Who Needs a Virtual Assistant?

By: Amanda Pageo, Virtual Assist USA

The short answer is: anyone who needs 25 hours in the day.

As a modern and cost-effective approach to traditional staffing, we work with several groups:

1)      Mid-to-large size companies

2)      Entrepreneurs

3)      Professional service providers, like lawyers or CPAs:

4)      Franchise owners

5)      Managers

When using a team of Virtual Assistants, you avoid the headache of having to sit down and interview individuals for days.

Because the point of bringing someone on board isn’t to create more work for yourself – hiring a Virtual Assistant team who can ramp up quickly cuts down on your workload.

Some examples:

1. Lawyer – Time is stretched thin in legal offices. Motions need to be filed, contracts drafted, invoices created, the website maintained and more. A handful of large Virtual Assistant teams, like Virtual Assist USA, also have experienced paralegals on staff. With impeccable attention to detail and a strong educational background, hiring a Virtual Assistant can free up your time to do the real legal eagle work! (These same principles apply to those who are Doctors and Accounting professionals.)
2. Entrepreneurs – A budding entrepreneur may task a Virtual Assistant to brainstorm new branding, create mock-ups for a website, develop a keyword strategy, performing market research, booking conference arrangements, filing and packaging RFPs or draft content. These tasks bog down entrepreneurs.
3. Managers – Managers come to a Virtual Assistant for 2 needs.  Most managers are inundated with administrative burdens like data entry into CRM professional alternative to staffing. Managers also come to Virtual Assist USA specifically when they need an outside specialist to aid in areas of search engine optimization, internet marketing and social media.

How do you want to use your Virtual Assistant?

Does Your Small Business Need to Be On Groupon?

Nope.

In our day-to-day work as a Virtual Assistant company, we have the pleasure of working with many small businesses, restauraunts and entrepreneurial retailers.  As a practice, we personally advise them against using group-buying sites like Groupon and Living Social. The main reason? Our inherent goal is to always help our clients’ businesses grow and generate new revenue. Group-buying sites are not in line with those goals. They often force a business to loose money, because the business owner pays a 50% fee-for-service on top of offering deep discount, translating to a net of only 25%. In this economy, profit margins are tight, so netting a 25% profit is detrimental to many small businesses.

Most small business owners will argue that they can take a hit one time to gain a repeat customer. However, launching a daily deal generally fails to generate repeat business. The customer buys the deal because of the deep discount and has a difficult time getting back into the “full price” mindset.

A far better way to generate new business is to work with a professional Virtual Assistant to create a proven marketing plan and calendar.

Top 5 Ways to Keep Your Newsletter Fresh

By Amelia Josephs, E-Marketing Expert for Virtual Assist USA

Many clients who use our Virtual Assistant and newsletter-writing services come to us because they struggle with keeping their content fresh. We avoid the stale, stuffy newsletters with 5% open rates. We aim to create the newsletters with high open rates,

1)      EZine Articles: This service is a great way to get instant content for your newsletter. Do the right thing and give proper credit to the original source. Go one step further and let them know you’re using their content—often, they will be happy to share with their own lists.

2)      Review an App: Search for apps that are most applicable to your target industry. Which apps provide solutions to your client’s problems? How good of a job do you think they do?

3)      Give back to charity: Choose your favorite charity (or better yet – poll your employees for theirs). Offer to donate to the charity on behalf of every newsletter subscriber who does something – Tweets about your newest product or places a minimum order.

4)      Portfolio item of the month: If confidentiality allows, showcase an item from your recent portfolio. Bonus if that generates more traffic to your client’s site! If you cannot do this, choose a funny photo from Flickr, pull the embedded code and make your audience laugh.

5)      Do a poll: Engaging your list in a poll is a great way to keep your business in the front of their mind – for at least 5 minutes. J Use this as an opportunity for inexpensive market research or feedback on how you can better serve their needs. Most potential customers are happy to tell you how to do this, as long as you ask politely.

For assistance in creating your e-mail newsletter, contact Virtual Assist USA.

7 Ways to Use Your Virtual Assistant This Holiday Season

While it’s the most wonderful time of the year, the holidays may be stressing you. With an already demanding schedule as an entrepreneur or corporate manager, the extra activities of the holiday can make you feel like you won’t see your bed until 2012. This group is even more susceptible to overwhelm at this time.

It’s vitally important to not let business development, marketing and other activities slip during this time. We see it happen every year– and come the bare months of January and February, your sales appointment calendar is empty and you have no recurring revenue on the books.

