Prof has requested that her students interview a VA assistant. I am truly looking forward to learning more about you and your business.

How did you decide to get into the virtual assistant business?

I wanted to stay home with my 2 kids and not have to pay for daycare or try to work nights while my husband worked his day job.

Rewarding – my kids are with me 24/7 except when my daughter goes to Preschool. My daughter will be in Kindergarten this fall all day and my son will start Preschool this fall (part time) but excited – because then I can focus more on my clients while they both are away. Challenges – at first – trying to get everything figured out. A bit of worrying of how I was going to contribute to paying family bills – been in the business for almost 3 years and now I have lots of faith and know next week – will be just fine. I haven’t marketed my business since Fall of 2009 because the referrals keep on coming in. Couldn’t be more happier and it is really rewarding – I am helping my clients with what they need and providing for my family too.

My VA business is mainly focused on techie tasks. I have lots of tools and resources at my finger tips – so between my computer, software programs and other VAs I have met along the way – I can easily help almost any client with their requests.

1. My family. Personal
2. This is my career. Professional
3. Reason for why I’m here – Passion of helping others

Figure out what you like best and stick with it. I have done some tasks for clients when I first started because I didn’t know. You will do tasks that you won’t like – you swear you will never do them again – but you have to go through the life experiences so you can learn from them. I would not say there is anything I won’t do again – just prefer not to.

Goal in 5 years – to continue to help clients and provide for my family. Like I mentioned – I have been in business for almost 3 years and this year is definitely helping me and my husband reach one of our goals – get a house that we will live in for years to come. We have been moving for the past 3 years because he hasn’t been happy with his job or where we have been living – we just moved in August and found a house that we will be moving to in June – we couldn’t be more excited to get settled down. Without my career choice of being a VA and my very successful business and a huge THANK YOU to each and every one of my clients I have helped/served – we would not even be getting the house that we have had a vision for. Vision what you want and make that dream come true – because it really can happen.

As you can tell – right now – there is nothing I would do differently. I have been trying to figure out how to get a work at home career since my daughter was 6 months old – but it is a struggle to figure out the HOW.. you can read this and that online – but WHAT do you believe? It was really hard until my co-worker told me she was working from home plus doing her full-time job – so that’s when I asked LOTS of questions to grasp what she meant and now I understand and am loving what I am doing.

Yes – I have helped 2 people to build a virtual assistant business. One decided it was not for her and another is working for a client that I work for as well. The best advice I can give is – try it out – don’t quit anything you are doing today – do it in addition to your full time or part time job then see how you like it and what you are doing. If you can give it more time – then great – because you will probably get more success out of it. I literally worked non-stop until March 2010 then decided – wow that’s enough working – I need to get boundaries and family time and now I have tried really hard to keep a balance between family and work. So far it is still a win-win.

Best of luck with what you do and Keep moving forward!
- Staci

I’m often asked by SEO clients whether or not they need to worry about duplicate content. So many site owners are scared they’ll get hit with a “duplicate content penalty” and that’s totally understandable. Who would want to risk all those page one rankings? While I have no problem erring on the side of caution (especially when they have great rankings), I also like to educate site owners about the truth.

And the truth is this. Duplicate content has been clarified over the years and what it amounts to is that there is NO penalty for duplicate content.

The way the search engines deal with it is only one page will rank. So if you post an article on some other site that the search engines evaluate and determine to be a ‘duplicate’ of an article on your site, the one posted on the other site will only rank if the page on your site is not already ranking. The page on your site will NOT be penalized.

Google doesn’t want the #4 and #7 listing to be the same content basically and that’s certainly commendable. Can you imagine wading through the results if everything was ranked? I don’t even want to think about what the results would look like.

One thing to note is that although the duplicate content may not rank, the link from that site probably still counts toward your incoming links and that can help your other rankings. Two other things to consider are that (1) people visit that other site and see your articles and click on the links so posting your content there can increase your traffic and (2) all that content on other sites helps establish you as an expert!

Another important thing to remember is that there’s no penalty even if the duplicate content is on the same website. This can happen for various reasons and you definitely want to clean your site up as much as possible to make it easier for search engines to index your content and rank it appropriately but you shouldn’t lose sleep over being penalized. It’s just that only one “page” will make its ways to the search engine listings.

Think about this for a moment. If there truly was a penalty, all someone would have to do is go to the top listed sites, submit all their content to article sites and get them penalized. Surely search engines realize that unethical people would take advantage of the penalty and hurt their competition.

And now I’d like to invite you to try out my search engine optimization services. Be sure to mention this guest post and I’ll make sure you get the “Friends of Staci” discount. )

Thanks!
Glennette Goodbread
http://www.PremiumWebDesign.com

Additional references:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
• http://www.highrankings.com/no-dupe-content

P.S. Glennette is offering a free consultation to determine if her services will help you. If you want to get higher rankings or fine tune your current standings. Also be sure to stop by her website sign up for her FREE “Get Your Top Google Places Business Listing”.

I can usually write in spanish with no issues because of Microsoft word and the insert character feature – however trying to write spanish in HTML coding – now that’s another story. I was googling for my answer and feel like I hit the jackpot and just had to share this resource with you too.

Direct link to resource is: http://webdesign.about.com/od/localization/l/blhtmlcodes-sp.htm

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