Ah, it’s that time of year again; time to decorate the tree, or light the menorah, and spend time with loved ones. It’s that magic time of year when little ones walk around with grins from ear to ear with anticipation of events to come. No matter how magical the holiday season is, the fact is that for many small business owners, it’s a time of year that means stress. Everyone has gifts to purchase, feasts to prepare, decorating to do, travel to plan and so much more; add to that the fact that you need to arrange for replacements for vacationing staff, send gifts and/or cards to loyal customers and maybe even arrange for a staff party, and you have a great recipe for chaos.
There is really no need to let the holidays make you tense. There is a cost-effective solution to the surplus of holiday work that most small businesses experience. Most of the duties on your holiday to-do list are items that can be completed by a professional Virtual Assistant. Here are just some of the ways that a VA can relieve your stress this holiday season:
1. Have a Virtual Assistant order your gifts and/or cards. This is a task that can quite easily be taken care of virtually. A Virtual Assistant will even be able to send the cards out for you, and arrange to have the gifts wrapped and sent to your customers, suppliers, colleagues or employees without you ever having to lift a finger.
2. Do you have a holiday promotion you would like to publicize? Have your Virtual Assistant write a press release about it. A press release is a great way to generate publicity for your business and in fact, there are quite a few online services to which your VA can submit your release for free.
3. Does your business offer a solution to a problem that people commonly face during the holidays? Have a Virtual Assistant write an article about it. An article is an excellent way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website and generate some extra sales.
4. If you have a staff shortage during the holiday, but don’t want the hassle of placing job ads, reading resumes and conducting interviews only to hire someone for a few weeks, consider outsourcing some of the employee’s tasks to a qualified Virtual Assistant. A VA can be hired on a per-task basis, or can be contracted for a brief time during the holidays and after the holidays are over, the contract can be too.
5. A Virtual Assistant can make all the arrangements for a memorable staff party; from booking restaurants or halls and handling staff invitations, to directions and entertainment. A VA can take the hassle out of the staff party, so that you can just show up and enjoy yourself.
6. If you are planning a vacation during the holidays and need to have someone monitor and respond to your email, a Virtual Assistant can handle this as well. By either forwarding your email directly to your VA, or by setting up a web-based email account which both you and your VA can access, you can be sure that all of your important clients are well cared for in your absence.
The holidays should be a time of year that you look forward to, not that you dread. By getting the qualified help you need, you can alter your focus from business stress to family and enjoyment.
I was listening to a song by Colby Callait and Jason Mraz called “Lucky” on the radio the other day and it got me thinking about how lucky I am. The song is actually a love song, but in it the artists sing about how lucky they are to have all that they have. It made me think about how lucky I am for my own family and for having the best job in the world. I basically have a different job each day. I work for different clients on different tasks all the time, which means no monotony and no boredom.
Few people are in a job that they can truly say that they love, but some are in a position to love their job and they simply don’t know it. For example, many entrepreneurs are living out their dream of owning a business, but the tedious, long hours and repetitive paperwork involved makes them unhappy. Others struggle because, although they know their area of expertise inside and out, they can’t figure out how to manage some of the other aspects of their business such as marketing, bookkeeping, or creating a web presence.
Falling in love with your job all over again is actually quite easy and can be done in a few simple steps. Start by taking out a sheet of paper and making two lists. The first will be a list of all the parts of your job that you love; the parts that you truly enjoy and that give you the most pleasure. The second list will be of the tasks that you don’t like; the ones that are tedious or difficult, or at which you are not skilled.
Next, review the tasks that you don’t like. Of those, decide which tasks can be done by someone else without affecting your company’s revenue. Review the tasks that can be handed off and, if you have employees, distribute the tasks among them. If you don’t have employees, don’t worry, you can still delegate. Outsourcing is incredibly cost-effective and is becoming more and more common among solo entrepreneurs, small businesses and even some medium sized companies.
