Recently I saw a question on LinkedIn that somebody wanted information about a virtual assistant. They were considering using one and wanted to know about others’ experiences with them. Unfortunately there were a lot of negatives posted and that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Unfortunately, there are several virtual assistants who are just virtual assistants because they have the desire to work at home but are not business savvy.

There is a difference between being an employee and owning your own business. When you are an employee your employer holds you accountable whereas when you own your own business a big part of accountability comes from within, not somebody else. Your clients also hold you accountable but most of it comes from you. This is true with any type of business whether it be web design, virtual assistant, consulting, sales, retail etc.

Accountability

When you own your own business you have to hold yourself accountable. Just because nobody is breathing down your neck, doesn’t mean you don’t have to do a good job. If you really in truly want a successful business you need to make sacrifices. Your clients are counting on you. If you don’t do a good job you are letting yourself down as well as your clients. Your clients hired you because they need help not because they want somebody to keep giving them excuses.

Self Discipline

Running a business requires a lot of self discipline. There will be things that you don’t want to do and it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that you can do it tomorrow or later or whatever than it is to handle the tough jobs.

There may be days when you wake up in the morning and it’s a beautiful day and you would rather go to the beach than stay at home behind a computer and do the work that your clients need you to. That’s when self discipline really gets put to the test.

Exaggerating/Lying

Exaggerating is the same as lying. It’s okay to tell a potential client or even a current client that you don’t know how to do something. This will look much better for you. If you tell a potential client that you don’t know how to do something you leave them with the choice as to whether to work with you and be patient while you learn or to go and work with somebody else who has the experience.

If you lie to them or exaggerate your abilities thinking that you can just post your questions on a forum and get the right answer, it leaves you and your client feeling frustrated and gives your client a false sense of professionalism on your part. This can cause you to lose your self confidence and cause the client to lose confidence in you, giving you and your industry a bad rep.

Colleagues

While you may believe that being unaccountable, undisciplined, exaggerating and lying is only hurting yourself, you are wrong. It not only hurts your clients it also hurts your colleagues. By you believing that it is only hurting you, it makes it difficult for the “good” virtual assistants, web designers, consultants to keep their business successful. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen these words “I have been burned so many times” or “my past web designer created my site and has since fallen off the face of the earth and my site’s not working etc”

If you don’t have accountability and self discipline you will immediately fail in owning your own business. With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging people are more apt to take their grievances to the web, tarnishing your reputation in the process.

When you don’t have good business standards and are lucky enough to get clients and they leave to find somebody else, it immediately puts them on the defensive causing them to be nasty, ignorant, pushy etc and this can greatly hinder their chance of finding a good match that will be a GREAT asset to their company. I don’t know about you but if I get somebody to contact me and they come across as if they are looking for a fight, I won’t work with them. So they are left to fend for themselves hindering their business success.

So the next time you think your business standards are only hurting yourself, think about those clients that are also being hurt and the colleagues who are having a much more difficult time finding clients because those clients have been “burned.”

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There is no doubt about it, Joomla is a very complex system to work with if you don’t have the proper training.

Time and time again I am hearing how people are just not happy with their Joomla website and they are not happy with VirtueMart (Joomla’s shopping cart).  Their complaints are the structures are just not user friendly when in reality, with the proper training Joomla and Virtuemart is not any harder to use than WordPress or 1Shopping Cart.

The problem is that Joomla comes with so many functions already enabled. People get lost. Once they understand that they can learn to create an article and manage it, then they can learn to move modules, etc, and that they can learn one thing at a time and not get confused by it all at once, Joomla starts to make sense.

Case Study

I met a fellow virtual assistant who had a Joomla site and she was ready to throw in the towel and move it to a WordPress website.  This is fine but she eventually wanted to give away things, have a newsletter and other things that could be accomplished with WordPress but she would either have to pay for these services or she would be using WordPress for something that it was never intended for which is a complex website and she would’ve eventually ran into problems.

