As a Virtual Assistant I am always looking for new skills I can acquire that will increase my marketability to both current and prospective clients.
I have made a point to only pursue learning things that I am passionate or most curious about. If there are things I am not passionate about I have partnered with other Virtual Assistants who enjoy doing those things.This allows me to spend my time on things I enjoy the most, which is incredibly important as a solo-preneur.
This week I learned several new things, some profound, some spiritual and others technical.
- With Aweber I learned how to include a newsletter sign up form on my FaceBook fan page as well as including a LinkedIn badge so that people can easily connect with me on LinkedIn as well
- WordPress – wow, I think I spent three hours yesterday looking at various plug-ins and experimenting with some of them on my site
- LinkedIn — how to integrate blog posts into your profile
- Ping.fm – not sure how I like this yet but I may play around with it a little to see if it will compliment posting my blog posts through Onlywire. (if you aren’t using Onlywire to submit your own blog posts to about 20 different social bookmarking sites – you are really missing out! There is no other way, that I am aware of, on how you can submit your own posts to all those sites in less than 5 minutes!)
Where and how do you learn? Do you find inspiration in what you see others do? By reading books? An insatiable curiosity?
What things do you want to learn but realize you are not passionate about? Are those things that I can help you with? Maybe you are looking to start submitting your blog posts to the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.ci.ous, StumbleUpon, etc. but haven’t taken the time to set up an OnlyWire account.
As a small business owner look at the points in your business that cause you pain or frustration. Those tasks are hints of tasks you should outsource to a Virtual Assistant so that you can focus on what you are most passionate about.