I received a brochure yesterday from the USPS. They are promoting their “if it fits, it ships anywhere in the country for a low flat rate – and your shipments arrive in just 2-3 days” program.
You can get a free Flat Rate Box Shipping Kit here. Even if you don’t want a kit, go to the site anyway; Al is pretty funny to watch.

Holly

That’s German for How to Translate a Website.

While doing research for a client, I came across a tool for translating websites. I’m sure there thousands available but of course, Google has one as well.

Here is the link Google Translate. My client asked if I would find the names and email addresses of the COO and CEO of a particular German company. Their website is completely in German. With Google’s translator tool, I was able to cut and paste the text from the site into the translator. I wasn’t able to find any information about the management of the company so I submitted a message via their online form. I typed my message in the translator and reversed the translation from English to German.

If you want to impress your international contacts, type a message in the translator and send an email to them in their native language.

Til din succes (Danish for “To Your Success”),

Holly

Have you come across a website where the text is nearly impossible to read?

To increase the font, hold down the cntl key and the + key. To decrease the font hold down the cntrl key and the – button. To return to the original font size, hold down the cntrl key and the 0 (zero) button.  Pretty cool huh?

I was speaking with a potential new client today. She hired a VA last year and things were going great. At least they were going great until December. She hasn’t heard from her VA for about five weeks now. No calls, no emails, no nothing. What happened?

I wasn’t surprised as I’ve heard of this happening before. What I can’t understand is why a VA would suddenly stop all communication. I know that emergencies come up, illness, etcetera but as a solo business owner, it’s especially important to have processes in place so that a client isn’t left wondering what happened and whether you’re going to continue to help them.

This situation really got me thinking about disaster planning and how I would handle an emergency and what processes I should have in place so at least my clients would know something happened and what their expectations should be in terms of my return or whether we need someone else to step in to assist. I also started thinking about how I can help clients set up their own disaster plans.

So, one of my projects this quarter is to set up a disaster plan for my business and to find out from my clients what processes they have in place, if any, in case of a disaster.

Do you have a disaster plan?

Are you monitoring your website traffic? If not, you need to start and an easy way to do so is by signing up for a Google Analytics account. Once you sign up, you can copy the HTML code and place it on each page of your website. Okay, if you aren’t skilled in that area, then send the code to your web guru and ask him or her to put it on your website for you.
By monitoring the reports, you’ll find out how many visitors have been to your site and where they came from. For example, let’s say you recently posted a news release on webpr.com. If you put a link to your website in the article, Google Analytics will show you how many people visited your site from clicking on that link. Then you’ll know which marketing campaigns are working and which are not.

You’ll also learn:

• the length of time spent on each page of your site
• what browser visitors are using (i.e. Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox)
• source of the traffic
• keywords used in their search

If you don’t want to have to sign in and out of Google Analytics and monitor the reports yourself, your virtual assistant can do that for you. Just be sure to discuss the reports during your weekly or bi-weekly telephone calls.

If you’d like to see a sample report, post a comment here or send me an email. I’d be glad to show you one of my reports.

To your success!
Holly