Wow! It’s been a very busy summer so far and I’m way behind on my blog. So, let’s just get this party started. As you may remember I decided to take a Virtual Assistant Education course a couple of months ago. It was an eight week course with a four week apprenticeship with entrepreneurs and small business owners. I took the class primarily as a way to get into the apprenticeship since I was looking for more clients and this seemed like a cool way to do it. It also was my way of seeing if I was keeping up with other virtual assistants (also known as VAs). And although I know a lot about the business, the pearls of wisdom and information that Denise shared with us are very precious to me.
In case you don’t know what a virtual assistant does, let me give you a brief overview. Virtual Assistants handle tasks that are time-consuming and do not generate income for the business owner. For example, if you are a salesperson you only make money while you are selling goods and services. You aren’t making money setting appointments and doing market research. So, you’d hire a VA to set your appointments, manage your calendar and look for more potential customers for you to meet. Or, if you are an author/speaker the best use of your time would be in the creation of your product, not booking venues to speak, setting up teleconferences, wading through email, etc. So you would hire a VA to take care of those things. Virtual Assistants work with doctors, authors, entrepreneurs, internet membership site owners, small businesses, etc. The VAs do the grunt work while you expand your business and your brand.
As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll need to be able to access your client’s email, setup website accounts and other things. And the more clients that you have in place, the more passwords there are for you to remember. I used to just use Firefox’s “Remember” feature, but as that becomes cumbersome after awhile. And that’s where this nifty little gadget comes into play. It’s called Roboform and it is a wonderful addition to my software collection. This isn’t just a password program; it actually is setup to fill in all of your information anytime you are on a registration page. Roboform turns itself on when it detects a page that contains forms and will ask if you want it to fill in the blanks. It’ll even submit the form if that’s your choice.
Not only does it remember and store away your information, it also allows you to setup different accounts. So, you can have your unlimited profiles and passwords. So in practice, each client that you have would get his or her own profile complete that can even include their business credit card that you might use for purchases that they ask you to make. It also will generate its own encrypted passwords to keep your accounts safe. And best of all, since those encrypted passwords are all but impossible to remember, it’ll remember them as well. I haven’t upgraded to the RoboForm2Go yet because I’m usually on my own laptop, but it’s a great feature if you use multiple computers. It allows you to retrieve your passwords from any internet-connected computer.
This will be a great help to me since I already have too many passwords to remember for myself, let alone my new clients. And now that I can free up some brain space that was previously reserved for passwords into something much more productive … like keeping up with this blog!