Many companies are outsourcing bookkeeping, web design and maintenance, as well as administrative support with incredible results and are saving money in the process. With outsourcing you pay for only the tasks you assign and you can assign tasks in small or large chunks. For example, if you just can’t stand keeping your books, hire a bookkeeper to do it, If you don’t like updating your blog, hire a virtual assistant or a ghostwriter to write for you. Handing off these tasks allows you more time for the parts of your job that you love, or that bring you more profits.
By leaving the tasks you don’t enjoy in someone else’s capable hands, you can love your job all over again. Increased enthusiasm about your job will most certainly increase your effectiveness. It can also give you the time to focus on the more important aspects of your business, likely resulting in increased profits. It is a win-win situation; love your job, make more money. What are you waiting for? Fall in love again.
Every business owner with a web presence and good sense wants to drive traffic to their website. After all, more traffic will mean more sales, and more sales means more profits. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site. Some are better than others, and some are great, but are just too expensive. As well, not all traffic is of equal value. Just because you get hundreds of visitors to your site, doesn’t mean that they will necessarily be converted to customers.
The most important traffic to your site is targeted traffic. These are the people who are actively searching the web for information relating to your product or service. There are various ways to attract this traffic. Optimizing your website for keywords that your target market is searching for is one way. But it can take months for the search engines to pick you up, and it’s often difficult to get good rankings for popular keywords. Another method to get targeted traffic is using pay-per-click campaigns. If you know how to use pay-per-click properly, you can gain traffic almost immediately. The downside is, it could be costly. So how do you gain the type of traffic that wants what you have to sell, without having to compete for search engine rankings or spend money? The answer is article marketing.
When you use articles as a means to market your business, you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field. The individuals who read your article are people who have either searched for one of your article keywords, or are looking for articles to publish in their ezine or newsletter that may go out to a large number of people in your target market. After reading your expert advice, these individuals will decide whether they want to hear more, and if they do, they will likely click on the link in your resource box leading to your website. This is not just targeted traffic; it’s highly targeted traffic. If an individual has clicked on your link, they have found value in what you had to say in your article, and want to learn more. This type of traffic is much more likely to buy from you than the less targeted kind.
Your business is your area of expertise. Share some of that expertise and permit your target market to see that you are knowledgeable in your field. Be sure to spell check your work and watch for words that are frequently misused that won’t be picked up by your spell checker, i.e. “than” versus “then”, “their” versus “there” etc. Have someone proofread your article. When you proofread your own writing, often the mistakes get overlooked because the material is not fresh to you. Get a trusted friend or colleague to check for errors and ask them for feedback on the article. This will only make it better. Next, perform a search for “free article submissions”. Select both the most popular sites and the ones that your target audience is most likely to frequent. As they say, “practice makes perfect”; the more articles you write, the better you will get and the more easily the words will flow.
If writing really isn’t your cup of tea, or, if you simply don’t have the time to write articles, you might want to consider outsourcing this task. The highly targeted traffic that results from a well-written article containing fresh, useful information is too valuable for you to pass up. Contracting this work to a professional Ghostwriter, or a Virtual Assistant that offers this service, shouldn’t cost you as much as running a pay-per-click campaign. The articles will look like they came from you, because your name will appear in the resource box, and you own the rights to the article because it was paid for by you, so you can use it, and reuse it as you see fit.
The benefits of article marketing are too great too ignore. If you are not article marketing, you are missing out on one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to drive highly targeted traffic to your website.
At times it seems as though quality customer service is a thing of the past. Some companies just don’t appear to care about keeping their clientele happy. If only they knew how damaging this is to their business. Consider the following statistics from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs:
• For every customer who bothers to complain, there are 26 others who remain silent.
• The average “wronged” customer will tell 8 to 16 people.
• 91% of unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again.
• It costs about five times as much to attract a new customer as it costs to keep an old one.
• Each one of your customers has a circle of influence of 250 people or potential customers who hear bad things about you.
