I have a client who put up his own WordPress site.  It’s nice and functional – the problem is he copied and pasted all his content into WP pages from another site we built about 2 years ago where we had put everything in from Dreamweaver or Word (and that worked – it was a Sitesell site).  So the formatting is askew in some cases since he’s not allowing the css built into his template to do its job.  His other site did well with some tables we had set up – WP not so much.  Most of the pages are ok because they are static. 

There are a few pages that we change monthly based on his upcoming teleseminars.  Every time I update those pages, the formatting goes bonkers again – bolds show up where they shouldn’t, font sizes change and things that were left justified are centered, etc.  Every time it’s something different and the page keep morphing like a bad Sci Fi movie.   I’m thinking it’s because everything originally came from another site and wasn’t entered into the page allowing for css to do its thing.  Is that the case, oh WordPress Wizard?  

I have to fix this page and I’m thinking I will just do it from scratch and manually put the content in a new page using the WP formatting.  If I do that, how do I get that page to be named the same as the old one without removing the old one (in case he decides he wants to go back to the crazy page)?  Also, I assume if I change the font style and size in the css for say the paragraph format or the Header 2 format, that will filter through the entire site, correct?  (He seems to think if I do it will change for THAT page only – he’s a dabbler and drives me crazy cleaning up after him.)

Thanks for your advice, Denise – I appreciate you and value you very much.

Blessings,

Brenda Zeller

Answer

Hi Brenda, 

YES – copying and pasting content from an old site is the problem and I would recommend rebuilding that page (or those pages) from scratch. 

As for creating a new page (without removing the old one) – what you will need to is change the permalink for the OLD page, then publish a NEW page and make sure the permalink is set to be the same as the old one.

And yes, any changes made to the main theme stylesheet (style.css) will apply to the whole wordpress site, not just an individual page.

Hope this helps! 

Denise

Great customer service lets your customers and clients know that you value them and you want them to be happy enough with your customer service to refer you to their circle of friends, family and customers. In short, great customer service is about reaching out and forming a relationship. How do you go about forming such a relationship? By remembering the one true secret of good customer service and acting accordingly; “You will be judged by what you do, not what you say.”

These are examples of some truly great customer service experiences that I had lately and wanted to share with you.

Grasshopper Virtual Phone System for Entrepreneurs

Grasshopper

Hi, this message is for Denise Griffitts, (Click here to play message from Grasshopper)

This is Jonathan Kay, I am the Ambassador of Buzz here at Grasshopper. I actually just left you a voicemail but wanted to follow up with an email as well. I wanted to reach out to you as I really enjoyed your article “Does Your Small or Online Business Have a Toll Free Number”. First off, it was important to me that I connected and thanked you. Really appreciate you giving us the vote of confidence. I feel like people really don’t take enough time to just say “thank you”, so that is what I wanted to do.

I was excited when I saw your article as I was not familiar with The Virtual Assistant Industry prior to it! What else do you guys work on? Anything at all I could be a resource for, or something I could help with?

Thanks again.

Jonathan

(I did call Jonathan back to thank him and we had a great free-ranging chat on business, customer service, blogging and the Virtual Assistance Industry. Thank you Jonathan!)

Dominoes Pizza

A week or so my husband and I were both down with a miserable (and lingering) case of the flu but knew we were going to survive it when hunger pangs in the form of a rabid desire for pizza hit us both. I don’t normally like to order pizza but our survival that day clearly depended on somebody besides me cooking food for us.

It was a cold and rainy day and we didn’t want to infect the poor delivery person with what ailed us, so left this envelope on the door with a tip. The lady ran back to her car in the rain, grabbed a pen and some masking tape and put this back on our door and then gave a quick ring on the doorbell to let us know that our order had arrived. I was impressed! Now that is customer service and we definitely let the manager of her store know how much we appreciated that very kind gesture.

I would really like to hear of superb customer service that you have received. Please share!

Denise, I have looked at all of your websites and understand that you are a professional web developer as well as a virtual assistant. Very impressive!

My question to you is this. My website is not professionally built but I did what I could with the limited resources that I had at the time. It is an HTML site. Do you recommend that I move to WordPress.com?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

Monica, San Diego, CA

Answer

WordPress.com versus WordPress.org

Hello Monica and thank you for stopping by. If you could send me the URL to your website I will be happy to look at it and make recommendations for you.

