Customer service is an important aspect of every business. When customers aren’t satisfied they go elsewhere. For business owners that don’t have the time to provide proper customer service, they can hire a virtual assistant with the skills to do the job.

What is customer service? It can be as simple as answering an email from a customer in a timely fashion. Or, it is providing a FAQ page on the business website. To a customer, having their needs met is the definition of good customer service.

The Market

After business gains clients through marketing and advertising, that is only half of the job. They may have fifty one-time customers who spend $100 each on the site. That is $5,000 worth of business.

If poor customer service drives them away, that $5,000 will seem like small change in the long run. Better still are the same fifty customers spending $50 each time they visit because of customer loyalty inspired by great customer service. Now, the business makes $2,500 each time these fifty customers visit. A satisfied customer is the best marketing tool a business can have.

Because the customer has the power to make or break a business, treating them like they are important (which they are) is a crucial step in the business plan. Businesses use email systems, answering services, automated phone messages and instant messaging services to deal with customer issues. But, each of these types of service ideas needs someone to effectively manage them in order for it to work.

Customer Service Expert Virtual Assistant Tasks

When sales drop off because of customer dissatisfaction, it’s time to get help. Virtual assistants are trained in communication skills. These skills not only benefit you in finding clients but doing your job as well.

As a virtual assistant customer expert you will be working with the client to solve their customer problems. Your work for them will be done with their customers and reported back to them. Part of your job will be:

· Addressing customer complaints (calls, emails, IM)

· Handling product issues between client and their customers

· Answering customer questions

· Sending out emails, catalogs and newsletters to subscription customers

How broad your services really depend on what the business is in need of. They can give you leeway to offer customer refunds, exchanges and other offers depending on the situation at hand. This requires that you have access to customer accounts databases and privileges to update them.

Much dissatisfaction with outsourcing customer service by customers is the lack of knowledge of the product or the company. As a virtual assistant specializing in customer service, you will become familiar with the company and their products as a common practice so that you can do your job well. It is an added bonus for you to have worked in the customer service industry before.

A virtual assistant brings skill in communication to the table when dealing with customer service issues. Your work with create lifelong customers for your clients.

One niche that virtual assistants are pursuing is that of a web designer. More and more brick and mortar businesses are taking their products to the Internet. Without the savvy to create the base for their online presence, they will need your help.

What is a web designer? A web designer is someone who works to set up websites for other businesses. If you have knowledge in this area and are talented to boot, you can take your virtual assisting business in that direction.

The Market

The Internet is the next great frontier. Millions upon millions of people use the Internet everyday to look for information, conduct business and buy merchandise or services. The way into this world is through your online presence. It is the way that people learn about you and your business.

Web designing has a tremendous learning curve. Most people don’t know anything about HTML or RSS except that they are letters. It can be intimidating for someone who wants to build a website (for an existing business or as an Internet business) to do so and not make mistakes.

Mistakes can cost you business. Pages that won’t load or graphics that are too loud can turn visitors away before they can see what the business has to offer. Many businesses would avoid this part if they could.

The area of web design is ripe for the picking for any virtual assistant with experience. Website designers who can take the ideas of the business owner and turn them into reality are and will continue to be in demand.

Virtual assistant website designers perform tasks like:

• Website setup
• Blog setup
• Monitoring forum discussions
• Page setup
• Search engine optimization of pages
• Uploading files, videos, audio and podcasts
• Troubleshoot coding problems
• Website maintenance

Visitors look for different things in a website. Placing ads at the top of the page are more eye-catching. Dedicating each webpage to a different product allows more information about the product to be readily available. Well-informed visitors are more likely to buy the product that way.

These are just a few of the tasks you may be called upon to perform. Believe it or not, just taking care of the website duties is a weight off of the mind of business owners both small and large who want to concentrate on the business side of things and not pulling their hair out trying to manage graphics or blog posts.

The good news is that any one of these areas can further be defined as a sub-niche. Within web design you can concentrate on website maintenance or simply the initial setup. Both are much needed services. Any virtual assistant, who likes the technical side of the Internet, will see their passion fulfilled as a website designer.