1. Bookkeeping: Have your Virtual Assistant manage your year-end bookkeeping. Your VA can reconcile accounts
2. Plan for 2012: Create a Standard Operating Procedures manual or a Marketing calendar to plan for the new year. Your VA should have plenty of ideas to make this process more efficient for you.
3. Purchase and Coordinate Corporate Gifts
4. Sales Collateral: Your Graphic Design Virtual Asssistant can coordinate and design new sales materials so that you are ready to head to appointments on Jan 2!
5. Ordering, Addressing and Mailing Christmas or Hannukah Cards
6. E-Book: Your Virtual Assistant can convert your current e-books or other materials to Kindle or Nook format in time for holiday purchase. This is a great way to add some revenue to the books!
7. Maintaining an Internet Presence: By posting social media messages, writing blogs and submitting to PR inquiries, your Virtual Assistant will ensure that you maintain a strong internet presence through the holiday season. Remember that Google is looking for new content every 30-45 days, so it’s vital to be constantly visible.

Above all, remember to be good to yourself. Take care of yourself during the holidays — get rest, take vitamins, exercise and enjoy the season!

As you realize how beneficial these tasks are to your business, contact us. Virtual Assist USA’s Virtual Assistant team ramps up quickly– we can have a conversation and begin work the same day.

 

 

What Blogging Means to Your Revenue Stream

Our worlds are jam-packed with statistics, opinions, guidelines and data on how to operate and manage a successful business. Yet, most business owners struggle to cohesively take that information and write blogs.

They don’t realize how important blogging is to an overall marketing and SEO strategy.

Google’s latest algorithm, developed earlier this year, changed the game for many businesses. Websites that had previously been at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages), sunk to the obscure 5^th page.  The reason for this change is that Google is now looking for fresh content, relevant keyword-dense information and frequently updated pages. In a word: blogs.

1. To get started writing blog posts, keep track of all of the developments in your industry. Think of how they affect your client’s problems and your solutions. Simply bookmark it in your web browser.
2. To aggregate all of this information, subscribe to RSS feeds or hire a Virtual Assistant to compile the information. Work closely with your Virtual Assistant to organize these steams of information, use SEO techniques and create an overall master strategy.
3. Short posts are okay, too. You can post a link to a relevant piece of industry information and offer 3-4 brief sentences that outline your opinion on the issue. As common sense dictates, avoid politically-charged comments.

The most important piece of advice: do not neglect blogging. Consistently follow up with your plan. Stay up-to-date with the latest SEO techniques. Work closely with your Virtual Assistant team to follow your plan and constantly adjust it. By blogging, you maximize the potential of your online success. When you have more visibility online, your revenue stream directly increases.

3 Top Tips On Selling a Service

As a Virtual Assistant and business services firm, we count a number of law firms, CPA firms, real estate developers and insurance agents as our clients. Businesses who sell services have a unique selling challenge and less opportunities than our retail and product clients have.

Here are our top 3 tips for selling a service:

1)      Feel your client’s pain: Be empathetic, attentive and patient. In today’s economy, some deals take longer to close, too, so be patient. Be more attentive, too, because it’s more important than ever to be laser-focused on client’s individual challenges. Aim to always directly answer the question: “What can I do for you? How can I help you succeed with what I have to offer you?”

2)      Impress clients with numbers: Avoid selling your service on fluff and shoddy-sales tactics. The ability to clearly and visually present what you can do for prospective clients is valuable. Data-driven sales conversations are the ones that result in an inked deal. Have a Virtual Assistant team prepare case studies, collect statistics and distribute data. Large Virtual Assistant teams also have graphic designers on staff to compile everything in a professionally-designed report.

3)      Find repeat business: Hire a Virtual Assistant to go through your database and connect with old clients and contacts. A Virtual Assistant team can create a custom e-mail campaign, perform A/B split-testing, monitor the results and create an overall strategy for getting back in touch with old clients. Virtual Assistants can also create Warm-Letter campaigns in Linked In and personally touch base with contacts on your behalf.

Lastly, remember to always treat your clients with care!

5 Quick Small Business Tips

Just 5 quick tips for your small business…

1. Sign up for HootSuite and pre-schedule your tweets and Facebook posts for the week or month to supplement your daily posting.
2. Write at least 5-10 blog posts so you’re ahead of the game. Schedule your posts to publish on Wednesdays or Thursdays, proven to drive more traffic.
3. At the end of your engagement with a client, ask them what they enjoyed best about their experience, so that they are focusing on the positive and also providing you feedback. Take feedback seriously.
4. Make a special offer to clients on their 1 year anniversary of being with your company. Reward their loyalty.
5. Send out 5 handwritten notes this week to employees, vendors or past clients. Let them know you’re thinking of them and appreciate what they’ve done for you to give you the best job in the world!