She reached out for help and I answered her and spent two hours working with her (she basically needed a full education on how to use her site because her designer created the site, got paid and walked away, which is unfortunate) and she is now much happier with her website.

Her complaint was also that it was not user friendly but once I helped her understand how to do things to her website, she realized it’s really not that un-user friendly.

When you are not use to web design and shopping carts and how they work, whether you use WordPress, Joomla, 1Shopping Cart or Virtuemart, it can all seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.  All you have to do is reach out and find the right person who is willing to take the time and teach you.

With the fast-pace of your life, you may not want to learn something new and that’s fine but if you don’t take the time to learn, it can leave you frustrated and cost you a lot of money.  Even if you have somebody update the site for you, you have to pay them every time or if you try to learn things on your own without somebody in the background to help you out it will cost you in lost time and frustration.

So before you give up on something because you feel it is non-user friendly, reach out and find somebody who is willing to take the time to work with you and educate you because you may just find that you were just uneducated on the item.  Being uneducated can be detrimental to your business and cause great confusion.

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Owning a successful business is one of the most rewarding things that you can do.  However, getting it to be successful can be difficult but there is more to running a business than just figuring out what you want to do and getting clients.

Starting a business is not something you can do overnight.  It takes several weeks or even months to get it to the point where you are ready to open for business. You need to do research and I’m not talking just market research but other research as well.

In order to be sure that you are operating your business legally, you need to check into local, state, and federal laws regarding your industry.  If you want to run your business out of your home, you need to check with the local laws regarding whether or not this is allowed. Some questions to ask are:

1. If you want to run this business out of your house, are you legally allowed to?  If your neighborhood is zoned residential, you may not be able to.
2. Do you need any kind of permit for your business? i.e. zoning permit
3. Do you need any type of special license for your business? In Pennsylvania, they were trying to pass a law that if you sell items on consignment on Ebay, you need an auctioneers license (don’t know if it passed or not)
4. Are you allowed to post a sign outside of your house and if so what are the size restrictions?
5. If you sell services/products online, where do you need to collect sales tax from?  For example, if I am doing work for somebody in PA, I have to collect sales tax however if I do work for somebody in Kansas, I don’t have to collect sales tax.
6. What type of business entity are you going to run under? i.e. sole proprietor, limited liability, corporation, partnership, etc
7. What taxes do you need to pay both locally, state and federally?

Insurance

1. Is your business something that if something is done incorrectly you can cause injury to somebody or something? i.e. Dog walking: If you walk a dog and it gets loose and it bites somebody or causes an accident, you can be held liable because you did not have control of that animal. Also if the dog gets loose and is hit by a car the dog owner can also hold you liable.  Do you have measures in place so that you do not loose everything should you get sued?
2. Is your business something that can cause emotional or monetary damage if something is done incorrectly? i.e. Giving some wrong information on a person to a collection agency so they start contacting the wrong person to get payments for delinquent accounts.  The wrong person can sue the collection agency and the collection agency will then, in turn, sue you.
3. Do you need to be bonded?

Market research

1. Is there a market for your type of business?
2. How do you measure up to the competition?  How are you different from the competition?
3. What is your ideal market? Age, gender, income, etc
4. Where does your ideal market hang out?
5. If you use statistical data to analyze need and demand, remember, statistics can only tell you what HAS BEEN. It cannot tell you what WILL BE. If you do business differently, better, etc, than the competition, you may be able to succeed even in a crowded market. It only gives you a guideline as to how creative you will need to be to succeed.

Marketing Research

1. How do you plan on reaching out to your ideal market?
2. Can you make your own brochures, letterhead, and business cards or are you going to purchase them?
3. Are you going to market locally, regionally, or nationally?
4. What do you need to do to market to that locale?
5. Are you going to have a website?  Can you create the website on your own or are you going to have to hire somebody?

Pricing/Forms

1. How much do you want to make monthly or yearly?
2. How much do you need to make to be sustainable?
3. How much is your competition charging? Is it higher or lower?  You can’t always base your prices on this but it can give you an idea
4. What forms do you need for your clients to understand your policies?
5. What policies are you going to implement and can you stick to them?
6. What forms do you need to protect yourself and your company?