Many virtual assistants worked in other areas of corporate America before they went into business for themselves. If your area was real estate, think about the opportunities waiting for you as a real estate virtual assistant.

Real estate agents either work for a company or they can go out on their own and work as an independent. To make money, they sell homes and other properties. Agents stay busy with listings, showings, sales and other projects. Combine that with their office responsibilities and the “little details” and you have way too much for one person to handle.

The Market

As any business owner will tell you, it is hard to juggle promotion, client satisfaction, daily operations and professional affiliations all at once. Many new businesses like an independent real estate agent are not in the position to hire new employees at first. Besides that, the pick of local applicants may be less than qualified to do the job without some hand holding at first.

The real estate industry was among the first to use virtual assistants to meet their needs. Virtual assistants had the necessary skills to handle bookkeeping, accounting, database management and various other office activities. Virtual assistants that once worked in real estate decided to use that knowledge to build a niche business for themselves. As such, they were able to expand their services to real estate agents beyond just the basics.

Duties of a Real Estate VA

Virtual assistants that have been in the real estate industry know that an agent needs help with basic office needs and much more. With that in mind, virtual assistants, like you can offer services like:

• Business marketing plans (creating company logos, brands)
• Website management (virtual tours, website content)
• Contacting potential clients (home sellers, home buyers, FSBOs)
• Coordinating listing activities (data entry, promotional info, presentations)
• Closing activities (escrow, inspections, signings)
• Keep track of appointments
• Create new business leads

With the knowledge of real estate, clients will seek you out to make their job easier. You will be able to propose new areas for business growth, create sales copy depending on the area and the situation with the housing market and deal with the questions that customers ask but agents don’t always have time to answer.

Many real estate virtual assistants work with local agents and develop a professional relationship. With your expertise, you are not limited to that though. Maybe you deal mainly with website services. In that arena, you can create stunning websites and virtual tours for clients in any time zone as long as they provide the needed information for you to get started.

A virtual assistant in the area of real estate is a vital member of the team. Your knowledge helps the agents to concentrate on the business of helping clients to buy or sell property and leave the rest to you.

The virtual assistant business is booming. Businesses have realized the advantages of hiring someone to help them with their business tasks. As a virtual assistant you can work to meet the needs of any and every client or you can change your tack and specialize in one or two areas of business.

Have you heard the phrase, “Less is more”? It’s true when you are talking about virtual assistants. A general virtual assisting business lets you take in clients from all walks of life. That’s good if you like that, but sometimes the learning curve can be quite big with certain projects. When you specialize, the client gets the benefit of your accumulated knowledge on each and every project.

The reason you started your virtual assisting business in the first place was to go to work for yourself. Going into business as your own boss shouldn’t be an unhappy proposition. If it’s not a law it should be, wouldn’t you agree? As the person in charge, you have the right to decide what work you do or do not do.

Take your virtual assistant business to the next level with niching. Niching involves tightening your business plan to include one main area of expertise. When you stick to one thing, you become good at it. You can even call yourself an expert in the field. Clients will pay a lot of money to work with someone who knows their stuff. You can be that person.

Specializing

How do you specialize? First, decide what services you enjoy doing for your client. It could be website design, social networking, handling personal matters or another area altogether. Many virtual assistants worked in the public or private sector before they became entrepreneurs. Use that knowledge to create a niche for your new business.

Reasons to Niche

The first reason is more money for your services. Because you provide the same services to all your clients, you can ask for a higher rate. You can make the same profit that you did before but with fewer clients.

Secondly, niching lets you work at something that you love to do. It is a proven fact that when you are happy, you work better. That goes for employees and business owners. You gladly answer questions for customers or take on a trying task.

Thirdly, you can keep your clients satisfied with great customer service and job integrity. Your clients get your best work always and will recommend you to others. You build a solid faithful client base.

