VAClassroom is essentially a skill-based training center designed to equip Virtual Assistants with the exact "in-demand" skills that businesses are seeking right now in 2008. For example, I recently finished a teleseminar with Marty Fawnkey (Conference Call University) titled: "How Virtual Assistants can profit from the Social Media Explosion in 2008."  We discussed some key strategies on how Virtual Assistants can effectively tap into the hot Social Media VA niche. This teleseminar was essentially a "mini-course’ taken from one of the many comprehensive training courses offered at VAClassroom.

So, the niche opportunities for Virtual Assistants right now are endless! If you are interested in developing your niche skills and expanding your income opportunities, then VAClassroom is worth checking out!

Here is the link to the special offer that VAClassroom is running until 11:59pm (PST) on May 21st.

VAClassroom Special Offer

Tags: Virtual Assistant, Virtual Assistants, VAClassroom, Virtual Assistant Training

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Over the last year, we have seen a shift in thinking among Internet Businesses pertaining to Social Media. In 2007, business were asking the question (with skepticism): "Can Social Media Marketing really be profitable for my business? Is there really any value in hanging out in Facebook Groups, commenting on blogs, networking in Linkedin and sharing videos through YouTube?"

I think these questions have been effectively answered by many of the industry experts who have openly endorsed Social Media Marketing as a powerful business building channel.The real question Internet Businesses are asking in 2008 is: "Okay, we see that Social Media Marketing is a good thing, but how do we actually find the hours in the day to carry out these time-intensive Social Media Marketing activities?

The answer is: You won’t, but a Virtual Assistant can!

Presently, there are endless opportunities for Virtual Assistants to carve out an "in-demand niche in the Social Media realm.  With the right Social Media "know-how", Virtual Assistants can win more clients and grow their income opportunities as a Social Media Marketing VA!

Our sister site, VAClassroom is offering a FREE 1 hour Live tele-seminar on Monday May 19th, to discuss how Virtual Assistants can truly profit from the Social Media Movement in 2008. For more details and to sign-up, go to: 

http://www.vaclassroom.com/special/teleseminar.aspx

Apparently, the spots are filling up quickly, so be sure to sign-up to claim one of the 250 spots for the call -  it should be a good one! 

Tags: Virtual Assistant, Virtual Assistants, Virtual Assistant Training

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Since many of you are Internet Business owners, I am sure you have already experienced the buzz happening in the Virtual Assistant industry these days. It is certainly one of the fastest growing sectors of the Internet right now, with no slowing down in sight. More and more companies are quickly seeing the immense value in building virtual teams to help them take their businesses to new heights.

VAClassroom seeks to fill a key training gap by providing Virtual Assistants with practical and relevant  training courses on some of the important tasks businesses are currently outsourcing. The Virtual Training Center will be offering a membership-based site completed with new training courses and certifications, a VA Marketplace, Job Search Support, Live Coaching and many other valuable resources.

VAClassroom is currently running a pre-launch contest with a chance to win a "VA Business PowerPack" including a full website or blog makeover,  a 1 year membership to the popular business tools, Freshbooks and BaseCamp. The contest winners will be announced the day prior to the official launch of VAClassroom in early May.

For business owners such as yourself, this Virtual Assistant training portal will include a marketplace in which you can connect with skilled and trained VAs across many different niches and specializations. We will pass along more details once the marketplace is ready to go!

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Given the crazyness of my schedule over the last while, I was again confronted with challenges of maintaining a healthy work/life balance. While some of you may do this very well, as an Internet Entrepreneur, I find that some extra heavy bricks tend to surface constantly on the work side! I personally find that I constantly need to plaster my MAIN priorities in life on whiteboards, reminder notes, screensavers etc.. in order to keep focussed on that which is most important.

Caroline Middlebrook, one of the better blogger I have come across also shared recently about her own struggles in keeping focussed on her priorities. Based on her own experience, she outlines six steps to achieving the optimal worklife balance. I appreciated her one step "Procrastinate the Unnecessary"! I am as guilty as any in getting consumed by semi-important tasks that take away from those high priority tasks. Her post was a good "wake-up call" for sure!

Look forward to connecting with you all more regularly now!

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. I am actually been taking a short hiatus from my blog (as you probably noticed) to complete some other priority projects, but will be back in the swing of things next week!

Take some time to slow down to spend some time with the ones you love this day! I am hitting the romantic comedy, "27 Dresses" with my wife tonight. No, she is not dragging me to this "Chick flick" as I happen to be a sucker for romantic comedies. So, I would be curious know what your favorite Romantic comedy of all time is? I was thinking about mine and I have to say "Notting Hill" (Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant) would top my list - Killer funny and rather touching - two thumbs up!

Have a great day!

