Hello Moms!

This month one of the home business ideas I want to tell you about is one that many women I know are doing successfully. That is becoming a Virtual Assistant.

A Virtual Assistant (VA) is basically an online secretary or administrative assistant, but you work for clients as an independent contractor which means that you need to take care of your own taxes and healthcare.

If you have computer skills, are able to multi-task and can dedicate a good portion of every day to being online and on your computer - you could easily build a home business as a Virtual Assistant.

There are many good job sites where you can bid on initial work. A general rule of thumb when looking for work at home opportunities is never to pay for work. This makes sense, and good job boards such as elance are one of the few exceptions I would recommend.

When I began working from home as a Virtual Assistant I joined a well known job board called elance. This is where I found most of my ongoing clients. Their rates have gone up over the years, but so has the amount of jobs that get posted there. In my opinion it is well worth the investment.

Most of you know that my husband recently joined me in working from home. We needed to acquire some new clients and decided get an elance membership (I had let mine expire over a year ago). As a testament to their service, within two days we were awarded three different small jobs and have already found two ongoing clients from that membership.

I recommend that you check it out, build a strong portfolio to include that lists your references, job experience, education etc. and purchase a membership. We went with a three month basic subscription which has more then paid for itself. This is a good starting point for finding clients and beginning to work as a virtual assistant and an avenue I personally endorse as viable.

Thanks for reading the FreelanceMom news - I hope you find some tips useful to you.

Best wishes for your business!

P.S. Check out the following articles for more information:
» Joining VA Organizations Has Many Benefits
» Tips on Winning a Virtual Assistant Position AND Keeping It
» Assisting You Virtually- How Virtual Assistants are changing the face of the workplace
» The Virtual Assistant

HOME BUSINESS TIP If you own your own website - you know the importance of promotion and search engine optimization. Here are some tools that I find helpful: Alexa Toolbar - The Alexa toolbar gives you an idea of the amount of traffic potential link partners have and also lets you submit your website as a related site. Read more about promoting with Alexa. WebCEO - I find this tool INDISPENSIBLE for checking the best keywords to optimize for, check my search engine rankings, compare my site to other sites, and optimize my pages. It's the best!

The Global Work Marketplace - The revolution of how work gets done
By Lori Redfield

Will cubicles be a distant memory for today’s workforce? Will the expense of office space and the tremendous burden of employee benefits be a thing of the past for modern day businesses?

The reality is, for thousands of people, this change has already occurred. Internet based 'Service Auctions' now abound where businesses can post their ongoing jobs or one-time projects to a global market of freelance professionals, a.k.a. - 'Service Providers'.

The service providers then bid on the work, adorn the bid with their 'pitch' and online portfolio and viola! What commonly takes weeks to accomplish and thousands of dollars in payroll and advertising revenue... can take a business as little as a day with no overhead costs at all.

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Advertising Special

Biz Op listings in November... Sold on FreelanceMom.com for $27/month. This month, to newsletter subscribers ONLY you can purchase a BizOp listing for one month for just $10! Interested? Just email Lori for more details.

There Are Over 3 Billion Web Pages...Where Is Yours?
By Ann Rusnak

Search engines remain the #1 way people use to locate you on the Internet. Over the past several years, search engines have under gone some major changes. Many of the free ones are gone and indexing has become more sophisticated.

Yet, our web site has remained in the top ten ranking for the past 4 years with very little maintenance. I have a business to run and don't have time to play search engine ranking games.

First forget trying to trick search engines. This is a big waste of time. Search engines soon catch on and you'll lose that ranking or worse yet...get your site banned from the search engine index.

Secondly, forget about always being #1. Algorithms constantly change and it can become a full time job attempting to maintain a number one ranking. We constantly go from #1 to #10. As long as we stay on the top ten search results which is the first page of the search engine, I am happy.

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