In view of these figures, companies that don’t make customer care a priority could be losing thousands of dollars. The following are some simple ways to ensure that your customers remain happy and will keep coming back:
1. Say thank you. This is the simplest possible way to keep your customers happy, but it is all too often overlooked. A customer that feels appreciated is much more likely to bring you repeat business and/or refer you to a friend. Your clients are the reason for your business’ continued existence, so they should be appreciated. Saying thank you is often enough, but imagine how much more valued a customer would feel if something more personalized was done to thank them, such as a thank you card, or a simple coupon sent in gratitude for their business.
2. Respond to customer inquiries promptly. People simply don’t like to wait. Today’s world of high speed internet, microwaves and cell phones are evidence of this. If a customer has to wait days to have questions answered by you, they will likely take their business to a company that responds to their inquiries quickly. This situation could be rectified by setting up an autoresponder to answer general questions, leaving you more time to respond to more specific inquiries. If you still can’t find the time to respond promptly, then consider delegating this task to an employee or outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant.
3. Know when to say sorry. Learn to be accountable, not only for your own mistakes, but for those of your employees as well. When you consider that it is estimated that 35% of dissatisfied customers would not go to the competitors if they received apologies, you realize the true value of “I’m sorry”. We all know that there are difficult people, who will never be pleased, but the vast majority of your clientele are not these people. Being sincere and genuinely trying to make a disappointed customer happy will undoubtedly help you to retain more clients.
4. Value your customers by giving them a little extra. This is a small step that doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. It can be as simple as a small, unexpected free gift after a purchase, or providing a little extra service above and beyond that for which you were hired. Going the extra mile for your customers will make them feel appreciated and might even generate some referrals.
5. Personalize your service. Call your customers by their names and ask them how their day is going. Even if your business is conducted over the internet, there are ways to personalize emails to let your customers know that you care about them. If a client feels you know them, even a little bit, they are much more likely to show you loyalty and not move on to your competitors.
Without your customers, you don’t have a business. Customer service should therefore be high on your list of priorities. Treating each of your clients with genuine respect and gratitude by following these simple steps is sure to merit your clientele’s loyalty.
March 11th, 2009 in
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While working hour upon hour may pay off where your bank account is concerned, it’s sure to wreak havoc on the rest of your life. Success is meaningless if it doesn’t touch all areas of your life. Who wants to be rich if it causes the rest of your life to be empty? Being a success isn’t only about being at the top of your game in your business life, it takes into account all areas of your life.
For workaholics, it’s a hard prospect to consider: taking a step back from their business lives. Often they feel that if they let go of any part of their work, they stand to lose everything previously gained. In reality, slowing down doesn’t mean giving up on achieving your business goals, it simply means finding ways to work smarter to give you balance in your life as a whole. It means getting your working (or shall we say “over-working”) habits under control and optimizing the time you do spend working in order to get more done in less time. The following are some tips that are sure to help you curb your workaholic tendencies:
Keep an agenda. Use it to schedule your day. Plan your work time, family time and whenever possible, schedule some time for R & R. Remember that overextending yourself is sure to result in burnout. The goal here is balance, not adding more hours to your day. Foregoing sleep is unlikely to make you more productive in the long run.
Allow yourself to forget about work for a while. For workaholics this step is easier said than done. Time with friends and family can become stressful when your mind is swimming with all the things to be done at the office. A conscious effort to forget work is needed to break this habit. Remember, someone that is distant and distracted does not make for a fun companion and will likely damage their relationships.
Learn to delegate. Studies show that successful individuals are not those that bury themselves in work, they are the individuals that simply know how to delegate to make the most of their time. Many workaholics have a hard time with this, believing that the best way to get a job done well is to do it themselves. This belief could actually damage your career instead of helping it. For example, when a business owner takes on non-incoming earning tasks such as research, data entry, fielding the company`s incoming emails or calls, and micro-managing employees, he or she is losing time that could be spent on the money earning aspects of his or her business. Delegating these tasks to an in-house employee, or outsourcing to a virtual assistant to save costs, would free up the entrepreneur’s time to earn more money for the business.