I can answer your WordPress question though. You NEVER want to have your business or professional blog on WordPress.com.  The distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is a very important one and one that tends to confuse a lot of people.  WordPress.com allows you to build a blog but you are hosting your site on their servers, meaning that you cannot upload critical plugins, or post links to affiliate programs. Without the ability to upload plugins you will only have a blog. You cannot make it look or behave like a true website. There are also many miserable stories of people having long-time blogs hosted on WP.com only to have them shut down for a program violation. You do not want somebody else to be in charge of your business presence.

What I recommend you do is to do is install WordPress on your own server and use your own domain name. WordPress.org is free blogging software that you should be able to install directly from your C-panel. You will need a solid web host and for this we recommend HostGator.

If this is a project that you will be undertaking on your own, there are many great WordPress tutorials and forums available on the internet. Ben Cope, “The Internet Genius” offers a great FREE WordPress Tip of the Day series that are very helpful.

I hope this answer helps you and please visit again and often to submit questions about the Virtual Assistance Industry.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com.

Hi Denise.

What do you tell people when they say they can hire virtual assistants overseas and pay them $3.00 an hour? What are the pros and cons of that? Have you posted any blogs on the subject? Do you have any good articles I can read so as to know how to respond to people when they say this?

I also have had people tell me that they have tried to use virtual assistants in other countries and that they experienced problems in communication because they didn’t speak good English and they also received documents that were full of language, punctuation and formatting errors. I believe you get what you pay for and I don’t know how anyone can expect to receive quality for $3.00 an hour.

I would really appreciate anything you could tell me on this subject and any blogs or articles you can refer me to. 

Thanks!

Debbie Forte

Answer

That is a great question Debbie and I will do my best to answer it for you.

My motto is and will always be, “Do What You Love and Outsource the Rest!” Now that is an easy premise for me to put forth, but what does it actually mean to the entrepreneur who badly needs ongoing assistance to build and grow their business?

As a business owner you realize by now that running a business, be it a traditional brick and mortar business or an online endeavor is one of the most time-consuming things one can think of. Your life as you knew it changed dramatically the moment you became self-employed. Being your own boss and enjoying creative freedom is for many, a dream come true. But honestly, how many hours have you spent on the dull, uninspiring, and extremely time-consuming work of keeping a business running? Across the board, entrepreneurs of all descriptions describe the biggest drawback in their business life as the drain of the daily minutia that chews through hours and drains creativity.

As a business owner, you end up wearing multiple hats. You are your own accounting department, marketing department, sales, tech support and customer care. On especially bad weeks you might find yourself spending more time on these tasks than on actual billable work.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant, someone who can take care of things you don’t have time for, can help you build and grow your business while retaining the creative passion that launched you into entrepreneurship in the first place. You can now find Virtual Assistants offering pretty much any service you might need assistance with, from administrative to social media marketing to web design.

If your business is in its infancy, or if you have a very limited budget you may be considering outsourcing some of this work to other countries. At this point, especially if you’ve read Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week, you might be thinking about hiring an offshore Virtual Assistant, probably based in India or Philippines. You can find many of these “Virtual Assistants” on Elance.com, Guru.com and similar sites. You can also find them by performing a simple Google search by using the term “offshore Virtual Assistant”.

Offshore VAs can offer a wide variety of services, including some very technical ones such as web design. And their rates are incredibly low compared to their colleagues in the US and Canada. It is not uncommon to post an RFQ on Elance and receive bids with rates as low as $3 per hour. Virtual Assistants in the US and Canada, on the other hand, set their rates to an average of $30-35 per hour and some go as high as $70 per hour, depending on their core competencies.

Given these wildly different rates, making a choice seems like a no-brainer. Pick an offshore VA and save both time and money, right? You might feel a twinge of guilt over sending work overseas, but then you have to think of what’s best for your business, don’t you?

You’re absolutely correct – your business interests should be your top priority. That’s exactly why the “no-brainer” choice, the one based solely on cost differences, might not be a good one for your business, and may actually hurt it.

Most bestseller business books and top-of-search-engine articles on the subject will wax eloquent about all the potential benefits of cheap overseas labor. But search for “offshore outsourcing problems”, dig deeper into Elance reviews, and talk to fellow business owners who tried this option and you start getting a more balanced picture.

Most of the complaints about offshore vendors in general and Virtual Assistants in particular mention issues such as language and cultural barriers; inadequate communications from vendors; lack of experience or specific skills, especially when it comes to creative services; cost and time overruns; lack of project and process continuity; and need for close and continuous supervision.

While some services might be well-suited for offshore outsourcing, others simply are not. Consider content creation – all those articles, press releases, blog posts, newsletters that businesses now use as part of their marketing. Even if, and it’s a big if, the content is grammatically correct, there’s still the relevancy issue. It is unrealistic to expect an offshore Virtual Assistant to communicate effectively with target audiences that are distant in terms of geography, language and culture.