Specializing as a virtual assistant is a way to increase your business. Clients get an expert in the field and you get to work a business that you love.

We all experience times when something unexpected happens and we need to make extra money. One of the fastest ways I know to get money coming in is by selling reports. The problem is, if you are on a tight schedule, you may not have time to put a report together...or do you?   Discover how to make money selling special reports to online biz owners. This quick report includes practical suggestions and action steps to get started without any huge investments or steep learning curves.   It's easy to get started. Grab your free copy here:

Yup, I said it.

Entrepreneurs everywhere are spending a FORTUNE on info-products, coaches, teleseminars, in-person events, membership-programs, etc. and it’s getting them NOWHERE.

Now, I’m obviously not advocating spending zero dollars because let’s face it, we all do need a bit of help. What I AM encouraging is to stop spending your money with everyone on the planet and find one person you resonate with, is where you want to be and gets the latest stuff happening on the web.

Otherwise, you end up like most entrepreneurs. You hire a coach and then another coach and then a guru and then you buy big group coaching programs and then you attend in-person events with high ticket prices and then you hire an online business manager and then a web designer and then an SEO expert and… and… and…

You get the point (I hope)…

What happens is that instead of listening to ONE person who knows what they are doing and is where you want to be, you are listening to ten or twenty or thirty people who all tell you DIFFERENT things and make your head spin. All of these ideas that you’re paying for are great except nothing is being implemented because you just don’t know where to start.

So, if you’re not making any money and you’re scratching your head trying to figure out why, even after all of this great advice you are getting nowhere, FIRE half (or more) of the people you’ve hired to “coach” you and find yourself an awesome coach, strategist or someone who can lead you alongside your own amazing and brilliant thoughts and ideas.

Do so and I guarantee that you’ll make more money this year than you ever have.

Put down your wallets… and watch this video.

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Erin Blaskie is the owner of Business Services, ETC - A Global Internet Marketing & Implementation Firm. Her company helps businesses from around the world take their practice online and create huge success using various internet marketing tactics. Erin herself has been featured in three print books (”Becoming an Online Business Manager” by Tina Forsyth, “My So-Called Freelance Life” by Michelle Goodman, and “The Official AWE Emerging Trends Guide 2009” compiled by the Association of Web Entrepreneurs), honored as Office Arrow’s 2008 Runner-Up Business Woman of the Year, interviewed by countless gurus and media personalities (John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, Sheri McConnell, Stacy Karacostas, Gina McNew) and featured in major news publications (ABCNews.com, Ottawa Citizen and Employment Journal).

What's the biggest difference between people who are successful in social media and those who are not?  Simple--the successful people have built themselves an audience. 

An audience doesn't necessarily mean having 10,000 followers here or 5,000 friends there.  At its most basic level it might be that.  But what's a bunch of friends and followers if they aren't helping you to grow your business? 

Consider this: what if your "audience" isn't anyone who would be interested in what it is you offer?  What if they were people just looking to boost their numbers without any interest in engaging with you in any sort of dialogue?  What if they were primarily focused on promoting their own stuff the majority of the time?  These types of scenarios are clearly not ideal.

So what should you really be looking to achieve?  Building the right kind of audience with social media means your participation there is leading you to be seen as a credible, trust-worthy source who may be able to help others solve whatever problem they may be having.

It means you are reaching a market of people you have deliberately sought out through search strategies who might need what you have.
When you've grabbed the attention of your followers and friends and built interest and credibility, you now have a way to gain traffic to your website, capture more leads and continue building and strengthening the relationship.

It's all in the three C's:

1.  Content:  Content is the lifeblood of successful social media marketers.  What reasons are you giving people to listen to you? This goes two ways: sharing your own helpful posts, links, tips and resources--and promoting and sharing the content of others.  This does three main things: establishes your expertise, drives traffic to your site, and provides your audience with helpful information.  Remember, the content you are sharing should not always be your own.

