In the past I have had some success with Google Adwords. These are the “sponsored” links that appear down the right hand side of a Google search page and sometimes across the top. These are a great way to begin learning about and working with keywords and a successful way of getting increased traffic to your site, as well as paying clients. They work on a “pay per click” basis so when someone clicks on your ad, you accumulate the cost onto your account. You can set yourself a daily budget so that when your clicks have reached a certain amount, your ads no longer show on Google searches. This is great for ensuring you don’t go over your weekly or monthly spend. The actual “how tos” of setting up an Adwords account can be quite complex and a bit of trial and error before you find the right mix of your keywords, campaigns and pay per click budget. This service is perfect to be performed remotely by your VA - she can set up your account, add your keywords, design a compelling ad or ads and monitor the campaigns (as sometimes keywords get deactivated for not being optimised enough or not paying enough per keyword). If Adwords appeals to you but you don’t have the time or energy to learn it yourself, why not speak to us about setting up and monitoring a campaign for your business?

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I’m excited that I’ve enrolled in a Resume Writers Course that I’ve been longing to do for a while. I like the notion of assisting people to bring out their best and really sell themselves to prospective employers. In terms of an additional service that Net Secretary can provide to its customers, the resume service will be offered predominantly as an online service but it will also enable me to do more of the ‘face to face’ work that I enjoy - getting out there and meeting with customers, interviewing them about their skills and the job they want and then going away and preparing something wonderful for them. I’m not completely sure what the Resume Writers Course entails in absolute detail, but it does have lessons and assignments to prepare, and appears to have a lot of positive feedback from participants. The course designer, Beverley Neil, has won countless awards for her outstanding resumes so I am looking forward to learning all she has to impart. Here’s hoping I can manage my time effectively to really get stuck in so I can start using it for my clients.

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The updates to the Net Secretary website are 90% complete with a bit more tweaking here and there needed. I’ve also been pleased with how my site has been performing in the Google search engine rankings - number four for the search term “secretary” and top of the second page for the search term “Virtual Assistant”. It got me thinking about search engine optimisation and how simple and invaluable it can be. I am proud to say that I have done all my own site optimisation for Net Secretary, with just some solid research and self education. I grabbed a couple of books on how it all works and also researched the internet. The tools are really quite simple and in my opinion, there is no reason to pay hundreds of dollars to a so-called “expert” who can ‘guarantee’ you a top five position in the Google search rankings. Anybody can learn the rules, which are based on good keyword rich content, regular updating of your site’s content and a solid understanding of links and backlinks and how they work. One thing I have found to be instrumental is that you can’t fool the Google spiderbots with artificially loading your site with keywords - the spiderbot knows what is “good” content and “manipulated” content and will actually stop crawling your site and therefore not rank it if it has been done incorrectly. I want to encourage the spiderbots to make frequent visits to my site and therefore maintain or even improve its relevance ranking. If anybody would like to know more about SEO, feel free to drop me a line.

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I finally found the time and motivation to get Net Secretary News back up and running. The newsletter was one of my passions when I first started my business and it got put on the back burner whilst I got busier. Net Secretary News sat there like a neglected child, silently imploring me to give it some attention, which I finally did this month. As it turned out, it was good timing as it’s the 3rd anniversary of when  I began the business. In terms of marketing, there is nothing quite like email marketing  as an effective tool. I like it because:

• It is immediate - I send it, it lands in the recipient’s inbox in seconds. No time lag of snail mail, no risk of it getting lost in the post or buried among the piles of mail businesses usually receive.
• It is inexpensive - compared to the cost of printing and postage for a hard copy newsletter, email marketing is dirt cheap.
• It is good for the environment - it saves a few trees sending newsletters electronically.
• It is interactive - active links in electronic newsletters means that recipients can click on matters of interest to them at the time, rather than opening a hard copy newsletter, logging on to the internet, typing in a URL address, etc etc.
• It is easy to manage - changes to content, layout etc can be made at the click of a mouse button. Mailing lists are also easier to manage electronically rather than printing out hundreds of costly labels.
• It is technologically savvy - what better way to create a professional image of your business and demonstrate the latest technology by using current technology to produce a newsletter? Beautiful graphics, layouts and links are great advertisements in themselves.
• It is effective - the hit rate is statistically superior to traditional hard copy newsletters, mainly due to the immediacy mentioned above.
• It saves you time - lets face it. Undertaking a traditional hard copy newsletter is time consuming!  All that printing and envelope stuffing, taking them to the post office, not to mention if you find an error after they’ve been printed, you have to live with it or start again!

If your business is thinking about an e- newsletter, why not have a chat to us? It is more inexpensive than you think and an invaluable marketing tool for your business.

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It never ceases to amaze me the wonders of modern technology and none more so when I receive a query from a prospect in another country. One of the reasons I love what I do so much is that it breaks down borders across the world to in fact make this business borderless in many respects - a global business thanks to the Internet. We can all learn so much from one another just on a local scale but when it encompasses those who live in a different time zone, culture and climate, the learnings become that much more interesting. The main benefit of being an Australian VA is that I can offer my US and UK clients an “overnight” service - as they wake and check their inboxes, I have worked “overnight” (my day) to deliver their job. A definite win-win for all concerned and one that still gets me (perhaps pathetically!) excited when I complete a job for an international client.

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