Virtual Assistance & WordPress Solutions for Coaches
Here is the long overdue- Part 3 of “Selecting the Best WordPress Theme for You”.
In Part 1 – we covered the wide variety of “Free Themes” available
In Part 2 – we covered the pros and cons of “Bulk Themes”
Here in Part 3 we cover my favorite – Premium Themes.
A Premium Theme is one where you pay for a theme that has been thoroughly tested and usually comes with great support not only from the developer but from the community that has been built around it. [Read more...]
When you are ready to start a new website project or re-vamp a current site it is easy to say, let’s go, get it done and learn along the way. While I agree that there is a time to Ready, Fire, Aim, there is also something to be said for pre-planning and putting some thought behind what your end goal is.
One of the projects on my list is to develop a set of Planning FUNbooks (who wants to work 
!) for Membership Sites & Websites. To walk you through the planning stage, to the installation & set up phase to the getting ready to launch phase. With questions, checklists, charts, eventually the works to walk you through the process with options to consider and most importantly helping you nail down, “The Why” of the project.
This is an opportunity to share what I have learned and what I continue to learn with each client project I work on. Over the next few weeks I will be blogging tips and ideas to help me flesh out the steps and get some feedback from you on what questions you have when starting a project like this.
If you have questions right now, put your comment below, I would love to answer and help out if I can.
There has been a lot of talk in the past year or two about membership sites, how to use them and how to make tons of money from them.
There are definitely entrepreneurs out there who make a lot of money from membership sites – to be honest from what I have seen they are few and far between. Don’t get me wrong, a well done membership site can absolutely be a money maker, the potential is there and there for the taking. However, what I see happening over and over again is the idea of throwing up a membership site, inviting some people and then the money will start rolling in.
Sorry, but it ain’t going to happen that way! Membership sites take work. They take planning, forethought and management after the fact. When I walk someone through the process of setting up a membership site they often get frustrated by all my questions. There are some that barely answer and some that realize oh, I didn’t think of that and will take a step back for a bit and put some foundational pieces in the plan.
I’m getting pretty forceful and determined about making this the first step in working with a client. I don’t know if I can emphasize enough just how important this step is… it is huge! I have seen too many great membership sites get started, working beautifully and then go nowhere because there was no plan beyond the idea of “if you build it they will come”. I’m raising my hand on that one – I have been guilty in the past of this exact same thing.
If you take the time, up front, you will save yourself countless hours of frustration and worry later on.
Here is just one example of a planning process. [Read more...]
I’m a sucker for plugins. There are some pretty cool, fun options out there.
Want to customize your blog feed – yes there is a plugin for that.
Need an event calendar? Need a donation button? Need a directory? Wait for it… yes there is a plugin for that too!
Want to have your blog posts convert to Pirate on “Talk Like a Pirate Day”? Oh yeah, there is even a plugin for that!
This is a great list of plugins, many I am looking forward to taking a closer look at and trying:
Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins « Lorelle on WordPress.
Have fun!
I say this every year, but sheesh!? Where did the year go?
This Christmas weekend I’ll be spending time with my family, opening presents, eating lots of food, playing with the dogs, watching some of my favorite Christmas movies, and reading the Christmas Story. A time to just “be”.
December tends to be a reflective time of year too. A time to look back on what happened over the year and look ahead to the New Year. Last weekend I carved out a block of time to take a closer look at what got done, what didn’t and why.
This big issue I found… not planning. At least not thorough concrete plans that were written down on paper. I had lots of big plans in my head but that doesn’t get you very far does it.
There is a power in writing ideas down, seeing the words and acting on them. This didn’t happen nearly enough and I had to ask myself, why? I know part of it was overwhelm with too many ideas floating around in my head which made it hard to know where to start.
Another reason was that I did not take the time to be quiet and let the ideas flow. This is where a lot of my “aha” moments have come from this year and will be a bigger part of my business plan in 2011. These “aha” moments have come from reflective moments while at training seminars, journaling each day and many more while walking the dog. [Read more...]
This past year part of my journey both professionally and personally has been to take a closer look at my strengths, weaknesses and personality. Diving in and examining how that affects me and the people I work with – both as a team leader and when working with a client.
It has felt like working on a big puzzle at times, getting stuck on the outer edge, not sure how to fill in the center. But now the center pieces are starting to fall into place and understanding my personality better has had a huge impact on this process.
I have read a ton of books on these subjects, I’m a sucker for those personality tests, I’m curious to see what results will be. This year has been different, the personality tests have started to make sense. Light bulb moments of why I enjoy certain things and others I don’t, why this job/task/project has been so much fun and why this one really drove me nuts.
My business is starting to change as a result of this understanding. I am taking a closer look at they type of work I do, services I provide and the people I work with. Now I can put a finger on why some things worked and some really did not.
When doing a consult with a client, I am now learning to listen better and ask questions about work styles, work preferences, communication needs etc. Interestingly, this journey has shown me that some of my strengths, or at least what I have thought of as strengths, are tasks, jobs etc. that I have grown into – not because they are things I like to do but because I have been around long enough to know the “big picture” and this is the “next logical step”. This happened quite a bit in the corporate world and I have seen it in my journey with clients as well.
