Virtual Archives - Online Business Love

Send Out Cards and Amazing Mail

I dropped by tonight to purchase a card for a birthday celebration tomorrow for my niece. The date just kinda snuck up on me! The card cost more than double what I spent months ago when I had to do this. I realized I need to start planning ahead.

With Send Out Cards or even Amazing Mail —all you just have to be in front of your computer and we all know we do that way too often 🙂 Just choose a card, write in it, pick a gift if you desire, then click send – that’s all there is to it!

Did you know that If you know in advance you need to send a card to someone, and I mean only 3 days, then you can get a card for just $1.99 printed and mailed? And you can design your own card or use any one of the 25,000 templates that are available?

How often do you hear the phrase ‘well, it is the thought that counts’? Did they just forget or is it an excuse? Have you said it?

How many times have you thought to do something? Call someone, send an email, send them a card, buy a gift, send a letter, only to find some weeks later you had forgotten, the letter is still on your desk, in your car, in your purse, the email never got sent, and you never had time to go to the mall.

With Christmas just a heartbeat away, and other celebrations too, isn’t it time you stopped procrastinating and took a few minutes to show you someone you care? Of course it is! Get Hooked Up with Send Out Cards Now!

How have you felt when you’ve received a card out of the blue?

Are you Active and Engaging on Twitter Lists?

By Annette Leave a Comment

You should be! You’ve probably seen at least one reference on your own profile page to Twitter lists.

Twitter lists are a powerful way to categorize Twitter users according to their area of expertise, or the topics of their tweets and then, once the list is created, let anyone see it. They save valuable time because when you create a list, every tweet from every person on that list feeds into that particular list.

The lists are powerful tools that can help you do valuable research, track down experts in a particular niche, find people in your target market, spy on your competitors, find journalists who cover your industry, and so much more.

They’re also an excellent way to determine how other people perceive your expertise and your brand. Here’s what I mean.

Go to your Twitter Home or Profile page and look under your photo on the upper right side. You’ll see the number of people you’re following, the number of people who are following you, and the number of lists you’re on. Click on “Listed.”

Instantly, you can look down the list and see which Twitter users have put you on one of their lists, and you can see the names of their lists. For example, I’m on a number of Twitter lists. When I click on “Listed,” a window opens and I can see that many of the lists include the words “virtual assistant”, “VAs” and “social media.”

If you aren’t on many lists, or you haven’t created your own lists yet, that’s OK. Joan Stewart, aka, The Publicity Hound has many Twitter tips as well as tons of other social and book tips!

http://publicityhound.com/blog/topic/social-media/twitter

Start using Twitter lists today! What did you discover?

My Path to Virtual-ality

By Annette 6 Comments

Let me take you back in time to a world where the PC barely existed with dial-up and DOS. Life before even MySpace and did we even have Craigslist then?

Well back then, I had my 1st taste of what life could be like virtually! I started dabbling in brokering our own semi-truck-loads of lumber or grain or whatever I could get my hands on, through a few states in the west. I was living all country-like in the mountains in Idaho. I loved working with a PC with the wide-world and taking care of family at home at the same time.

Life changed and I moved to the big city of Portland, Oregon, entering a world of new adventures, and went to work in Corporate America. All through the next 9 years, I dreamed of working for myself virtually. Many of my skills were honed during this time. In 2007, I was laid-off from Corporate America. I was scared! Free to fly, but scared. It was a new world out there with all these new PC’s, Windows, LANs, WANs, and DSL. Facebook was making an appearance, and Twitter was big. I found that working from home virtually with companies was still very much a new concept, and I just couldn’t break in to it yet. Still night dreaming… A few months later I went to work for a small business, soon to be laid off again in 2009.

By then the economy was shifting. Companies were downsizing and starting to see the benefits of hiring virtually. Facebook and Twitter were huge. I could find many virtual assistant networking sites. I became a sponge finding as much material as I could. I decided to see if I could make a way into the virtual world. I put my ad up on www.virtualassistants.com. I started a website and twitter account, using my direct selling name of shopwithannie putting VA (virtual assistant)at the end. I started talking about it on my Facebook profile.

My 1st client came from Elance several months later. He was a writer who needed client/vendor management. Shortly after, I received responses from my ad on a VA website. Virtual was happening. I love my clients, love my work, and love being virtual and still being a vital part of growing companies. It makes me smile to know I have finally made it to virtual-ality!