Transcription or VA WordPress Theme PLUS BONUS: Access to Transcription Crash Course! $17.00

Major Credit Cards and Paypal are accepted here.
You will be redirected to download the theme immediately after your payment is processed.

BONUS: Access to Transcription Crash Course is included free!

When you unpack your blog theme you’ll find a folder named “BONUS” which will include an access pass to Transcription Crash Course.

It’s fast and easy to get access to the full report and all of it’s bonuses as well. This easy-to-understand, step-by-step guide will show you the exact steps I took to get my own transcription business started.

For more information about the course check out http://www.transcriptioncrashcourse.com

The WordPress theme features…..
Top navigation for pages with dropdown list for subpages.
Top navigation for categories with dropdown list for subcategories.
A folder full of social media icons in the images directory that you can use in your sidebar to link to your favorite social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
omment count bubble on the home page to show off your most popular discussions.
About section in the sidebar that automatically fills from the user settings info. (can be removed easily if you don’t want to use it.)
Easy to edit reserved spaces for banner or adsense advertising.
Post divider on the home page to visually break up the content.
Breadcrumb trail navigation on the single post pages for easy browsing.

To Your Success,

As a thank you for your participation in the survey I’ve included a little win-win scenario for you in the last question I appreciate your time, so I tried to keep things short and to the point.

Thank you for participating!

Have you had time to research the top blogs in your niche? Maybe you have started commenting on a few of them, but have lost track of the last time you visited. It’s not easy when you are trying to keep your own blog updated with fresh content and possibly creating digital products to sell or giveaway. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Outsourcing your blog promotion can lead to huge traffic increases. Your VA can take sites that you are already a regular on and keep up with their posts with relevant comments, research new blogs to comment on and so much more.

If you have your favorite blogs to comment on in your feedreader already, then commenting may be just a matter of a few hours a month. Blog promotion hours will be a matter of communication between you and your VA to find out what your needs are and make the most of them. It’s amazing what can be accomplished in just a couple of hours a month.

In the case of my VA services, you can set the amount of blogs you want comments on and we can set a monthly retainer fee. I will comment on relevant posts weekly or more often as specified in our contract. But a retainer will guarantee that the high SEO blogs in your keywords are hit regularly to bring you the most traffic possible in your target market.

While you are busy creating new, think about how you are growing your readership. It’s frustrating to post incredible, informative posts and have no comments back from readers or very little traffic. Contact me to find out how we can push that forward.

Blog management will keep those blogs you started, current and the money flowing in from the traffic you worked hard to build. Stagnant blogs will hurt your traffic as return visitors stop returning. Remember that new content is king in the google search engines and unless you have been under a rock, no matter what anyone tells you, google is still the top search engine. Go ahead and check where your stat searches come from and then get back to me lol

You have a blog or website that is bringing in good or decent money, but it’s not truly your passion anymore? What to do? Sell it? Sure, but from where and will you get the amount of money you can make from a year or two’s affiliate clicks? Blog management is here to help. Blog management will bring you regular content and keep your target traffic happy. I’ll write articles in the same topics that are bringing you traffic and also answer blog comments weekly.

Your blog will no longer look sadly neglected and will keep up with the search engines. Keeping you at your current, hard-earned status in the search engine battle for your keywords and possibly moving you ahead if you never used keywords to build your content.

Blog management can take on many different roles depending on your blog so make sure and ask for ways to fit my services to your needs. Standard blog management rates can be found at the bottom of my services page and custom packages can be created. Possibly you just need a couple of posts a month to fill between your postings.

These prices are low and won’t to stay this price forever. I only have so many hours a week and my services are well received. I can’t make more hours in the day even though I have tried very hard to do so. lol Let me know what your blog theme is and how I can help you stay at the same level of greatness or even move up to the next level with your blog.

Here are a few reasons why maintaining your website is important:

# Attracting the search engines – Search engines are important to the livelihood of your online business, but they don’t like “dead” websites. Websites which have been left static without updates or fresh content are a no-no in the online world. Another thing search engines don’t like is broken links.

As you build your web pages it’s easy to miss broken links. A good strategy is to double check every link you add to your website. Inevitably you may miss some or some may become broken with time (as web addresses change and so on). Regular maintenance and “check-ups” for your website will help you spot these broken links and keep your customers and search engines happy in the process.

# Updating information may increase your sales – Regularly looking over your website will also help you make changes and adjustments as necessary. For example, you may have started promoting what was a great product two years ago but now that product may be outdated and not so great anymore. By updating your website you may find products and promotions which are a better match for your visitors. This means more money in your pocket and more satisfied visitors.