These are just a few of the many strategies that you can use to find the balance that is needed to become a success in all aspects of your life. The key is stepping out of your comfort zone and away from those workaholic tendencies to see what works best for you. I guarantee you will be glad you did.
For more tips on working smarter instead of harder, register for my monthly e-zine “Business Simplified” on the column on the right of your screen and receive your free mini e-book “How to Add 2 Hours to Your Day: Lessons in Efficiency”.
You have a website that sells a product or service. You have decent traffic, but most of the visitors are unique visitors, meaning, they visit once and then leave and possibly forget that your business even exists. One of the single most important things that website owners should do, but all too often do not, is capture the names and email addresses of visitors to their site. Obviously it’s not usually possible to capture the information of every single visitor to your site, but that is really ok, because you don’t want every name. What you do want to capture is the information of individuals who visit your website, are interested in your product or service and either, want to learn more from you, or want to hear about deals or specials you may offer. But how do you get this information? The simple answer is with an Ezine or newsletter. To help you decide whether to develop such a tool, here are the 5 Ws of Newsletter or ezine creation:
(1) Who should publish newsletters? Just about any online business can benefit from distributing a newsletter or ezine. There is no better way to promote your business with little expense than by sending an ezine to your opt-in list.
(2) What kind of content should my Ezine include? The key to any successful Ezine is great content. Your readers have subscribed because they have an interest in your industry or area of expertise. The information you provide to them should therefore be relevant and fresh. Topics can include anything from product reviews, industry news, useful resources, tips and tutorials and specials or promotions. The content can be written by you, by a ghostwriter or obtained through some of the hundreds of free article banks on the internet (as long as proper credit is given to the author).
(3) When do you send a newsletter? This depends on a few things. First, how much time do you have to put into it? If you don’t have much time, you might consider sending a quarterly newsletter to at least get your name into people’s consciousness four times a year. This may however, give readers too much time to forget about you. With quarterly newsletters, there is always the danger that by the time newly subscribed readers receive your newsletter they will have forgotten you. Sending an ezine monthly or bi-monthly provides a higher probability that your readers will remember you, but won’t feel that you are monopolizing their inbox.
(4) Where do website visitors opt-in? There are various ways that you can have your readers opt-in to your newsletter. Some ezine services provide you with code to add a pop-up window to your site asking visitors to opt-in as they arrive at, or leave your site. Although these methods have proven successful, many fear that their visitors will be annoyed by these tactics and opt for a simple sign-up form. Placing your form so that it is immediately visible to your visitors when they arrive on your site is likely to gain you more subscribers, as will having an opt-in incentive such as a free e-book or a discount on a product or service.
(5) Why distribute an ezine? An ezine or newsletter is an incredible way to develop a relationship with your website visitors. As you probably already know, repeated exposure to a brand promotes familiarity and usually encourages positive feelings towards that brand. The more familiar consumers are with your product or service, the more likely they are to buy from you rather than from one of your competitors. By sending your readers information regularly, you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field, thus increasing your readers’ receptiveness to your products or services.
For most, the benefits of putting out a newsletter well outweigh the work that you will put into creating it. Every online business should have a means to capture visitor information and ezine or newsletter distribution is a great way to do just that.
While most of us have professional goals and ambitions, the way we go about achieving them differs greatly. For many, the drive to succeed leads them to work long hours, lose sleep, and generally neglect their personal life. Others achieve success by prioritizing, delegating and organization. So, which type of achiever are you? If you suffer from any combination of the following symptoms, you just might be the former, otherwise known as a “workaholic”.
1. You work evenings and week-ends in addition to your regular work hours. Determine what impact these extra hours are having on your family life, and decide whether it is really worthwhile for you to be missing out on family and friends.
2. You seldom take vacation and when you do, you work. Everyone needs some time off to recuperate and refresh their mind. In fact most of us work better following a vacation because we feel less stressed and more focussed upon our return.
3. Your thoughts are consumed with work. You can’t make it through a school play, or an evening out with friends without checking your email, voicemail or blackberry.
