The Blog of Lisa Morosky

First of all, it’s been pretty quiet around LisaMorosky.com recently. It’s because of the big task that took up all my time last week: the relaunch of VAforBloggers.com.

I love deconstructing things. I love figuring out why people do the things they do. And in this case, I love deconstructing launches and relaunches and seeing the rhyme and reason behind it all.

So here’s my rhyme and reason.

I had planned to redo VAforBloggers.com in the first couple months of 2010 (after SpendLessOnLife.com was up and going). But, plans changed when I found out that I may have the opportunity to be profiled by a big-name blogger in the near future. Last thing I wanted to do was refer a ton of people to VAforBloggers.com with the way it looked before. So this relaunch suddenly became priority number one.

So I sat down and thought about everything that wasn’t working with the way VAforBloggers.com was, and the way that aspect of my business was.

Here’s what I came up with:

• My prices were too low, and because of that, I was getting swamped (and not necessarily with projects I loved).
• I didn’t have a way to monetize the people who visited VAforBloggers.com and didn’t necessarily want a virtual assistant. I was missing out on this big population of visitors.
• The site was ugly and boring, and it was half-assed. It was just something I put up there when I started doing VA work.
• I was wasting too much time following up with people before making a sale. There was too much back and forth communication. Nothing was automated.
• I wasn’t showcasing really anything I can/did do.
• I wasn’t following up with testimonials.
• I wasn’t giving people the opportunity to find out about my work style and personality before working with me. I spent too much time working with clients that I didn’t mesh too well with business-wise.

So now that you know why I did what I did, here’s…what I did.

• Goodbye hourly, hello packages. I don’t do hourly work anymore. Period. It limits my earnings and it gives people an automatic employer/employee attitude towards me.
• People now have the opportunity to know exactly who I am and how I work, and get answers to their questions ahead of time. So then they can make the informed decision to work with me.
• Some things are now on auto-pilot. There are “Buy Now” buttons to purchase packages. After you purchase a package, you’re automatically forwarded to a page with a project information form to fill out. I don’t need to do all of these steps now.
• The theme word is now “efficiency”. The way I do business is now more efficient, from automation, to publicizing my “no phone calls” policy.
• I’ve monetized those “in limbo” visitors by offering a range of products (currently just one) on how to do things related to your blog. So if you don’t want to invest in a VA, no problem. I’ll still show you how to do things, how to be organized, how to waste less time, etc.
• Some people view me as a consultant, instead of a VA. I’m not a consultant. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know just as much as they do – it just means I choose to be the Master Implementer of already created strategies (and not creating those strategies for clients myself). So to capitalize on the ton of questions I get through VAforBloggers.com (which, honestly, take up a ton of time to answer when they’re specific how-to questions), I’ve decided to do email consultations.
• I’ve made the site more visually appealing and organized.
• The homepage is essentially a landing page now. And just from the last day, I can tell you that was a good move on my part. I’ve created an email list for this site and a big goal this year is getting people on it!
• I’m showing work samples now. Not everything I’ve done (since some work has been confidential), but some of what I’ve done.
• The site is branded now (what a concept). The whole grungy dark background, the purples, the green, etc – that’s part of my Lisa Morosky/VAforBloggers.com brand. Twitter already rocks this, and so do my business cards, and now the two sites are catching up. Get used to the VAforBloggers.com look – you’ll be seeing something very similar over here on LisaMorosky.com soon.
• I’m doing Lisa Live (which isn’t really VAforBloggers.com-centric), broadcasting live for 2 hours weekly. It’s not going to start up for a couple weeks yet – but it’s a great way for people to get a little bit more comfortable with me, before they had their blogs over to me.
• I’m going to be feeding LisaMorosky.com content to the site monthly. I don’t have time to create unique articles for that site, so I’m recycling LisaMorosky.com content. Why not? They’re similar audiences.
• I’m using Headway on a site – finally. I wasn’t planning on using Headway for VAforBloggers.com. But time is money, people – and Headway saves me time.

So that’s that. I’ve had a good response from people thus far, so that makes me happy. I think the changes I made will affect business in 2010 (and for that, I’m psyched).

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