Cost and time overruns are not unique to offshore vendors. But they become much more difficult to control when combined with inadequate communications and cultural barriers. If choosing an offshore Virtual Assistant, you need to make sure to communicate early, often and state your concerns or requests in a very clear way, all of which can become very time-consuming.

Another very common complaint is the amount of close supervision, if not scrutiny, that is required when working with offshore assistants. Sure, even if you hire a local VA, you might have to do a bit of hand-holding at first, just so that your assistant learns the ins and outs of your business as and your management style. But any close supervision beyond this adjustment period defeats the entire purpose of hiring virtual help. Keep in mind that the VA you decide to work with is ultimately going to help you build and grow both your business and your online presence. A highly technical, highly competent Virtual Assistant actually partners with you to help you meet and exceed your business expectations. You should be able to have complete confidence that your VA is treating your business that same way she/he treats their own business. As if it was the most precious thing in the world!

The extremely low rate of offshore services is the reason behind yet another commonly-cited problem. Virtual Assistants who charge such low rates make money on volume. With hundreds and even thousands of clients and projects, they simply don’t have time to ask all the questions, review the alternatives and advise you of the best ways to handle specific tasks. Another issue is that they primarily work on one-off projects. For example, instead of dealing with just one project manager for all your tasks or projects, you might end up communicating with several people.

This is exactly the opposite of how higher-paid Virtual Assistants approach their clients’ work. Even though many accept occasional projects, they build their businesses around ongoing work with a handful of clients. These Virtual Assistants go beyond simply completing the tasks assigned to them. They approach each task while keeping the bigger picture – their clients’ business goals – in mind. As small business owners, they relate especially well to their clients’ concerns.

On the other hand, offshore VAs are mostly employees of virtual assistance companies. It is simply unrealistic to expect an employee in India to really understand the issues facing a business owner in the United States or Canada.

We all look for bargains. Keeping costs down definitely helps maintain a healthy bottom line. But when looking for a Virtual Assistant, a business owner needs to remember that a VA is much more than simply an implementer and that price and value are not the same. There are potentially many hidden costs and lost opportunities hiding behind a low rate offered by offshore Virtual Assistants.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com.

We all use them either physically or in my case, on my various desktops. Truly, I would be lost without them!

Why you should download this FREE program.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

These are online resources that will help you develop, gain knowledge, find new information and absorb new ideas.

Enjoy!

This Weeks Recommended Resource

WordPress Tip of the Day is a free video podcast from the “Internet Genius” Ben Cope that delivers high-quality video training for WordPress in 5 minutes or less every day in a format that is easy to follow, easy to understand, and always free!

Denise, I paid a relative to build my WordPress blog but it is not getting any traffic at all.  Would you be able (or willing) to look at it and make some recommendations?

Thank you, Ranisha 

Answer

Hello Ranisha. I would be happy to look at your site if you will contact me with the URL. Please use the contact form on this site to contact me.

Without actually seeing your site, I can only tell you the most common problems are with new sites are the following:

Page Content. Create compelling content. Period. If you don’t have content that draws and pulls visitors in, you will ultimately wind up with what is termed a “brochure” site meaning that it is simply an online business card.

Post to Your Blog at least Twice a Week. Your visitors will not know what you are expert at, what your passion in business is and who you are as a person if they can’t hear your voice in writing, in audio, or in video. You must be visible and offer really good content and insight.

Submit Your Website to the Search Engines. There are many free submission sites. Just do a Google search for the term “free URL submission”.  Many of them want you to agree to receive their free newsletter, so my best advice here is to use a junk email address at Yahoo or Hotmail for this type of work. If you give them your real address you will be immediately inundated with junk mail.

Meta Tags. We use and recommend All in One SEO Pack. You can download it here or login into your control panel and “Add New”. This is a essential plugin and will ensure that you have the correct title and meta tags in each page and blog post. Your meta title and description will appear in the search engines so be sure you craft your page and post descriptions carefully. The keywords that you use in your content and your meta tags will determine how you are found on the web.

Other Essential WordPress Plugins.

1. Be sure that your website and blog is updating to Twitter with the plugin of your choice. I like Twitter updater w/TinyURL.
2. Do you have a contact form on your website? Easy Contact and cformsII are great plugins.
3. Do you have a means for people to bookmark your site or share with other people? Choose your social bookmarking plugin and get it up and running as quickly as possible.
4. Google SML Sitemaps. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com.

Some time ago we created a PDF that our web development and virtual assistance clients have access to at Your Office On The Web on the client document password protected page.

