Claritypoint Virtual Assistance

Are you looking to add some “hot learning” to your summer nights? Kelly McCausey’s  annual summer seminar series this year features “hot” online careers that you can do 100% from home.

Industry expert speakers include:  Lynette Chandler, Deb Ng, Tawnya Sutherland, Alice Seba and more!

Work-at-home seminar topics include:

• Wordpress Tech/Designer
• Freelance writer/Ghostwriter/Paid Blogger
• Virtual Assistant
• Information Marketer
• Coach/Consultant
• Content Marketer/Podcaster

At only $10 for the entire series (there are still six seminars remaining), this event is too “hot” to pass on. For a complete line-up of speakers and topics, visit Hot Seminar Series.

Facebook usernames were made available 12:01am Saturday morning with the more common names being grabbed up quickly on a first-serve basis. If you are a twitter user, you are already familiar with having your personalized URL for your profile.

http://www.facebook.com/yourname

A couple of things to keep in mind when choosing your user name:

• Usernames must be at least five characters in length
• While you don’t necessarily need to use your real name or company name, generic names are not available at this time.
• Facebook will provide you with some suggestions for a user name. Select more to create your own username and confirm availability.
• Take care in creating your username, as once a name has been confirmed it can never be changed (even those with typos).

So, what does this mean if you are a coach, author or speaker (or really any online professional)? It means that you can now share your unique Facebook username offline on your printed marketing materials: your business cards, your brochures, in your press kit material, and on your authors bio in print publications.

Online, it can also be readily added to your press releases,  arcicles, and the social media community (in your blogs, tweets, post etc.). 

But they are going fast, so visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get your unique Facebook URL today.

One of the most popular training certification course right now is VAClassroom’s Social Marketing Specialist Program. Craig Cannings, the co-founder of VAClassroom and developer of this program, has seen so many amazing testimonies on how this niche training program has helped to increase many of their graduates’ client and income opportunities!

VAClassroom is running a very attractive summer special on this course where you can access a $100 discount off the regular price of $397 (ONLY $297). The course includes over 30 interactive videos, supplementary resources guides, action-plan templates as well as an exclusive Social Network designed for our Social Marketing Students to connect with instructors and each other - a great learning atmosphere!

“If you are looking to further your Virtual Assistant skills in the area of Social Media Marketing then don’t overlook the Social Marketing Specialist Training Program offered at VAClassroom. The course material is extensive, current and very relevant to any business looking to leverage social media into their marketing plans.

In fact, within 1 month of completing the program, I secured a Social Media project that more than paid for the tuition of the course. Now that’s a good return on investment!”

Theresa Scholes
ClickVA

Here is the link and Coupon Code for the Social Media Marketing Training Program:

VAClassroom Social Media Marketing Training Program!
$100 Discount Coupon: SUMMER09

This early summer special is only available for a limited time, so take advantage of this now and save yourself $100!

Update:  I thought you might be interested in this 60 minute webinar that was recently put on by VAClassroom titled, “Seven Ways Virtual Professionals Can Profit from the Social Media Boom in 2009″.

This webinar will give you a clear sense of the types of Social Media Marketing Services you might consider offering or outsourcing to a Social Media Specialist in 2009.

http://www.vaclassroom.com/social-media-boom

Ever wonder how to create a favicon (that little icon next to the URL in the browser’s address bar)? In this tutorial I will demonstrate how you can create your own website icon that you can add to your sales page, webpage or blog.

Step 1: Create your icon graphic
Use your own favourite graphic editor to create your icon (16 pixels by 16 pixels). Working with this size can be difficult so try using a larger canvas (32 x 32 or 64 x 64) and resize later. Take inspiration from your logo, website colours, initials, or some other visual association to your business to design your icon.

Step 2: Save your favicon
The next step is to save your icon as “favicon.ico”, but you’ll notice that the .ico extension isn’t an option in most graphic editors. There are two ways to accomplish this. A quick Google search will turn up several free favicon generators that you can use to convert your JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files to an ICO file format.

Alternatively, you can save your icon directly in Photoshop with a free downloadable plug-in. Installing this plug-in is relatively simple: close Photoshop, download, upzip, move the plug-in into your Adobe Photoshop/Plug-Ins/File Formats folder, restart Photoshop, and voila!

Step 3: Activate you favicon
The final step is to upload your favicon.ico file to website’s root folder (this should be the same location as your index file) and add a link element between the header tags of your website:

<link rel=”icon” href=”http://yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>

Note: If you are working with a blog you will want to drop that same code into the header.php (WP-Admin — >design — >theme editor –> header.php).

And that’s it! While a favicon isn’t going to improve your page ranking or send more traffic to your site, it is one more piece of online branding for your business.

Craig Cannings of VAClassroom.com and Leesa Barnes of MarketingFit.com are joining together for a free teleseminar for online professionals to learn the five social media tasks you can outsource and still be authentic (and which ones you should not), this Thursday, May 28th at 5:00 pm EST.

This is a great opportunity for virtual assistants too, to see where they can be expanding their service offerings. VAClassroom.com is the authority on social media virtual assistance training, offering a complete certification program covering seven sets of different high-demand niches.

For more information on VAClassroom’s certification program and/or sign up for the free teleseminar visit: www.vaclassroom.com. While you’re there take advantage of the free seven day offer to the VAClassroom Membership Program, which grants you access to their private forum, marketing videos, monthly events plus any archived audio/video recordings.

Update (May 31/09): If you missed this event the archived audio is now available at www.vaclassroom.com. Sign-up for your free 7-day membership program and head over to the event page to grab this recording!