Here are some of the things I have come to understand better about me this year:
Do you know and understand your personality enough to know what type of VA you can work with? Enough to know what kind of VA you need? Did you catch the difference in those 2 questions? We’ll talk about the first question here.
What type of person can you work with:
These are all things you should be aware of and be able to talk with a potential VA (or your current one…) to find the best fit for you. Once you know and understand your needs, you can ask questions during a consultation about how they prefer to work and who they like to work with. The answers to these questions can give you confidence in your decision or it might show you some potential red flags before you get in too deep.
This may seem like a lot of work but it is such an important step that it warrants some time and attention. Make sure you are noticing your work habits, work hours and communication preferences. What bugs you when talking with or emailing others, what makes you say, wow, that was a great email, I know exactly what they are talking about. Or I really need to be on the phone for this one to help us both understand what I need. Are you visual in your learning? Audio?
All of these are important in your journey as a business owner. The team you bring on will either help move you forward or hold you back. Make sure you are building a team that will help move you and your business forward.
What other personality traits do you think are important when working with a virtual assistant?
There is another group of WordPress templates out there called, for lack of a better term – “Bulk Themes”. This is a place where you can plop down $50-75 bucks and have access to literally hundreds of themes. These are great sites to look at if you love themes. You will find just about everything under the sun.
But just like free themes… you really need to be careful. Many of these themes will work just fine out of the box, but as soon as you need to customize a little or a lot, look out. Unless you know your WordPress structure and PHP code inside and out you may be in for a headache. More than once I have had clients spend hours trying to get it to work and then contact me for help, and end up paying me to get it fixed or get it to look the way they had envisioned. As a small business owner this is a drain of your time, energy and possibly not worth the effort. [Read more...]
Selecting a theme is a dangerous proposition, at least it is for me . Themes are fun! Addicting and time consuming.
There are so many to choose from Free Themes, Premium Themes, Bulk Themes… This week we are going to take a closer took at Free Themes, where to find them, what to look for and what to consider.
First things first… Free Themes are fun – looking at all the options, the creativity of designers and incredible array of features. And even better, they are everywhere, you would be hard pressed to not find something that would work for you. The best place to start is to look at WordPress itself: http://wordpress.com/extend/themes, here you probably could find just about anything you might need.
If you go to Google and type in the keywords “free WordPress Themes”:
About 66,200,000 results (0.20 seconds). That should do it don’t you think?
If you are new to WordPress, just learning and getting comfortable with using it. And especially if your budget is tight and not a ton of $$ to invest, a Free Theme is a great way to get started.
Having said all that, there are definitely things to be aware of. [Read more...]
The more I learn about WordPress the more I realize I have to learn. The “Press This” tool is quite a tool, to not have to think about logging into your site in order to do a quick post may be exactly what is needed to get your blogging habit back on track.
For my bookmarks toolbar I use Xmarks which you can sync across computers and different browsers. Hmm, I”m sensing another tutorial….
Thanks to Andy Traub for introducing me to this cool little tool!
Over the weekend I made a purchase I have been putting off, simply because I didn’t want to spend the money and even more… I didn’t want to go through the hassle yet. At least not until I had some time (have you heard that excuse before?). Thankfully, I changed my mind!
I have been a huge fan of the eMachine computers (I know… don’t laugh too hard!). They have been awesome computers for me, just outgrew my 2nd. Rarely had any problems and both lasted for a long, long time.
But the poor little guy was getting old, I needed way more space and a quite a bit more computing power. In comes the granddaddy of a computer… an HP with a 1 TB hard drive and a wonderfully huge 6 GB RAM. Woohoo! Now this might not seem like a big deal these days but consider that my desktop pc was chugging along with only a 160 GB hard drive and 1GB RAM, it was a trooper each day, especially with what I was putting it through!
Using it has been a dream, at least it was after I got everything transferred over, that took a long time and I still have a few programs that need to be installed. I am faster, more efficient and I’m no longer wishing for greater speed or wondering what I can delete or uninstall to give the poor computer some breathing room.
So this got me thinking, what other areas in my business have I put off, or ignored, getting the right tool for? It hit me the other day that I have not been taking advantage of the help of other VAs. Yes, I have been ignoring the very thing I tell my clients to do. So last week one of the VAs I had worked with earlier this year, got in touch to say hello and check in and my goodness what excellent timing! I realized right then and there that this was a tool I needed to have in my business and keep in my business. Good ole’ fashioned help. (Not to generalize virtual assistants as tools… really more of an asset but I think you get the drift)
By bringing on another virtual assistant to help me out in my own business, I am going to become even more efficient, the to-do-list and want-to-do list is going to start being tackled (it already is!), and I am going to be able move some of my projects forward. Wow novel idea!
So I am taking a closer look again at that to-do-list and see what other areas I can have her take on so that I can keep moving my business forward and tackle some of those wish list items that seem to keep falling to the bottom of my to-do-list.
What tool do you need today to keep your business moving forward?
If you had an assistant, what could you tackle and cross of your to-do-list today? This week?
P.S. If you have ever considered bringing on a virtual assistant onto your team check out our FREE special report “How To Find And Hire A Virtual Assistant”. Sign up for it here on our site for instant access.
