It’s been a long time coming - a combination of my being busy and not many contributions, as yet, to the newsletter. But we have a growing number of subscribers which is good to see and I was conscious I needed to get another issue out soon. You can see issue 2 here.

Remember, your dues for this free newsletter is to submit two tips a quarter. As the tips increase we hope to send this newsletter out every two weeks. This is a newsletter for the Virtual Assistant Industry by Virtual Assistants so we look forward to your contributions and it will be the contributions that keep this newsletter happening.

I look forward to hearing from you!

It’s been great to see all the subscriptions come through for our new VA Resource - VA Network News. We’ve got some great hints and tips already, some I’m holding over to further issues so we can continue themes (rather than have them all in the first issue) but there are still some areas that could do with something.

Do you have a service or product you couldn’t do without in your VA business? Then why not tell everyone else about it? We will be including your name, email address, business name and URL if you have one. The information needs to be short and to the point, maximum 250 words but we would prefer much shorter than that.

Do you want to know how to do something or where to find something? Why not ask in our newsletter and we’ll compile a list of answers to send out in an issue in the following month.

Please go to our comments page to submit tips, questions, suggestions for an issue of VANetwork News.

A new resource for the Virtual Assistant industry.

I’m putting together something along the lines of SpeakerNetNews.  If you’ve ever seen it, it is a newsletter sent out weekly to the public speaking community worldwide and speakers get to suggest items, tips, products, services that they’ve found useful in their business and want to share what they’ve found with others.  The newsletter is not meant for promotional activities, i.e. big-noting the speakers and telling of their success stories, but more for the advancement of the industry and sharing of information. 

I would love to see similar for our industry - I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time and have finally been working at setting it up over the Christmas/New Year break. The website is still being worked on but I expect it will be ready to launch very soon.

If you work with public speakers you’ve probably seen their newsletter at some time and/or may have had your services mentioned in it - I know I have.

I hope that you would like to contribute a tip or item to the first issue which will go out in a couple of weeks, or sooner if it’s ready by then.  As if I need another project!  But it’s one I think that is needed.

If this is well received by the community I expect it will generate a number of emails on a regular basis for submission to each edition.  SNN puts their’s out weekly and although that would be great to do, I anticipate it to be rather ambitious at this stage. I’d like to aim for every 2 weeks but expect that monthly at the start might be closer to the mark.  It’s possible if it does become popular and busy (I hope it does) that I’ll need a couple of co-editors to assist in going through submissions for each edition.

If you’d like to participate you may send an item for the first issue, bearing in mind that it isn’t meant to be promotional material for your own business and only your name and email address will be included when the item is published. 

I also encourage you to subscribe and let me know if the autoresponder back to you worked ok, needs changing, etc. Remember it is very early days as yet but I expect over the next few months it will be in good shape.

All the best to you for 2008 and I look forward to your posts and seeing our industry grow in leaps and bounds!

Kathie M. Thomas, Editor, VANetwork News