The Strengths of Inbound Marketing V. Traditional Advertising

By our friends at Myron Corporation

Small business owners often find themselves forced to compete with larger companies that have access to many more resources. With enough money, an organization can blanket an entire area in commercial material that will raise awareness of a brand, product or service no matter how well those things are made nor how much value they provide to consumers.

Thankfully, local companies that provide high-quality items can use some interesting techniques to attract loyal customers. One method that can be quite effective is inbound marketing.

Alternative strategies

Inbound marketing operates under the assumption that modern technology can more efficiently draw customers to an organization than putting a company’s name or brand in front of consumers. There are a number of tools that can be used to accomplish this, though most involve the internet.

For the most part, the crux of inbound marketing lies in search engine optimization (SEO). This strategy involves creating a company website and optimizing it so that when users search for a product or service in a certain area, the search engine will bring that business’ website to the top of the list of results. This requires some effort but is successful for generating sales leads and establishing relationships with individuals.

Other methods

Inbound marketing can also involve some other tools, such as promotional products. These tools are essentially useful items that can be purchased at a low cost. After being branded with a company logo, symbol or name, they are distributed for free among consumers. By creating a buzz around a name or identity, an organization will guarantee that customers will think of that group when considering a product or service from the same industry.

Another element of this new form of awareness campaign can be found on social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have thriving communities of users who interact with organizations and companies by exchanging comments and asking for information. When a customer requests to follow a group or to be friends with their online presence on a social networking site, it allows companies to market directly to people who have already expressed interest in them.

A final piece of the puzzle involves social online business directories. Quite a few consumers use mobile devices or portable computers and may find themselves attempting to quickly find a store or office on the go. Services such as Yelp!, CitySearch and FourSquare provide directories of reviews, pictures, maps and other resources that will help to link people with a company’s online presence.

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This guest blog post was written by Myron Corp.  Headquartered in Maywood, New Jersey, Myron Corp. is a global provider of imprinted promotional products that serves customers in ten countries. Myron manufactures quality custom promotional items such as personalized pens, custom calendars, and other corporate promotional gifts designed to build brand awareness and customer loyalty.

 

 

Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs thrive on risk-taking and stress. There is no way around that and no one will change someone’s psyche. It is how entrepreneurs are born.

When you are running a business, it’s very easy to get stressed out (For this, we whole-heatedly recommend checking out Diana Fletcher, the Stress Reducing Expert).

Before you talk to Diana, check out our Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs. These aren’t the typical time management tips like “Only check your e-mail 3xs a day”. I know you won’t do that. (For the record, I think that is insane.)

1. Make Sure Your To Do List Is One-Page: If you’re to-do list is more than one page, you’re bound to be stressed and overwhelmed. Pick a day each week (Thursday or Friday) to create your upcoming To-Do list. Do not cheat by making your writing really tiny! Whatever does not fit on a page, delegate to your Virtual Assistant. Then, delegate the remaining 50% of your list. (For an idea of what Services a Virtual Assistant can handle, click here.)
2. Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Use Post-Its: Once you start pasting sticky notes on your office walls, your week is going no where good. Plus, it looks very sloppy. Simply use your manageable To Do list to keep track of tasks. Immediately delegate half of your list to your Virtual Assistant. Definitely delegate anything that you were going to write on a Post-It.
3. Delegate Anything That’s Been On Your List For a Week: If it’s been a week and the task has not been started, delegate it to your Virtual Assistant. This is your cue that you will not get it done.
4. Tackle the Big Guys First: Give priority to the tasks that have a direct impact on your revenue or will take more than 2 hours.  A bonus is if you can complete your big tasks in the morning before lunch. (Some entrepreneurs may not remember what the word “lunch” means, so as a refresher: it is a break in your day where you eat food and do not check e-mails.)
5. Get 8-9 Hours of Sleep: This is just because being tired stinks.

Hug Your Clients!

With our local clients, we have a blast together. We meet for lunch, grab drinks, attend events. With our clients who don’t do business in the Pittsburgh, PA area, we chat on the phone — often. When we’re not talking business, we are laughing. It is a wonderful thing to be around positive, grateful clients who find value in our Virtual Assistant services.

It is an important Core Value of Virtual Assist USA to let our clients know we appreciate them. Sometimes, all  a client needs to hear is “Thank you for choosing us for your Virtual Assistant and business-to-business service needs.” 

A long-time, brilliant client introduced us to research that says personal relationships are more likely to succeed when interactions are closer to the 5:1 ratio of positive to negative. This is crucial in business relationships as well.

We do not compete on price with offshore Virtual Assistant companies, instead, we compete on service, quality and speed. We also like to think that a little gratitude goes a long way– our clients always feel valued and appreciated. And yes – when we can, we give them a hug!