The eighth skill is a very practical yet necessary skill for working online - the ability to manage shopping cart systems.

As a VA, you need to have the ability to setup a new product in the shopping cart, complete with a ‘welcome’ autoresponder, thank you page and the buy button link.

However a shopping cart can also be a very important marketing tool in any online business. Most shopping carts these days come with added features that are a must in any marketing toolbelt, such as affiliate modules and ad tracking systems. We use and recommend Web Contact Pro, which has all these features and more (www.growyourvabiz.com/webcontact.html).

The key to a successful affiliate program is to ‘keep it alive’, making an effort to keep in touch with affiliates, updating them on new products/services and perhaps even sharing how much money your affiliates are making (always a nice little incentive to see the real dollars that can be made).

Many people setup an affiliate program through their shopping carts, and then never make any effort to contact their affiliates again.

As a VA this is something that we can quite easily manage for our clients. Take on the role of Affiliate Manager for your clients, contact the affiliates at least once a month, and your clients will see added sales and revenue as a result. The increase in sales can be tracked through the affiliate module in the shopping cart.

Now ad tracking systems are a WONDERFUL but woefully under-utilized tool. With an ad tracking system you set-up a special url that will track how many times a particular link is clicked.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of tracking all links on the websites and in the broadcasts of your clients. By tracking the number of times a link is clicked, you can track conversion rates to the sale (ie: 50 people clicked a link and 5 people bought the product, that is a 10% conversion).

You can also gauge the interests of your readers based on the number of clicks for a certain topic. This can actually be quite surprising at times, as you may expect people to click a link to buy an ebook on ‘managing your time’ only to find out that 5 times as many people clicked on a link to see a picture of your cat.

Go figure.

To be honest we just started doing this ourselves earlier this year, and it has already proven to be an invaluable marketing strategy. By tracking our clicks we have been able to create new products/services based on what people have proven to be of most interest to them.

If your client is new to shopping carts and has asked for your help in setting one up, you will also want to know a bit about merchant accounts. Unfortunately you cannot setup a merchant account for your clients, as they need to apply for one based on their own financial needs and background.

However you may be able to help them research their options and move the process along. Merchant Accounts can be somewhat tricky, so be sure to read this article on ‘What to know when getting a merchant account’: http://growyourvabiz.com/merchantaccounts