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Looking to Upgrade Your Skills?

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VAclassroom has launched signup for their 2011 Summer Skill Camp. This Skill Camp consists of eight 90-minute clinics over 4 weeks. Topics covered include mobile marketing, Google Tools, creating compelling service packages, measuring social media ROI, strategies for launching an ecommerce product campaign, Facebook contests, monitoring clients’ social media activity & improving Google ranking with proven link building & SEO strategies.

The 8 clinics will be held on Tuesdays & Thursdays at 3 PM Eastern starting July 5th. Sessions will be recorded & will be available to watch later if you miss one or need to review the material again.

Oh yeah, did I mention there’s “early bird” discount pricing ($100 off) through June 28th? You can get more information by watching the video below or at this link.

[iframe_loader src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/nWPO1IpCAxE?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen width=”560″ height=”349″]

Is E-Mail a Secret Weapon for Social Media?

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In my daily reading of some of my favorite social media related blogs, I ran across a post by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, about email and social media. It’s not “full of information” but I found his thoughts on the relationship between email and social media success very interesting. I thought it might be an interesting read for you also. Here is an excerpt with a link to the full post on Fred’s blog below.

…I remember four or five years ago, people, myself included, were asking if social media was going to lead to the end of email as we know it. In an ironic twist of fate, it turns out that email is social media’s secret weapon. And more and more social applications are leveraging the power of email to drive repeat usage and retention…

Social Media’s Secret Weapon – Email – blog post by Fred Wilson.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between social media and email? Have you found email campaigns increase the quality of the social media presence for yourself or your clients?

10th Annual IVAA Live Summit

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Many of you may know I’ve spent last week in Portland, Oregon at the 10th Annual International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA) Live Summit. It was a wonderful week of learning and spending time with good friends, getting to know current acquaintances better (turning some of them into friends) and meet new ones. But, I wonder how many people understand how much of ourselves committee members put into an event like the IVAA Live Summit.

Planning for an IVAA Live Summit literally starts 2 years prior to the event. Since the venue for the next year’s Summit is announced 1 year prior (at the end of the current Summit) multiple venues must be researched (including estimated travel costs for attendees); availability, food, beverage, lodging and venue rental prices must be quoted by potential locations; the final venue location must be chosen and the contract must be signed 1 1/2 to 2 years prior to the actual event date.

While for many people a week at a business conference is almost a vacation, when you’re on the planning committee, that week is anything but a vacation. After literally 2 years of planning, many of the committee members arrive a day early – some 2 or 3 days early – to make sure everything at the venue is ready for the attendees; walking through with venue staff making sure all the tables, chairs, food & beverage plans, audio/visual is set up, swag is ready for attendees, sponsors have what they need, all shipments have been received and accounted for, etc.

The IVAA Live Summit Committee members do all this without pay. We volunteer countless hours of our time, pay our own travel, lodging and registration fees, then, many of the committee members miss out on attending the sessions taking care of the details.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’m about to begin my 3rd year on the Summit Planning Committee. Your IVAA Live Summit Committee works hard to make sure those connected to the Virtual Assitant industry have a top-notch conference to attend so they will have a place to learn about the new trends in the industry, learn new skills, connect (or re-connect) with others in and around our industry. One of the best ways to show your appreciation for all the hard work is to attend an IVAA Live Summit.

The next IVAA Live Summit will be April 17 – 20, 2012 in Memphis, Tennessee. Show your support and invest in your virtual assistant business by attending the Summit in 2012. Registration will be open after the IVAA Online Summit and there are generally big discounts for IVAA members who register during the “early bird” registration period. Attendee registration prices for 2012 have not yet been set, but historically, early registration has been in the $250-$280 range with full registration in the $500 range. Travel varies greatly depending on where you’re coming from, but average airfare is in the $300 range if you book early, and the IVAA attendee price for a room at the Peabody (where the Summit will be held) will be $169 per night (most attendees get together with a roommate or 2 and split the cost of the room – plus it’s more fun with a roomie!). Two lunches and 2 – 3 breakfasts are generally included in the price of your registration as are beverages and light snacks during sessions.