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The first one on my list is Scribd.com

Scribd.com  is a collaborative document (and file) sharing  and syndication site that has huge potential to drive serious targeted traffic while significantly improving your Search listings and rankings. Scribd currently sees about 10 million unique users per month visting, posting and sharing documents. Scribd is a social community with some key distinguishing features from that of popular article directories like ezinearticles.com:

• Allows you to upload pretty much any type of document or file including PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets, Word Documents, Power Point Presentations and even image files like JPG and GIF files. This flexibility allows users to syndicate their content in ALL shapes, sizes and formats!
• Enables you to embed your uploaded documents in a blog, Facebook Profile and another external website.
• Unlimited storage space - can upload as many documents as you want.
• Quickly indexed by Google and the major SEs thus further increasing your search traffic and rankings
• Able to share documents with a private group of friends or make it completely public
• Collaborate and share feedback on each other’s documents

Scribd is a great channel for connecting with targeted groups that are relevant to your products and services. By providing awesome targeted content to your groups and across applicable categories in Scribd, this will build your reputation and ultimately increase the traffic to your respective site. Like other social media sites, Scribd allows you to tag your documents with your keywords in order to be found by the right audience.

Scribd definitely makes my top 5 list for the best content sharing and syndication channels on the net at this point. As mentioned, over the next few days,  I will feature my other top 4 content-sharing sites that you must include to your link-building strategies!

Tags: Link building, Scribd, Content Sharing Sites, Content Syndication, Social Media

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Don’t get me wrong, my personal productivity is probably better than the average person and yet I am still bogged with jumbled priorities, overloaded schedules and simply too much work to do! Can you relate?

This week, I was consumed by a couple key projects that the majority of my regular priorities went out the door such as my business blog. If you follow my blog relatively closely, you might have noticed that I was MIA last week  - ZERO posts. There were a lot of things that simply did not get done last week. Now, hindsight is always 20/20, but looking back at my week, I could have better processed the important tasks in order to accomplish so much more with so much less stress!

I am not sure if you have read "Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress Free Productivity by Management Consultant, David Allen, but this book has provided some invaluable tools that have enhanced my productivity to new heights. Of course, all those tools remained in the toolbox last week and were not implemented whatsoever - I was too busy to implement them:)!

I want you leave you with this below diagram (rough copy from a book) which is a little hard to read, but very helpful in processing your daily priorities and tasks. I would definitely recommend picking up the book or a "Personal Productivity" pill if it ever hits the market - I will be first in line!

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With the Page Rank jump, I spent some time this week reflecting on the SEO tasks and activites we had performed over the past few months that might have helped the cause here. Now, before I share my "Simple Truth" (and I mean simple), I must make the disclaimer that I am not a Search Engine Optimization Guru in any way, shape or form. Yes, I read a lot of Search Marketing blogs, ebooks, ezines etc…, but am really just trying to keep up with this rapidly evolving industry like every other business.

Now, as I reviewed our many activities, it all came down to this one simple truth: A steady steam of relevant and keyword-targeted content was the cornerstone to our Search Engine Optimization success! You are probably saying to yourself, "Craig, you are a rocket-scientist, this is revolutionary - NOT! Everybody knows that "Content is King". Yes, content is king no doubt, but what separates the successful SEO campaigns from the medeocre ones is the ability to produce the RIGHT content with the RIGHT keywords via the RIGHT distribution channels. This is where certain web companies leave others in the dust! Not to say that we have arrived with our own SEO efforts, but we are certainly starting to reap the benefits of our content creation and distribution strategies.

I would say right now that 70%+ of our content distribution has occurred via a multitude of Social Media channels, such as Scribd, Digg, Squidoo and Delicious. The other 30% has been focussed on Article Syndication using such tools at ArticleMarketer as well as manual submission to industry-specific article directories.  In looking at our recent results, we have big plans in 2008 to escalate our content writing and syndication via powerful new social media outlets such as Hubpages. There is definitely a Big Web 2.0 Wave that each of us can ride for a time that will be instrumental in improving our SE results.

 For those of you that are still trying to ascertain what keywords you need to be optimizing your content for, I would suggest a couple quick strategies:

1. We started regularly using Word Tracker to find those long-tail keywords that saw the best volume but had the fewest competitors. It does take some some time to separate the wheat from the chaff, but well worth it! You can also use other tools like Keyword Discovery and SEOdigger to help the cause as well. Also, I had featured Hittail a couple weeks back - another great tool that idenfies those long-tail keywords (3-4+ keyword phrases) you might consider using in your blog posts, articles and website content.

2.  I would run a PPC campaign via Google (and possibly Yahoo and MSN) and identify those particular keywords that are converting at the highest level over a period of time and start to optimize those in your website content and syndicate articles and such based around those keywords. This can take 2-3+ months to determine, but again, well worth it in order to target the most relevant keywords for your site and user audience.

In my next post, I am going to outline the most effective traditional and Social Media channels for distributing your relevant content. Have a great weekend everyone!

Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Website Optimization, SEO Strategies, SEM Strategies

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