Look through your old web pages to see if there are any promotions which can be updated or given a little extra “oomph.” Times change and on the internet time moves at a faster speed – keeping up with the times is important and you can do this by simply looking over your pages and tweaking as you go along. Updating your information on the pages will also help your page be picked up my the search engines more.

# Keeping track of your stats is important – Another part of your basic web maintenance is keeping on top of all your visitor statistics. It makes sense to regularly go through your website and check how many visitors you have on a monthly basis, where they’re coming from, how they’re finding you, what pages they’re accessing and so on.

A running log of these statistics will help you quickly identify any potential problems such as loss of traffic or reduced income from sources such as Google AdSense and so on. But make sure you don’t get caught up in checking your stats too often. Checking them monthly is usually more than enough unless you have run a special promotion.

Regular basic web maintenance for your website is important. It can help you keep up with changing times, help to attract more visitors and ultimately make you more sales. If you find this task difficult to squeeze in, try scheduling it in for a set time each month or every few weeks. It shouldn’t take long and the time investment may make all the difference to your business. And finally, if you don’t have time to do the web maintenance yourself you can always think about hiring an assistant to help you with this task.

The first step to your New Year, New VA Clients resolution is to create a vision statement. In this statement you will write an intention for your business. This may include goals or it may be a brief paragraph about where you want to take your business. It’s also a great idea to visualize, in writing, what your business looks like now that you’re working with your ideal client. How has your business changed? What projects are you working on?

Step two is to decide who your ideal client is. That may be an easy decision or it may take some time to clarify. Is it someone who has more money to spend? Someone who has a firm commitment to improve their life? Someone who really wants to get involved in your community? Someone who has the same beliefs and aspirations you do? Take some time to outline your ideal client. Is this a local client you want to help or someone that is completely virtual?

You may want to go so far as to create an identity for them. Give them a name and age, outline their habits and why and when they’d use your products and services. Best Buy is a great example of how to create a customer profile or identity. Some of their customer profiles include Buzz (the Techy), Barry (Wealthy Professional), Ray (Family Man) and, Jill (Soccer Mom). From these persona’s they have created individual marketing strategies, which takes us to the next step.

Your third step is to outline how to market to your ideal client. Ideally, if you’re stepping up your chosen client, you’re going to also want to step up the emphasis on your credibility and authority in your industry. Depending on your industry this can be accomplished in a number of ways.

Some possibilities include:

* Speaking engagements
* Publication
* Testimonials from experts in your industry
* Partnerships with experts in your industry
* Case studies and white papers
* Discounted VA work in your field for extra testimonials
* Article Writing in your field

Finally, create targets and strategies to achieve these goals, and systems and metrics to measure success. This is an important final step to achieve your New Year, New VA Clients resolution, and it’s often where people drop the ball when trying to achieve their resolutions. We’re great at setting intentions and wanting to improve, and often not so good with the follow through. Entrepreneurs are a different breed of course; you know how to make it happen! Go and PROVE IT!

“Outsourcing” is a hot topic, but what is it and can you use it in your business? Outsourcing is the process by which you pay someone else to do tasks that take you away from making money with your direct sales business. Can you use it for direct sales businesses? You sure can! Here are five things you can outsource to make your direct sales business more efficient, and possibly even more profitable.

1. Newsletters

As a direct sales business owner, you have to communicate with your downline and your customers. A newsletter is a great way to do this. However, if you’re not comfortable writing a newsletter each month, you can outsource this task to someone who is more suited to it.

Find a ghostwriter, someone who will write the content in the newsletter for you. You can still pass it off as your own work. No one on your team needs to be the wiser. You do need to make sure you’ve read the content, though, just in case someone asks a question about it.

2. New target markets

Hire someone to call your current customer list and ask them some pointed questions. Ask them how old they are, which products they are using, their income bracket, whether they rent or own their home, and how many people are in their family. You may find, after compiling the information, that you have more people in one age and income bracket using your products than any other market. Now you know which new market group to target with your advertising dollar.

3. Autoresponders

Autoresponders, an automatic system of sending pre-written emails to your contact list, are great for saving time and money. You may not understand the concept, but there are people that would be willing to set up your autoresponder system for you. They will be able to create emails for nearly any reason you would send an email, all without having to personally attend to an email system. Autoresponders are set up and then when someone joins your list the emails go out in the order scheduled.

4. Drop shipping

If you’re in direct sales, you may have one outsourced task already taken care of for you. Many direct sales companies have a process in place where you never have to maintain inventory of the products you sell. This process is called “drop shipping”. You place the order, tell the system where the order needs to go, and the company sends it to your customer for you. If your sales are brisk and it is keeping you from other work, you may consider outsourcing this task further by hiring someone to input these orders for you.