As there is nothing client sensitive in this document I wanted to share it here with you along with a few more resources that are not currently listed in it. As you can imagine, it is a “living” document and updates regularly.

Here is it’s most recent incarnation.

Click here to download Recommended Resources. Some of these resources are coded with my affiliate links, some are not.

Other resources that we use and recommend.

Video Resources

Easy Video Player

• Instantly and automatically send your video viewers to any website, shopping cart or affiliate promotion after your video stops playing.
• Embed “buy now” buttons directly into videos.
• Embed opt-in forms inside your video and capture email addresses for list building purposes
• Create and protect “member only” videos thereby ensuring that only paid customers can gain access to your exclusive content.
• Publish your videos on any website in seconds.

You will also need to signup with AmazonS3 to host your videos for pennies. Very affordable!

WordPress Themes and Plugins

Elegant Themes

Each WordPress theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of WordPress. DeniseGriffitts.com uses the Who’s Who Theme.

WP WishList

WishList Member is a powerful membership script that can turn any WordPress blog into a full blown membership site. Your Office On The Web is expert at installing and configuring this very powerful plugin.

WordPress Dream Theme

An excellent theme that is not only easy to learn and use, but you also get have the option between self-service and full-service. The full service option gets you free phone support, free setup, free installation, and 1 hour of customization. Plus, you can use the theme on multiple sites.

WordPress Tip of the Day

WordPress Tip of the Day is a video podcast that delivers high-quality video training for WordPress in 5 minutes or less every day in a format that is easy to follow, easy to understand, and always free!

Other

Overnight Prints

I use Overnight Prints for all my print collateral and most of my clients do as well. The paper stock is excellent and the free online designer allows you to create your own custom business cards and other print collateral with their Interactive Designer. Or you can choose from 1000’s of designs by using the Classic Design feature. Trust me when I tell you the quality is superb!

PayPal

You can absolutely use your Paypal account either directly from your website by using “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” buttons or you can use Paypal as your only payment provider in 1shoppingcart. It is not mandatory these days that you have a merchant account if you don’t need or want one. My web development site has a Paypal payment page that you can see here. This is an easy solution that allows you to take payments for services without having to log into your account to send invoices or payment requests.

Napping on the job is usually grounds to be fired, but Your Virtual Assistant / Your Office On The Web, as a forward-thinking and progressive company encourages employees to nap to improve safety and increase productivity.

Approved nap time is part of the company’s broader fatigue counter-measure program developed by both the companies (Your Virtual Assistant and Your Office On The Web) and its union workforce comprised of Denise Griffitts and all contractors and salaried employees.

National Workplace Napping day is always observed the first Monday after Daylight Savings Time begins.  Because of the loss of one hour’s sleep due to the return of Daylight Savings Time,  Your Virtual Assistant’s employees will be more sleep deprived than usual. We therefore declare March 15th, 2010 a paid holiday.

Signed in to law this day: January 20, 2010

by Denise Griffitts

My office uses Grasshopper which used to be called GotVMail. Grasshopper is very easy to set up. Just pick a toll free number for your business, or transfer your current number. Then record your main greeting. You will also have the opportunity to have it professionally recorded if that is your preference. Add departments and employees, choose what phone number you want your calls to terminate to and you are done. I actually don’t have my toll free number ring to my office as it can be terribly disruptive. What we have done is to create mailboxes and departments and have the voice messages emailed to the proper department as an .MP3.

There is also a “Read Your Voicemail” function available for an additional $10 a month. If you are on the run a good bit, the voicemail transcription will be emailed to you as readable text. You’ll be able to stay connected when you can’t listen to the .MP3 file of your voicemail. You can also listen to your messages on your Blackberry or iPhone. Just click the “Play It On Mobile” link in the notification email and you’ll be listening to your voice mails without dialing or logging in to your account. For those of us on the run, this is a great tool.

Another really great feature is that you have unlimited extensions for your small business. Each extension has its own call forwarding, voicemail and message delivery settings. Even if you’re the only employee, by utilizing unlimited extensions you are giving your small business the big business sound that it needs.

Truthfully, there are too many features for me to list here. What I can tell you is that we use it, and love it. It is also very affordable to have a toll free number these days. Plans start at $9.95 a month and there is a $25 activation fee. My monthly bill seems to hover around $25 a month which given all that the system offers is remarkably affordable. Be warned though, if you make a habit of answering the calls that come through on your toll free number you will run your bill right up through the roof. I strongly recommend that you treat this strictly as a voice mail system and return the calls at your first opportunity.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Vitual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.