While running a business can be a great opportunity there is a lot that needs to be done and taken into consideration before you can even open your doors and start welcoming clients.  Even after you open your doors, it takes time to get clients and you have to continue to work at it.

Running a business is not as simple as waking up one morning and saying I’m going to open a business so that I can control my own destiny. You MUST do your due diligence!

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As some of you know I provide free website reviews to anybody who asks. My reviews consist of taking a look at the site and looking for any obvious problems. It can be something as simple as the content is to “me” centered, there are no description tags and title tags for the pages or it can be something as complex as the coding is causing problems or the design itself isn’t very good. In doing reviews, I tend to see the same patterns over and over, and one of the most common is that the site simply does not get enough traffic. A good review will look at both the site, and the traffic stats, and make recommendations based on the conclusions.

A service type business should be getting between 200-500 unique visitors per month if you expect to get ANY calls. If you aren’t getting that many, chances are the design has nothing to do with it. The marketing is what the culprit is. If you are getting less than 200 visits per month then your website is not getting found by the search engines. Yes your website may be listed on page one for the website URL but that doesn’t mean it is getting found by any other keywords or phrases.

In order to get your website found you need to continue to market it. You can have the best basic SEO out there, the best design out there but if you aren’t getting traffic you aren’t marketing it enough.

It is not enough to join Facebook and create a business page and ask to connect. It is not enough to join Twitter and post to your hearts content and follow thousands of people. You have to do more than that.

You have to submit your website to link directories, comment on blog posts with your URL, write articles and submit them to article directories with your URL in the Author box, create a blog and update it consistently and make sure that you put your URL on the blog, find forums that your target market hangs out at and participate and if you are allowed, use your URL in your signature line and make it linkable, find directories that your target market may frequent and add your URL there. The possibilities are endless.

If you are marketing well, and have solid traffic, and the orders are not coming, then it’s time to take another look within your website and see where you think you may be able to improve. If you don’t know where to improve, feel free to contact us for a free website review.

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We purchased our house 6 years ago and a few years ago my husband got a job 40 miles away, one way, so we put our house up for sale. We put it up for sale right before the housing bubble burst and we had it up for sale for three years. We live out in the country and our asking price was reasonable for the size of the house, the location and the property that we had but still we had no takers.

One of the problems we ran into was our neighbors. They have an old house and they have a lot of cases of unfinished projectitis.  They have a lot of old lawnmowers, old motorcycles, and old cars laying around in their yard.  They are items that they purchased intending to fix up but some how never got around to it.  They don’t live right next door, they are kitty-corner from us and we have trees and a fence that the previous owners of our house put up so they didn’t have to look at the items.  Automatically because of these neighbors people turned their noses up at our house and weren’t interested.

Sure, they have stuff laying around but they don’t do anything illegal, it is their property therefore it is their right to have that stuff, I do not have rats, snakes etc coming over to my property because of their junk, they do not have parties at all hours of the night.  They leave us alone and we leave them. When we have talked to them, they have been nothing but polite and neighborly to us. People who don’t know them always ask us “how are they for neighbors?”  We always tell them the same thing, their fine. Actually besides their junk they are the best neighbors you could ask for.

I understand where these people are coming from because as human beings we are visual beings.  No matter how much people try to deny it, we judge by what we see and if your website is not up to par, you will be judged and you will lose clients.

It doesn’t matter if your SEO is remarkable, you are ranked number one on search engines for specific keywords or if you are the best business around, if your website is bad, you will lose clients.  If your website is sloppy, unorganized, and hard to navigate your visitors will notice that and that will reflect badly on you and your business.

As a small business, you will need all the help that you can get to make it a success so don’t cut corners by trying to do your website yourself if you have no knowledge of web design because there are several elements that makes a website good that you may not be aware of.  Hiring a good web designer could be worth it’s weight in gold when creating a professional, appealing website that gets you business.

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