4. You are missing out on the lives of your family and friends. Do you know the name of your child’s much-loved teddy-bear, or your spouse’s favourite book or television show? When was the last time you had dinner with your best-friend?
5. You don’t have any time to relax. When was the last time you took a bubble bath, read a book, or went to a movie? Without taking time for yourself on a regular basis, all you are sure to achieve is burn-out.
6. Relaxing stresses you out. When you do decide to read a book, or see a movie, you find you can’t relax because you feel that you should be working.
7. You are having family troubles because of your persistent absences. If your spouse or children resent you because you aren’t around, it is time to make some changes.
Workaholics are in reality not more likely to achieve success. They are in actuality much more likely to reach burn-out status before that happens. In fact, experts agree that the vast majority of successful individuals are not workaholics, but that they have learned how to prioritize and delegate. If you are a Workaholic, it’s not too late to change. Letting go of some of your lower priority tasks does not mean the end of your work-related ambitions and in fact may just help you to attain the goals that you have been striving to realize.
February 20th, 2009 in
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You are a business owner with a web presence. During a routine Google search for your page ranking, you discover something disturbing. There is another company out there with a name very similar to yours and almost identical content on their website. What do you do? Is your company name and website content automatically protected by copyright law? Should you have registered your company name as a trademark? Can you demand that they change their name and dismantle their website immediately?
Intellectual Property can be a confusing topic, and one that all business owners should know about. Sadly however, many entrepreneurs simply don’t. Intellectual property is in very simple terms an idea that legally belongs to somebody, be they a company or an individual. Only the owner of that idea, or somebody the owner has a legal agreement with can use the idea. Generally, the owner of the idea is usually its creator unless someone paid them to create the idea, in which case the idea’s owner is the person who paid for the idea. There are different kinds of intellectual property, but for the purpose of this article, we will focus on copyright, patent and trademark.
Patent – A patent protects the creators of new inventions. An invention can include anything from a new product or business method to a recipe. If you decide to patent your invention, there a few things you should know. First, you will need to apply for a patent in every country where you would like your invention to be protected. Secondly, getting a patent is going to cost you a pretty penny. You will have to pay thousands of dollars to patent your idea and it will take a minimum of 2 years (probably more) before you are granted a patent. Also, your precious invention will no longer remain a secret since your patent application will be made public once your application is submitted. If all of this wasn’t enough bad news, patent protection generally only lasts for twenty years from the date of your application. Phew! On the up side, once your patent is accepted, you can sue anyone who tries to manufacture or sell your invention.
It’s worth mentioning here that another method to keep your invention protected is to keep the method of manufacturing it a ‘trade secret’. If you choose this process, of course, in order to manufacture your product, you will have to tell somebody. You would have to have anyone who would learn your secret sign a confidentiality agreement. Consult a lawyer if you plan to use this method.
Trademark - Trademarks are the marks used to distinguish one company’s products or services from another’s. They can include a product name, a slogan, and any other mark that is deemed to be unique to a company such as a logo or unique packaging. As a rule, you can’t trademark descriptive words, geographical names or a person’s name. You also cannot register a business’ name. You can however, register part of a name used to identify a product or service. For example “Kellogg’s Company” is the owner of the “Kellogg’s” trademark and the “Rice Krispies” trademark. You cannot register a trademark similar to one that is already in use by another company. Beware; a trademark does not have to be registered in order to prevent others from using it. If a company is using an unregistered trademark in your geographical area, they can still prevent you from using it. You could perform a search in a trademark database and find later that you are using another company’s unregistered trademark. If you find another company in a completely different industry using your unregistered trademark, you probably won’t be able to do anything about it if they are not your competitors or if they are not in your geographical vicinity. Protection of a registered trademark however, is much stronger than an unregistered one, and once you have a registered trademark, you can prevent competitors from using it, or confusingly similar ones anywhere in the country in which your trademark is registered.