There are 48 weeks until the beginning of the Summit in Memphis. For most attendees, all costs could be covered by putting aside $22 per week starting now. That would net $1,100 in your Summit Savings by the first day of the Summit. Breaking it down into milestones you’d have $528 set aside by the time early registration begins – more than enough to pay for your early registration. Depending on where you’re coming from, you’ll probably have enough to pay for airfare by Thanksgiving – which is when you’ll probably want to start looking for flights. By the time Summit starts you’ll have enough put aside for a room at the Peabody without needing a roommate to split the cost. But, again, it’s MUCH more fun with a roomie!

The committee works hard to put these events together for us, so attend, learn, enjoy, connect! (And think about volunteering!)

Change a Facebook Profile to a Facebook Page? Yes You Can!

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If you are one of the countless people who set up a Facebook Profile for your business instead of a Facebook Page you’ve no doubt eventually regretted that decision but don’t want to loose all the “friends” you’ve amassed. Now you don’t have to loose those invaluable connections! Facebook has released a tool that will allow you to “convert” your profile to a page.

This is an excellent tool for those public figures, small business owners, freelancers, etc. who need to convert to the much more “business” friendly page (no “approving” friends, no “limits” on the number of people who can connect with your page, etc.) but don’t want to loose all the connections they’ve made.

Be aware, there ARE limitations to what this tool will do, so you’ll need to download all your profile information BEFORE converting, but all your “friends” will be converted over to people who “like” your page without them having to do anything.

Read more about this on Facebook’s FAQ about converting your Profile to a Page.

QuickBooks 2011 Release 6

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QuickBooks® 2011 Release 6 will be available for download Thursday, March 17 at 12 p.m. PST. This major update introduces some significant improvements for many product versions.

For a complete list of enhancements and release notes or to download and install the manual update, click here, then select the appropriate product.

The automatic update in-product will be available on Tuesday, March 22, 2011. You are encouraged to allow this automatic update and to accept the patch.

RELEASE 6 DETAILS

Below is a chart that outlines what’s available with R6 for each product version.

Below are just a few of the enhancements highlighted in this Alert:

  1. Transactions in History Pane
  2. Improved Memorized Transactions
  3. Batch Invoice for Time and Expenses

 

TRANSACTIONS IN HISTORY PANE

Save valuable time when accessing important information related to transactions.

What Intuit did: The new right pane tab on the history window shows transaction specific information like the items above. In addition, you have the ability to create notes on supported transactions, saving you time when accessing.

IMPROVED MEMORIZED TRANSACTIONS

With this improvement, you’ll save time when entering the same transaction multiple times!
What Intuit did:
A new window displays a list of the memorized transactions that are due to be entered:

They also improved the wording of the scheduling options to reduce confusion.

BATCH INVOICE FOR TIME AND EXPENSES

With this new feature, you will reduce the time needed to invoice multiple customers for billable time and expenses.

What Intuit did: The previous workflow only allowed a single invoice to be generated.

NOW, you can view billable transactions for multiple customers and view the billable amounts for time, expenses, mileage and purchased items.

You select the customers to be invoiced, generate invoices and select delivery options (email or print).

NOTES

1. If you cancel your ProAdvisor Program membership or do not renew your membership, access to the automatic updates that are part of QuickBooks Accountant Plus will terminate immediately. You will continue to be able to use the QuickBooks Accountant software but will lose the enhancements included in previous updates and you will not receive enhancement updates going forward.
2. LaunchPad functionality will be available for QuickBooks Pro/Premier+ and QuickBooks Accountant+ for ProAdvisors by mid-April.
3. The release affects Windows desktop versions of 2011.
4. Batch Invoice for Time and Expenses is only available in Premier versions of QuickBooks.

Looking for a Subcontractor for HTML Ezines and Blog Postings

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I am looking for a sub (or two) to take over some of my clients’ HTML newsletters & WordPress blog postings. All content is provided – NO WRITING NECESSARY.

