SMB Marketing: Outsource Your Video




Working at Home

Virtual Assistant Demo Girl


There are lots of places out there where you can hire a freelancer to touch up photographs for you, create a logo, help you design your letterhead or handle other aspects of small business marketing, and that’s great. Those folks are really useful. But what if you need someone to actually help you run your business? You can find that online, too, and I love this site called Virtual Assistant Demo Girl.


The site is owned and operated by Michelle Shane, and she is remarkable. She’s not just someone who designs or creates things for your business. She actually makes videos for you and creates presentations that will market your company, but she will also actually go to work for you in your place.


Let’s assume that you have some sort of webinar that you’d like to put together, maybe it’s some sort of promotional webinar for your company, maybe it’s a training program that you’re going to offer to clients. Not only will Michelle host it and produce it for you, she’ll be the person who does the webinar. It’s pretty amazing. Imagine — while you’re relaxing at some exotic locale in the Caymans, she’s producing your webinar and hosting it for you. When you get home, the webinar is done, the people are trained, your products are sold, whatever it might be.







Virtual Assistant Demo Girl; small business marketing, outsourcing
Virtual Assistant Demo Girl
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Michelle Shane uses Camtasia Studio, which is the same software program that I use to create videos.  She also offers training in Camtasia for folks who what to learn how to make their own Web-based video demonstrations.


While Michelle offers a variety of services, I want to point out one last service that she provides. She can put together training programs and testing programs for your employees. If you’d like to see how your employees are doing in their training she can create specialized programs that will do just that.


If you’re looking for someone to help you with video presentations, want to learn how to make them yourself, or if you want to test and evaluate employee knowledge, Virtual Assistant Demo Girl is a great place — you absolutely want to come and take a look.


Yotify


Yotify.com is a Web-based service that’s a useful productivity tool. It simplifies many tasks that would normally be tedious to do manually, if they even got done at all. At the time of writing this, it’s in beta, and it’s free.


You can send out a virtual scout to track new apartment rental listings in your city, monitor prices on any item you want to buy, keep an eye out for a hotel room discount, see what other people are writing about you online, track an eBay auction, and much more. Pretty cool! Here’s how it works:


Step 1: Visit Yotify.com and click on the big blue sign up button on the homepage. Fill in all the usual form fields and register your new account.


Step 2: Click on the confirm code in the e-mail you’ll receive from Yotify.


Step 3: Look for the Send out a scout section at the top of the page. There are some gray category tabs along the top and some thumbnail graphics below that.


Yotify scouts find what you’re looking for.


To try the system, click on the Craigslist icon. You can now specify your local Craigslist region and have Yotify find anything you’re looking for in the for sale, housing, or jobs categories. For example, if you’re on the lookout for an Apple Mac Book Pro computer, you can type in those keywords, specify a min/max amount, specify how long you want the search to continue for, and even elect to receive the results as an hourly, daily or weekly e-mail digest!


To the right of the page you’ll see some of the results the scout found, and the actual ads are viewable on the page, without going out to Craigslist For even more ideas, view the free video (there’s a link at the very top of the page next to the logo).




You’ll find lots more small business marketing tips and resources from Andrew Lock in our Small Business In-Depth series, Lock in Your Marketing Resources.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical small business marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses “get more done and have more fun.”

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