5. Direct mailing

After you’ve built up a client list, you’ll want to keep in contact with them on a regular basis. You may have created a postcard with coupons and need to mail it out right before a major event or holiday. Paying someone to label and stamp each postcard could be money well spent.

Outsourcing is an excellent way to get more done in your direct sales business. There’s no reason that you, as the business owner, must attend to each and every task. Your time and effort would best be spent completing tasks that will help generate a higher income. Even though you may be putting out money by outsourcing these five tasks, it might be some of the best money you’ve ever spent.

Contact Val to discuss your outsourcing needs and where you can better spend your time and money. These are just 5 of the many tasks that can be done for you by a virtual assistant.

How do I get started as a VA and where can I find some work to get me started?

Well, I will start with how I personally got into being a Virtual Assistant. I have been working in data entry and transcription for about 7 years now. Some where along the line the data entry (document coding) that I was doing started to fail in the market.

There was a lot of offshoring going on and document coders went a good 5 or 6 years with no raises. In fact, many companies lowered the rates that coders were receiving for their work. While this was once my bread and butter, and I very much enjoyed doing it, I had to let it go. It simply wasn’t profitable anymore.

So, I focused on transcription, which continues to be a great source of income for me and many others like myself. Yes, many people do offshore their transcription work to folks who will work for pennies a day. However, they often find the quality of those transcripts to be lacking. If you’re putting out English spoken audio and video, it’s usually best to hire native English speaking transcribers as well. It just makes sense and you get a better product in the end.

From there and from being part of the WAHM commuinty online (and by that I mean, always being in touch with other WAHMs and sharing common interests) I made some really great contacts over the years. What I really wanted to do was help people grow their business while growing my own at the same time. I didn’t even know that what I wanted to be was a Virtual Assistant until someone told me that’s exactly what I was doing.

It had already happened without my realizing it. I was transcribing audio notes, making customer service phone calls, uploading HTML pages, tweaking code, and making graphics for other WAHMs to help them grow their businesses. I was assisting in a virtual way.

So, how do you become a Virtual Assistant too? I would say the first step in this or any business is building relationships. Talk to people. Find out what they need done. Find out where their goals are. Then determine how you can help them meet those goals.

That’s a great way to get the mind moving in the right direction. Next, you’ll want to think about the skills you have to offer and start writing them down on a sheet of paper. You can refer back to this sheet later when you’re making a website to advertise your services.

No skill is too small. Proficient with Excel spreadsheets? Include that! Good at making videos? Include that! Have a great speaking voice? Include that! Speedy typist? Include that! Telemarketing experience? Include that! If it involves you doing something that you’re good at, include it in your skill list.

What equipment do I need to be a virtual assistant? Chances are you have most of what you need already. First, your computer with an internet connection. Some programs are good to have, such as Word, Excel, Power Point etc…. However, these aren’t even a full requirement, because there is so much great software available open source these days. Just pop by Open Office and you’ll find plenty of goodies to use.

A PayPal account is perfect if you’ll be accepting payments and invoicing online. You can also accept checks and money orders by mail if you wish, and this is especially helpful if you plan to look for local clients.

Local clients? I thought we were doing this virtually? We are. Just because you are working virtually from your home office doesn’t mean you can’t reach out in your local community to find clients. Real Estate agents and Dentist offices all over the country keep VA’s busy all year round! So, don’t discount the local market too quickly in your search for work.

Another important piece of equipment might be your telephone. If you’re offering to handle customer service you’ll want a phone with unlimited long distance plan to avoid excessive charges. Make this a landline or a VOIP phone, not your cell phone.

Since we’re talking about talking I also recommend Skype for conversations with your clients, and I’m finding more and more that a lot of customer service gets done this way. When your clients are also serving up virtual services and information products the majority of their customers will be web based and ringing them up on Skype is the easiest way of reaching them.

I’m sure most of this is already going through your mind, so I’m going to skip to the big question that everyone wants to know. Where do I get work? I’m going to point you towards a few of my favorite resources here.

Let’s start with something many are familiar with. Message Boards. Great for networking, and still a good way to keep in touch with people that are of like business minds and to find people that are seeking help with projects.

Here are a few of my favorites:
Internet Based Moms : http://www.internetbasedmoms.com
Virtual Assistant Forums : http://www.virtualassistantforums.com/

Some Virtual Assistant Resource Sites that I would recommend:
Shelancers : http://www.shelancers.com
Virtual Business Mavens : http://virtualbusinessmavens.com/
VA Networking : http://www.vanetworking.com/
Virtual Assistant Networking : http://www.virtualassistantnetworking.com/

For Shelancers, make sure that you submit your listing to the directory when you join! I’ve made great business contacts just by being a part of this fabulous directory of business women.

Freelance Websites, while not always ideal are still a good way to find a few projects. Bidding on jobs can be time consuming and frustrating, so consider yourself warned and grab a cup of coffee before you dig into these sites looking for work.

Here’s a handful of freelance places to get your search started if you decide to go this route:
Team Double Click : http://teamdoubleclick.com/
Get a Freelancer : http://www.getafreelancer.com
Workaholics 4 Hire : http://www.workaholics4hire.com

Podcasts and blogs are out there to listen to if you’re needing some inspiration along the way:
Easy Wahm Websites – right here for blogging about work!
Wahm 2.0 : http://www.sparkplugging.com/wahm/
VA Talk Show : http://vatalkshow.com/
Yellow Highlighter VA : http://yellowhighlighterva.com/

And what would a Virtual Assistant post be without linking to a few of my favorite VA friends and contacts on the internet. Visit a few of us for reference and you’ll surely find some great ideas flowing through your mind for what you’d like to focus on in your own Virtual Assistant business. I think you’ll be surprised how very different each of us really are.

Val and myself right here at Easy Wahm : http://easywahmwebsites.com
Kit at the Virtual Peach : http://thevirtualpeach.com/
Red Pencil Editing : http://www.redpencilediting.com
Tishia Saves Time : http://www.tishiasavestime.com
Multimedia VA : http://multimediava.com

Now that you’ve got some ideas brewing in your head and you’re thinking about what you want to do as a VA, Val and I would be more than happy to answer any specific questions that may pop up in your mind. Just post a comment here and we’ll chime in with answers for you.

Ready, set …. ASK!

OneNote.
Using OneNote, publishing a copy of your notes to a shared location is a simple way to make them available to others.

Step One. Open OneNote, create a new page and type passwords to selected accounts on a specified page to share with your VA.

Step Two. Email by selecting the pages that you want to publish.

Step Three. Of course this is only effective if your page is password protected otherwise you could inadvertently give access to all of your passwords to the wrong person. To apply a password to specific sections of your notebook.

1. Click the tab of the section you want the password to apply to.
2. On the File menu, click Password Protect This Section.
3. In the Password Protection task pane, click Set Password.
4. In the Password Protection dialog box, type the password you want in the Enter password box.
5. Confirm the password by typing it in the Confirm password box, and then click OK.

Google Docs.
Google offers similar password protection for sharing documents. Users can edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and invite more collaborators and viewers. The only way a person can view a document is if they are invited to view it thereby increasing the level of protection.

Users have the ability to designate someone as a collaborator or simply a viewer. Viewers can see the most recent version of a document, spreadsheet or presentation, however they’re not able to make any changes. They can also export a copy of the document, spreadsheet or presentation to their local hard drive.

It’s vital to keep passwords protected particularly when you’re sending multiple passwords protected and private while still being able to share them with outsourced providers and virtual assistant whether they’re next door or around the world. OneNote and Google make it easy and add an extra level of security that emailing passwords just doesn’t have.

Here are just a few:

1. Advertise in Ezines. There are online newsletters everywhere that accept advertising. The key here is to purchase advertising in publications that reach your target market and to create your ad to showcase your expertise. Don’t try to be everything to everyone or you won’t attract clients.

Ad Example of what Not to Do: Hire me to lighten your workload. I can do everything that you don’t want to do. Let’s talk!

Ad Example of what works: Are you ready to get more leads to your business? I will handle your ezine advertising campaign for you. No more searching for targeted ezines, no more writing and tracking your ads. I’ll handle it all it all. My clients experience a boost in subscribers after I complete my ezine advertising campaigns that will pay for my services. Check out my website for testimonials and free tips.

2. Write and Submit Articles. The key here is to stay on topic. Don’t write and submit articles about health or pet care. Present a problem in your article and solve it. Make sure your author bio is very compelling to attract potential clients.

3. Network where *successful* people hang out. A huge mistake that VA’s make is to hand out on forums where there are other people struggling to make money. Instead, join a membership site for your target market and you’ll find yourself in the “inner circle”.

4. Advertise at Shelancers.com. One of the easiest ways to get your name in front of business owners looking for help is to advertise on Shelancers.com. Again, it is crucial that you list your specialty in order to stand out from the other providers. But, if you can find a problem that business owners face, and offer to handle it for them, you’ll attract loyal clients who will continue to work with you.