April 2005, Vol 12, Issue 2
[Bookstore]
For those who
work at/from home.
[Business Partners]
A list of complement-ary businesses to our services.
If you would like yours listed, please let us know!
[Case Studies]
Wondering how we
could assist your
business?
[Membership]
For prospective virtual
secretaries.
[Newsletters]
Read our previous
issues.
[Rates]
Kathie's service rates.
[VA Directory]
For a full list of our team.
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www.asecretary.com.au
How Many Email Addresses Do You Have?
If you've been on the Internet for a while, chances are you have more than one email address. You might have started off with one of the free accounts through Hotmail, Yahoo or Telstra. Then you may have progressed to an ISP account and so inherited an email address from your ISP, john@email.com.au or similar. Or perhaps one of those numbered email addresses very early on with Compuserve. From there you got your own domain and a new address, or several @mydomain.com. And then, if you've gotten really web addicted, you may have purchased other ISP accounts so you can have the web spaces at low rental to use for family photo albums, file storage and sharing, pet projects, your personal CV and a million other things.
Have you done an email address audit lately? Do you still have all those addresses live? When I recently received a bill from one of 3 providers I have an account with, it suddenly occurred to me - do I still need these accounts? Should I continue paying for these? The accounts had been set up for my daughters to have their own website they could play with, so I had a spare dialup address for my laptop and I think the third was to host a hobby website that wasn't drawing income, it was there because the subject was a hobby of mine. But the children have grown up and the hobby fell to the wayside quite sometime ago. The laptop account I only use now and then, perhaps once a year, so is it really worth keeping? And this is just one of the providers I use, remember!
Whilst I use my domain address for the majority of things I have occasionally used one of my spare addresses for mail lists, newsletters or as a backup if someone can't get an email through to me on my regular address for some reason. But where do you draw the line? Having all these addresses out there obviously makes you more vulnerable to spam. And whilst my main address is being filtered through Spamarrest.com the others aren't, they come straight to my inbox and me. I hadn't checked one of the accounts for quite sometime, it had been set up on Outlook on the girl's computer and none of them use Outlook much these days, opting for webmail, so I got a surprise when I opened Outlook and got all this email download - newsletters I'd subscribed to and lots of junk. I obviously didn't miss any of this stuff, although I did find one of the newsletters particularly useful, relating to small business and Australian government; I have to notify them of my 'real' address and then I can close down that account.
So, I decided it was time to do an email address audit and I won't tell you the final tally (but I do still have 13 coming in via Outlook that are active - admittedly some on behalf of clients). My girls call me a domain junkie - because I just can't help purchasing new domain addresses to divert to existing sites or because of a new site I'm planning, and of course, with them comes the availability of new email address options. Not that I use them all but they are there.... just in case. I will be closing some accounts and saving a little bit of money......... perhaps to purchase that new domain and set up the new site I was thinking about the other day.......
One more thing, if you do decide to cull some of your email accounts, don't forget to check what they might be registered with. It would be a shame for you to lose a domain name, contact, or miss out on information that was being forwarded to that address. Just recently the client of an association I run wrote and advised she'd received her membership renewal notice 6 months after it had been sent out. She also mentioned in her letter that most people knew where she was anyway - I didn't and no-one had told me! Don't assume the same with respect to your email addresses. After they are closed, they will bounce and the senders won't know where to find you if they have no other current form of contact for you. Which might be a good thing if you don't want to continue the connection.....
What is your count?
Book:
Instant Cashflow is written by Bradley J. Sugars. I won a copy of this book as a doorprize through my BNI chapter. I probably wouldn't have gone out and bought it myself, but now I have it, I find it really is a worthwhile read, with lots of hints and tips about how to make your dollar go further with various promotions, marketing ideas, networking, even sending out invoices. See www.bradsugars.com for details of where to get your copy. Thanks Stuart for my copy!
Website:
Copyscape is a website that will do a search of your URL to see if someone has plagurised your material. What a useful site this is! I've often used Google to search on terms or phrases to see if people are copying my material (it does happen and I have found offenders) but this site will make that job even easier. http://www.copyscape.com/
Did you know.....?
National Secretaries Day in Australia is called National Office Professionals Day and is celebrated on Friday 6th May - and not in April as in the UK and USA. Make sure you mark the date in your diary and remember your admin support on that special day!
What is a Virtual Assistant?
It's a term for home-based secretaries, administrative and secretarial support, and others who supply 
remote or virtual support.
We are as close to you as your computer and can do almost anything traditional support staff do - except virtually. You don't need to provide office space, equipment, software or furniture - we have our own!
Location no issue as the work is carried out 'virtually' no matter where you are! See our newest members listed at VA Directory
