Amber Drake (caricature seen at right), owner of Essential Admin, and I became acquainted several years ago and have enjoyed a strictly email-based friendship since then. It was a great pleasure to meet up with Amber and some other Idaho VAs in person recently in Spokane.
Amber first captured my imagination when she took her business [...]

Unlike some other faddish turns, this is a good trend.
IVAA pal Jill Chongva of Jill Chongva Design has launched a place to share and learn about how you can green up your work place. It just debuted this afternoon, so you can be among the first to contribute over at www.ecosavvybiz.com/. So, pull on [...]

What do you do about the clients in your practice who don’t generate a significant volume of work?
When I opened up my Virtual Assistance practice in 1996, I admit I had no client screening instincts. I was just thrilled to land that first client, ANY client.
Years later, when I began envisioning my ideal client [...]

A few years ago while on vacation in Mexico, I conceived of a new, organic approach to finding clients. I decided to approach businesses that were doing things that really interested me and get acquainted with the owners or management.
No advertising, no direct mail, just a phone call or email to begin a conversation.
As a [...]

Some of us dream of packing up and moving somewhere new and different. I have a friend who lives and works on an island in the Carolinas and I sometimes envision myself there happily toiling away and being far more creatively productive just because I’m enjoying ocean breezes from my office window…
For those who actually [...]

How about getting together for a latté?
In the Virtual Assistance community, members are encouraged to schedule meet-ups in their own region of the country or world.
Here in Arizona, a loose knit group of International Virtual Assistants Association members and non members hold informal gatherings every few months to exchange tips and just get [...]

If you gobble up everything you can read about internet marketing, emomsathome.com has a gift for you: “The Second How To Group Research Project.”
Wendy Piersall put out the call to her audience: pick a topic you’d like to learn more about and then research it and write an article.
Some of the contributors were surely [...]

Wendy Piersall of EMomsathome hatched a brilliant idea when she asked readers to jump in and research topics that she and other readers wanted to know more about. I grabbed this topic from the recently posted 2nd “How To” Group Research Project and invite you to join in as I explore it.
My Own Advertising [...]

For the baby house finches I’ve been spying on outside my kitchen window, the time came to move on. Many of us humans share that desire to relocate.
If you’ve been considering a move, or need to do so to be closer to family, or to please a spouse who has retired before you, it should [...]

You probably don’t even have linen sheets. My friend Sue, who shares my kinesthetic ecstacy for fibers, invited me to take a nap on her brand new linen sheets when I last visited her while she took her canines out for a walk. As a result, I bought some. Yes, they were expensive all right, [...]