2.  Conversation: Simply by being seen as someone who provides great content in the social media space you will naturally find yourself engaged in conversation.  Having these one on one conversations is what is going to make you stand out among the noise and deepen the relationship.  In addition, when you make it a habit to promote others, this brings more "social appreciation" your way.  These interactions cause others to seek out more information about you beyond where you've made the initial connection.

3.  Conversion:  Once you have converted someone to a newsletter subscriber, blog subscriber or paying client or customer, you've taken the steps toward acquiring another raving fan.  These loyal folks will not only bring you more sales, but will be much more likely to sing your praises to others out in the social media universe.  This is how you grow your "tribe."
Do you see how simple and effective it is to build an audience of captivated friends and followers?   Do you see the difference this could make to your bottom line?
I know you do. :)



© 2009 Communicate Value. All Rights Reserved.

Christine Gallagher, The Online Marketing and Social Media Success Coach, is founder of Communicate Value, where she is dedicated to teaching small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. To get your F.R.E.E. 5-Part E-Course and receive her weekly marketing & success articles on leveraging technology, building relationships and boosting your profits, visit http://communicatevalue.com.

We're a society of want-it-nowers, always looking for instant results. We love our credit cards, microwaves and drive-thrus too much for this mentality not to creep into our online marketing activities.

It takes time to build a list, to put out good content, to be seen as an expert in your niche. Conversion of the leads you capture through social media is almost never immediate.

One of the most frequent complaints I hear from small business owners looking to get more clients and customers by building an online presence is that it "takes too much time."

"Oh, yeah, that would be nice but I just don't have the time."

Many of these people have an existing offline business and are either struggling to attract more business, or are burning themselves out dealing with day to day responsibilities, endless networking meetings, seeing one-on-one clients and generally putting out fires. Therefore, adding online marketing into the mix sounds like one more "thing" they just can't imagine juggling.

The irony is that the internet can provide the leverage that would allow these small business owners and solopreneurs some of the relief they are so desperate for.  It's not a magic pill and it does take time. (I know, they don't want to hear that.)

The other group consists of those who are trying to build an online business and grow impatient with not seeing those quick results.  Sorry, but it's not going to happen that way. In my experience, success comes as the result of consistently doing small, sometimes boring tasks day in and day out.

You might not see any fruit from your labor for weeks or months on end.  But it is a result of those consistent actions that momentum will build and progress will be made.  This is especially true with social media.

"But I have 5,768 followers and 2,987 friends!  No one is buying from me!"

"I've been on Twitter for 2 months and I'm not making any money!"

In this case, it's not only time, but what you are spending your time doing there.  Are you providing value, having conversations, driving traffic outside of these sites?

Yes, there is a lot to learn--but there is so much information available out there.  Online marketing and social media can be absolutely amazing for your business IF you are willing to learn how to do it right and make the investment of time.

What are you spending your time on?

© 2009 Communicate Value. All Rights Reserved.

Christine Gallagher, The Online Marketing and Social Media Success Coach, is founder of Communicate Value, where she is dedicated to teaching small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. To get your F.R.E.E. 5-Part E-Course and receive her weekly marketing & success articles on leveraging technology, building relationships and boosting your profits, visit http://communicatevalue.com.

Having a blog is a great step in the right direction if you are looking for ways to dive into social media.  Conversations are at the core of what it's about, after all.  However, there is a lot more that you can do once you've got that blog up and running.  You can think of your blog as a hub connecting all of your social media activities--and you'll want to encourage visitors to interact with you socially in as many ways as possible.  Here are some ideas that you can run with:

Social badges, buttons and widgets (oh my!): Why not advertise your social presence while you have your readers' attention?  There are many different ways to do this. 

Facebook recently introduced Fan Boxes for those users with Fan Pages. These allow Page administrators to embed the most recent activity from their Page right in their website or blog.  If you don't have a Fan Page and want to let people know about your personal Facebook profile instead, you can also add a badge to your site provided by Facebook.  Use the "Create a Profile Badge" link all the way at the bottom under your picture. 

Facebook Connect is another option--this is a tool that allows software, websites, mobile devices and more to integrate with Facebook and send information between them.

