. They really need to get to know you and chat with you a few times before they even look at your Services page. Or is it a Southern thing?

Face-to-Face Networking Lets You Assess Your Future Client

Either way, this need for face-to-face contact works for me since it gives me time to evaluate prospective client and decide whether our working together would be a good idea after all.

Face-to-face Networking is Fun

I’m a stay-at-home mom who spends most of her days in the company of a preschooler. As intelligent, entertaining, thought-provoking, and fun as my son is, I still crave, occassionally, to be with other grownups talking about things other than Thomas the Train, drums, and alphabet. Networking provides just such an outlet, not to mention a great opportunity to wear something fancier than jeans and running shoes.

Face-to-Face Networking = Learning

There are things you will hear in a small group of regulars who know each other quite well that you will not hear in public spaces online. There is also a great opportunity to meet and listen to people from a different “niche universe”. Even though many of the people you meet are not your target clients or potential partners, they might offer a unique insight, share a valuable resource, or get you thinking about a new solution to your problems.

Now, face-to-face networking is not without its drawbacks.

Face-to-face Networking is Time Consuming – an hour-long even will take half a day if you factor in the driving time, pre-event mulling about, presentations that run on for a bit too long, and post-event networking.

Face-to-face Networking is Expensive – well, compared to online networking it is. Since most of the networking events are scheduled during business hours, you miss out on getting some work done. Many events have attendance and/or membership fees. Many are hosted over breakfast or lunch at cafes and restaurants – another expense. Finally, if your situation is similar to mine, you’ll have to arrange for childcare while you’re out networking.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio – I’d love to attend a networking group strictly for coaches or, say, for professional organizers – my target market instead of one with realtors, mortgage brokers, financial advisors, franchisees, MLM, and home parties-type businesses – not my target market. This can be easily controlled online, but offline many groups intentionally limit the number of participants from the same niche.

Still, I think old-style networking is important in a B2B business that is relationship-based, such as virtual assistance or social media support. And so I’m going to 4 networking groups this month. I found all of them through Meetup:

Women Business Owners Network – WBON – I’ve been a part of this group for about 8 months. I met one-on-one with a couple of people from this group and once bartered my services with another group member. I also did a presentation on Social Networking for Small Businesses and will be doing another one in March. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten for now.

Raleigh Entrepreneurs Organization - this is a new group I joined just a few days ago. It seems to be a diverse and active group with lots of interesting discussions. Also, very important to me – they meet in the evenings.

Raleigh Internet Marketing Mastermind – I joined this group last spring, but was able to go to only a couple of meetups since then. It’s a very in-demand group and meetups fill up very quickly, within a few hours of being posted. I’ve talked at length with some of the group members who might need my services and I’m hoping to work with some of them. But even if not, it’s a fantastic group to attend to learn all things Internet Marketing-related.

Raleigh Working Business Owners After Hours Meetup – I run my business part-time and in the evenings and it seems I’m an exception among the members of my other groups. So I was especially excited when I found out about this group late in December. I’m going to the first meeting later this week. So far, I have to say that this group has the most active message board and forum of all the groups I’m in. Very impressive!

So that’s my 4 for this month. Things might change next month if I see that one of these groups is not what I need. I have to tell you, for a part-time entrepreneur on a shoe-string budget, maintaining this pace is tough. But I hope that after 3-4 months I will be able to narrow it down to 2 networking meetings per month, possibly alternating between 3-4 groups.

What’s your experience with offline networking? How many events do you attend? How do you find out about networking groups? Please share your success stories!

Technorati Tags: small business, business networking, online networking, Meetup

Pros and Cons of Business Networking is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant