One of the tasks I do for my clients is submitting articles to article directories. When I first started submitting articles a few years ago, what should have been a 30-minute task was sometimes dragging out to a few days or more. I was frustrated and tired of playing email tag or the more popular ‘Guess Which Category’ game. I knew there had to be a better way.
 
“Necessity, who is the mother of invention.” – Plato
 
If you have submitted an article to any of the more popular directories, like Ezine Articles, Idea Marketers, or Self Growth, you know they are all different and each has its own set of categories, “fields” that differ from one site to the next, as well as different submission guidelines. Trying to keep track of all of these things can get really hairy! Since one of my favorite things to do is create checklists, forms, and worksheets, I created an article submission sheet to simplify the process. 
 
Before you get started, you will need to do a few things. (Don’t worry, I’ve provided instructions on how to edit the form in the video below.)

1. If you don’t have the article submission form, go to http://www.virtualassistantforms.com,sign up, and it will be sent to you via email immediately along with a tracking spreadsheet.
    
2. Visit each article directory listed on the form to sign up for your account (they are all free).  
3. List the possible categories and sub-categories from each article directory and edit the submission form.
4. Create an author resource box, maybe two, depending on if you write for more than one target audience or want to steer readers to a particular product or service over another.

Click the video below for instructions on how to edit and use the form.

Once you edit the submission sheet, it’s ready to be sent to your client (who will be WOWed with your initiative!) or, if you are the writer, you can send it along with the article to your assistant. Now, let’s submit an article!

Watch the video below as I walk you through submitting an article to one of the more popular article directories, Ezine Articles.

Next month I’ll show you how to submit to Idea Marketers, another popular directory. In the meantime, work on sprucing up your author resource box. You can use mine as an example (directly below), or read Christopher Knight’s article: Article Marketing 101: The Perfect Author Resource Box. You can also follow Christopher Knight on Twitter -he has loads of article marketing expertise.

Teleseminars, webinars, and online training have made their way into the standard toolbox for coaches, virtual assistants, and online marketers. They are not only a great marketing tool, but there are so many uses – everything from teaching “how to’s” to online coaching! The technology certainly has come a long way, but it doesn’t end there.

Whether it is your first time or 50th time giving a teleseminar or webinar, there are countless details to think of when putting on just one hour-long class – use FreeConferenceCall or InstantTeleseminar? How to get people to attend the class? Does the software support webcast and phone? Are the handouts up-to-date?

A few weeks ago, I completed my first week of teaching an online autoresponder training class and found out just how stressful and overwhelming it can be! Of course I made my fair share of mistakes so learn from me and read these pointers of what not to do when giving an online class.

1. Don’t double check the details. Don’t rely on your copywriter or virtual assistant for the attention to details. Make sure the detailed information, such as the date, time, phone number, passcode, and links are correct. I have seen (and sent) my fair share of “Oops, here’s the corrected link” emails and though many of them can be corrected quickly enough, having 100 people dial into the wrong phone number at the time of the call can be disastrous. Also make sure that the handouts, session notes, and follow-up URLs are all correct and updated. At the last minute, I thought it would be great to send a worksheet to the attendees. But I forgot to check it first and what they received was the 3-page rough draft instead of the completed 15-page worksheet – it had the same name of the file, just a different folder. Double check!

2. Don’t test the technology. Make sure you test, re-test, and test again the delivery method and format for your class, especially if it is the first time using the program. If you are giving a webinar and want to use an online meeting software, make sure it’s reliable and test it by going through an entire mock meeting. I decided to use a free webinar conferencing software which allowed me to webcast, record, and browse the internet with up to 20 participants. Sounds great doesn’t it? It was great until it froze up halfway during the class. I had only tested for five minutes at a time when my class was a 90-minute class. I firmly believe in “you get what you pay for” so I switched over to a paid service (GoToMeeting) and it worked much better for the rest of the sessions. Test!

3. Don’t prepare. The weekend before the class was to begin, I made a checklist and listed everything from remembering to unplug the phone during the meeting (to eliminate background noise) to posting a “do not ring the doorbell” sign on the front door. I know myself – I need to write things down or else I will forget. I had to attend a ceremony the morning of the class and when I rushed home to get ready, I was so flustered that I couldn’t find the checklist. I thought that I could wing it without my checklist and I was wrong. And of course my phone rang – loudly – and interrupted the meeting. Another note is that when giving a teleseminar via the phone, remember to turn off call waiting because I also discovered that people can hear all those clicks and the voice will cut out. Prepare!

4. Don’t have a Plan B. After the fiasco of my first session, by the second session I had familiarized myself with the new webinar software, I had a spare headset and microphone, I created my new checklist, I had printed out my outline, and I thought I was prepared. But what I didn’t plan on was my computer freezing up. Had I printed out the bridge line phone number, at least I could have dialed in to the bridge line and talked to the participants while I wrestled with my internet connection. It was the longest 15 minutes of my life! I had a backup laptop sitting right next to me but without the needed information, it did little good. I showed up late to my own training class. Argh!