You must be able to comfortably work with HTML. Nothing “fancy,” but basic knowledge is a MUST. CLEAN HTML templates are provided as a starting point for my clients’ ezines. Someone with Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup or the like is preferred. If you can code using a plain text editor, that’s fine – just no visual editors – I’ve had too many nightmare issues with the code when people have used visual editors.

Currently, my clients are using either iContact or 1SC for their ezines. Knowledge of sending ezines via these mediums is a plus, but not necessary. (I can show you how to set up the ezines & send tests and I would do the final launch.)

I’m spending about 7-10 hours per month on blog posting & ezines and I would prefer to sub these tasks out.

Please reply via email only to rfp@qualityva.com with your subcontract rates for this type of work as well as your usual turn-around time once content has been provided. Be prepared to provide samples of ezines you’ve done in the past if requested. Do not send samples with your original response.

The subject line for your response should be:

HTML RFP – First Name Last Name (or your company name)

Please be sure to put YOUR first and last name or your company name in the subject line.

Responses that have not provided a subcontract rate, turnaround time or proper subject line will not be considered.

Response deadline: August 4, 2010

1ShoppingCart Hit by Dreaded DoS Attack

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Many of you may know that 1ShoppingCart (and it’s many “white label” versions) was down for most of yesterday afternoon. When I logged into a client’s 1ShoppingCart account today, the following message from 1ShoppingCart popped up.

(1ShoppingCart has many “white label” versions/”private resellers” such as KickstartCart, Cartville, 1AutomationWiz, PracticePaySolutions, and others – anything that starts with “https://www.mcssl.com/” in the URL when you log in.)

Yesterday, July 14th 2010, we encountered a service interruption from approximately 3:18PM EDT until 7:20PM EDT.

We apologize for yesterday’s service interruption. We understand that it is our responsibility to ensure best-in-class service availability. We take this responsibility very seriously and therefore want to share with you the facts. It is important to note that throughout this outage, your data remained entirely safe and secure.

Yesterday’s service interruption was caused by a denial of service attack, which was aimed towards our systems. A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all. As you may know, every major provider is attacked every single day, and on occasion perpetrators achieve some or all of their goals. Even some of the biggest websites on the Internet are not immune to these types of attacks.

Our monitoring systems alerted us of a potential issue at 3:18PM EDT and immediately our Engineering teams began work to defend against this attack. We are confident that this outage, while it may have seemed lengthy, was mitigated as quickly as possible. During the entire time, our Client Services team was posting constant updates to our Twitter account in an attempt to keep you informed on our progress. We appreciated your support and understanding while we worked to get you back online.

The nature of these attacks are constantly evolving and each attack is different. We will continue to invest in our systems and continue to work endlessly to regain your confidence in our system and make 1ShoppingCart the most reliable and stable shopping cart solution available. We commit to you, our customers, that there is nothing more important to us than ensuring 1ShoppingCart is there when you need it.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please call 1-888-792-1961.

How Many Times Are You Going To Follow Me?

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There is something rather comical going on in my Twitter account. I began following a particular last year because they were a client of a friend of mine. I never really paid a whole lot of attention to their status updates because after a while the updates started to not be relevant to what she’s doing (or claims to be doing) in her business venture – absolutely NOTHING personal being tweeted, nothing about what’s going on with the business, a few re-tweets here and there and very little interaction. The Facebook pages for this person aren’t any better.

Anyway, I must admit I haven’t given my Twitter follower list a whole lot of attention this past year, so I’m still “technically” following this person’s Twitter account. Several months ago I started getting notifications that this person was following me – a couple of times a month. It was kind of funny at first and became somewhat of a private joke between me and a couple of other VAs who knew what was going on (the same thing was happening to them – from the same Twitter account). Then the notices started coming closer together. This past week I’ve gotten a notice that this person is following me on Twitter EVERY DAY.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Auto-follows bite. I’ll admit that I did do the “auto-follow” thing for a few weeks but I quickly discovered I was following a lot of people who did a whole lot of tweeting about a whole lot of crap. So I promptly turned off my auto-following.

Do you have any funny Twitter follow stories?