March 2004

Unleash the Potential of Booklets to Promote Your VA Practice

by Paulette Ensign

You are an expert as a Virtual Assistant, regardless of the specific services you provide. And you are eager to share your expertise with as many people as possible. Writing a book may have crossed your mind. Who has time for that? Consider writing informational tips booklets instead, a format that conveys much of your valuable expertise, with a lot less effort on your part.

Writing booklets takes much less time, money, and stress than writing a full-length book, and can bring as many or more benefits. Writing a booklet is less overwhelming than writing a book. If you have already written a book, you might want to divide that book into booklets and make more money from the parts than you will for the whole.

Author status from a booklet opens many other doors for you and your practice. Some of those doors are:

* Speaking engagements
* Sales of your services and any products you may have
* Radio, television, airline, online, and print interviews
* Large quantity booklet sales
* Leveraging the booklet contents to other formats
* Joint sales/marketing ventures

Booklets are best written in short action steps, giving your reader a jump-start within your topic, with some good concrete information. The best length for a booklet is a 16 to 24 interior page. As your reader experiences any success and satisfaction from what they read in your booklet, your credibility increases. They want more of you and more of what you are about. The booklet gives them an opportunity to test drive you if they have not already utilized your services, or to reinforce whatever they learned from you when they worked with you.

A booklet is both a profit center and a marketing tool. Every time you sell a copy of your informational tips booklet, it brings in direct revenue while, at the same time, promoting you to a larger audience.

Every person who reads your booklet is a ready-made marketing representative for you and your practice. A single-copy buyer could be a decision-maker for purchasing large quantities of your booklet to use for their company's promotional purposes. A company or association who invests in a large quantity of your booklets as a promotional tool for their own purposes promotes you and your practice with each and every booklet they distribute. They have paid you to promote you. Life doesn't get a whole lot better than that!

They may also be or know a reporter or producer to schedule you for an interview. The reader might have contacts in your community who has interest in licensing your booklet into another language or different physical format. You may be just the person to consult or train on an issue. Or they may need a series of speeches in different locations or departments within their organization. Any of that and more can and does happen from a booklet.

You are also in a position to help your clients' company grow by introducing them to the idea of creating a booklet for their business. All the benefits described in this article would certainly be available to your clients as well.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to how a booklet can serve your Virtual Assistant practice. Write on the topic you enjoy most and is the most lucrative for your practice so your people can have a choice of the booklet, your services, or both when they are in buying mode. The person may want to purchase the booklets first, and hire your services later, or buy both product and service at the same time. Everyone benefits either way.

What will your first booklet be?

About the Author

Paulette Ensign has personally sold almost a million copies of her own tips booklet, '110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life', without spending a penny on advertising. She is the Founder, CEO, and Chief Visionary of her San Diego-based company, Tips Products International. Contact Paulette at 858-481-0890, Paulette@tipsbooklets.com or visit www.tipsbooklets.com