Even though my training was aimed at a test group, I see this mistake a lot:

5. Don’t advertise or promote. Don’t take the “if I hold it they will come” approach. Promoting to your standard mailing or newsletter list probably won’t get you the results you are looking for. Even if you are holding a free teleseminar, you will want to promote to teleseminar sites such as PlanetTeleclass.com and Conference Call University (cculearning.com), post announcements on listservs, advertise in other ezines – and if you have affiliates, write up some promotional copy so they can get the word out to their lists.

You would think that I would totally be turned off to teleseminars with all the technical problems, sending the wrong information, being late to my own class – but it was actually an exciting couple of weeks! It can sometimes be uncomfortable to grow, learn, and challenge yourself… it is so much easier to just continue doing what you are doing. But then you’ll never reach your long-term goals.

Don’t let the fear of failure keep you from trying out new things. What it comes down to is that no one will remember what happened a month from now. I am still here, the world did not end, my business did not cease to exist, and I did not get discouraged. And a shout out to my Aweber test group – thank you!

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of improving the chances of your web page showing up when someone searches for your type of business, a service, or a product. This article cannot possibly go into all the aspects of SEO in-depth, but I do want to give you a few basics to give you a better understanding of how SEO works and what you can do TODAY to improve your web pages for the search engines.

The two most important items of my SEO strategy are to 1) write relevant content and 2) properly code each page. They are both equally important and search engines take both of these into account when ranking pages. You can have loads of great content but if the page cannot be read by the search engine robot, then it is a problem. On the other hand, a page can be properly coded and pass validation, but with very little content, it will not do you any good.

Content is King

“Content” means the words, headlines, subject headers – what is seen on your web pages and viewable by the public. Content is important because search engines crawl your web page and read words and phrases. It takes this information and adds to an index, sort of like a giant catalog. Then, when someone does a search, the search engine returns the results, ranking each page by relevancy. Search engines are not mind readers; therefore, it only makes sense that you need to write the content using words that people (your target market) will most likely search on if you want your page to come up high on the results pages.

One of the first things that I tell clients as they go about setting up their web page is, “do not write website copy for the search engines, write for your audience.” A genuine message from your heart is going to go a lot further than a page that’s stuffed with keywords but not much else. You may think that you do not know what to write, but once you get started, the words will come.

Write about how you got started in the business, why are you passionate about your product or service, how you have helped people in the past… Don’t forget to include as many details as you can about the problems your service will solve, how you deliver the service, who might be the best client for this service, etc.

Try to use the exact wording that someone in your target market might use, e.g., “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘How am I going to finish my newsletter article, answer all of those client emails, and still have time to actually do my coaching work? I need some help with my newsletter!’”

That way, when your prospective client types something like, “Help with newsletters” in to a search engine, this specific page is more likely to show up in the results, and higher up. This is what is called a “key phrase.” Incorporating key phrases into your content is much more useful than relying on single words, which has much more competition.

Quick Start Assignment

Choose just ONE of your web pages and look at the content. Do you give a clear explanation of what the intent of the page is? Do you give enough information about the product, service, etc.? Remember, each page is indexed individually. For example, if you are a virtual assistant offering a variety of services, of course you can list them on your “services menu” page, but also create a separate page for each service. This will go hand in hand with the back-end coding, which I’ll talk more about next month.

During my first year as a virtual assistant, when I didn’t have any clients and lots of free time, I took a free SEO online course and it was excellent! There is a time investment involved; the course requires active participation, and it lasts for a few weeks, but I would still urge you to attend. I literally learned everything I know about SEO by attending these classes and by completing each of the exercises. Find out more at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SEO_Techniques/

Personalizing your emarketing items, such as newsletters, broadcasts, etc. is not new; most people who use email regularly are used to seeing their first names in email subject lines or within an email newsletter. And, if you regularly send out emails to your subscribers, you probably have remembered the “first name” merge code by heart.

But many of you may be wondering, “What is the effectiveness of personalizing my emails?” “Does it really work?” “What else can I do besides add a name to the subject line?”

According to emailstatcenter.com, “Inserting a person’s name into an email increases open rates by as much as 10%. – Jupiter Research (2006).” So it does seem that personalizing emails does have an impact, even just a little bit. But the trick is to personalize correctly.

I would bet that you have received at least one or two emails that read like the following: “For {FIRST_NAME} , free ebook covers this weekend only.”

Um, that there should be something else before that comma. Yuck.

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We all know someone who is a “drama queen,” turning ordinary circumstances into academy-award winning performances as they moan about their bad luck and how the world has done them wrong, and as they describe countless tragic outcomes that are bound to occur any minute now.

When it comes to computer problems, I call this technology drama. If you think your computer is acting up for the sole purpose of making your life miserable, you might just have technology drama.

Because my friends, family, neighbors, and other acquaintances that I see on a regular basis know that my former career was working with computers, they have no problems telling me their computer woes.

The three most common types of technology drama that I hear about are computers that take on human-like characteristics, electrical interruptions caused by ghosts, or computers that are infected with super-bugs, viruses, or other types of “nasty” critters that are immune to normal software cleaning programs.

Do not get me wrong; I love these types of people. For many years, these people were not only my bread and butter but were also my sources of entertainment, bless them.

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