Want to encourage your readers to follow you on Twitter?  A simple Google search shows that there are many different badges out there to add to your site.  Twittercounter.com has one of my favorites--the "big bird button" has a sleek design that displays your number of followers. 

Finally, Google Friend Connect and MyBlogLog are two online services that allow web users to connect with their friends on different websites.  These free services help foster community around blogs and blog authors.

Submission buttons: If you use the Wordpress blog platform, a wonderful plugin to use is "Sociable."  This adds a row of buttons to the bottom of your posts for various social sites and tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon and more.  This way, readers can easily submit your content to be bookmarked, voted on and shared.

If you aren't a Wordpress user, the ShareThis or AddThis buttons are a great alternative.

Share-friendly content: It goes without saying that you want to add content to your blog that provides lots of value for your readers.  This is what builds your subscriber base and ultimately determines your success.  Some content is more "shareable" than others. 

As one example, people just love lists.  "Top 10 tips on...." "7 Ways to...." -you get the idea.  Consider adding these types of posts to the mix, because readers are more apt to share them. 

It's also worth mentioning headlines.  Keep in mind what might be attention-grabbing when you write your blog posts' titles.  People will be more likely to not only read further, but to share it with others and have those people share it too.

These days, people expect to be able to interact with you when they visit your site.  Make it super simple for them and they'll be back for more!


© 2009 Communicate Value. All Rights Reserved.

Christine Gallagher, The Online Marketing and Social Media Success Coach, is founder of Communicate Value, where she is dedicated to teaching small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. To get your F.R.E.E. 5-Part E-Course and receive her weekly marketing & success articles on leveraging technology, building relationships and boosting your profits, visit http://communicatevalue.com.

Twitter and Facebook are not the only social media sites out there--not by a long shot.  But they are of course two of the most well known and widely used.  They are also very similar in that they both essentially function as "status updates."  Because of this similarity, some really great tools and applications have come out which allow users to integrate the two.  Here are six of the tools I have used and like:

Twitter clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck: These are two Twitter desktop clients that allow you to browse your friends' Facebook status updates and update your own status right from their interface--no need to have a web browser open or be logged into the Twitter or Facebook sites.

Twitter or Selective Twitter Status applications: These two Facebook applications allow your tweets to automatically be posted to your profile.  Selective Twitter Status is great because you decide which specific tweets go to update your Facebook status by adding #fb after them.  This way your friends who aren't familiar with Twitter lingo aren't confused by your frequent status updates.

Vlingo application: Vlingo is a free application for the Blackberry, Nokia and iPhone.  It allows you to update your Facebook or Twitter status using your voice right from your phone!

FriendFeed application:  If you use FriendFeed, which consolidates all of your social media activities across different networks in one place, you can add the Facebook FriendFeed application.  If you are importing your Twitter feed, every time you tweet it will post to your Facebook wall.  This may be preferable to updating your status with every tweet such as with the Twitter for Facebook application.

Tweetpo.st: Tweetpo.st is a very cool site which allows you to post tweets as Facebook status updates, post links you tweet on your Facebook wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed), ignore @replies, change @mentions to real names and more.  It does all of this by using Facebook Connect.

Custom Profile Box or Extended Info applications: Finally, if you are just looking for a way to let your Facebook friends know that you tweet and encourage them to follow you, you can add one of these Facebook applications.  They both allow you to insert a graphic or text, which you can then easily link to your Twitter profile.  For example, I added a clickable Twitter bird logo that reads "follow me on Twitter."

Now you can save time and expend less effort on the two most popular social sites by using these helpful (and free!) social networking tools.

© 2009 Communicate Value. All Rights Reserved.

Christine Gallagher, The Online Marketing and Social Media Success Coach, is founder of Communicate Value, where she is dedicated to teaching small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. To get your F.R.E.E. 5-Part E-Course and receive her weekly marketing & success articles on leveraging technology, building relationships and boosting your profits, visit http://communicatevalue.com.