Copyright – Any written text, artistic work, or computer program is automatically protected by copyright. Anything you or I write, be it published, online text or unpublished, handwritten text, is copyrighted. Also anything we draw, paint, photograph, film, or compose is also protected by copyright. Copyright can be registered, but it doesn’t have to be in order for it to be illegal for individuals to copy someone else’s work. Copyright also lasts for an extremely long time. Usually it lasts the duration of the author’s life plus fifty years at which point it becomes a part of the public domain and can be used by anyone.
Factual information cannot be copyrighted. For example, this article is based on fact. Although you cannot copy my article and claim to have authored it yourself, you can take the facts included in the article and use them in your own written material. If you would like to use a very small portion of someone else’s written work, this is usually acceptable as long as you credit the author.
Finally, what do you do if someone uses your work without your permission? Your first step should be to contact the individual. You can usually either go to the contact page on the offender’s web site or go to www.whois.com and enter the offender’s domain to find contact information. If your initial communication doesn’t get results, you should then send a ‘cease and desist order’. For sample orders, just perform a search on ‘cease and desist orders’. Finally if still no action is taken by the offending party, contact their web host and advise them of the situation and finally, contact search engines and make them aware of the situation. These actions should render the offender’s website useless or in the very least give them enough trouble to convince them to remove the copied material.
For more information on intellectual property in Canada, visit the Canadian Intellectual Property Office at http://www.cipo.ca, for the U.S., visit the United States Patent and Trademark Office at http://www.uspto.gov and for Europe please visit the European Patent Office at http://www.european-patent-office.org.
One of the first questions I get when speaking with new or prospective clients for the first time is “how does it work?”. Although every virtual assistant or “VA” works differently, there are a few basic guidelines that you can follow to optimize the benefits of working with your VA:
1. Delegate, delegate and delegate some more! Create a list of tasks that either take you away from the money earning aspects of your business, or that you simply don’t like to do. Review your list with your virtual assistant and discuss how he/she might be able to take some of those items off of your plate.
2. The basis of any good client/virtual assistant relationship is communication. When you begin working with a VA, let them know how you prefer to communicate and what your communication style is. How will you be contacting him/her? Will you call, email, use a chat service? Do you plan on being in touch frequently each day, once or twice per week, or a couple of times per month? Some virtual assistants set a schedule for communicating with clients in order to remain efficient and may not be able to respond within your expected timeframe, while other answer calls at any time throughout the day. These are all things that should be discussed up front in order to prevent any surprises down the road.
3. Once you and your Virtual Assistant have worked together for some time, you will both know what is expected of you. In the beginning though, it will be a learning process for you and for even the most seasoned virtual assistant. Until your VA learns your working style, it’s best to give clear, concise instructions. He or she might not feel comfortable taking the reins (so to speak) on project ideas when they don’t know how much leeway they have.
4. Discuss task turnaround time. If you hire a virtual assistant and expect that each task given will be completed the same day, you might be in for a surprise. Unlike an in-house assistant, you are not the only person a virtual assistant is working with. He/she may have to juggle numerous clients and thus numerous projects each day. If you have a deadline, discuss it with your VA to be sure they have the time to get your job done on schedule.
Working with a virtual office assistant is a great way to grow your business without the stress, hassle and cost of hiring an employee. Ensuring that you and your assistant are on the same page is an important way to make certain that not only will you begin the working relationship on a positive note, but that you will also improve the chances of a successful long term association.
These are trying economic times for even the savviest of entrepreneurs. Businesses seem to be closing up shop everywhere we look. Many small businesses that are surviving are struggling to cut costs, while trying to maintain their bottom line by keeping the clients they already have. For some cutting back may mean little changes such as eliminating the purchase of unnecessary office supplies, subscriptions and memberships. For others the cuts may go deeper, eating into staff salaries, possibly benefit programs and marketing budgets.
While some cuts may unquestionably hurt the business, many small businesses make these drastic cuts without considering how at least some of them can be counteracted. For example, how can a business continue to attract customers with a drastically reduced marketing budget? During this challenging financial period, a little creative thinking may just be what keeps your business afloat.
Less costly alternatives to expensive print ads, or mailings do not necessarily mean that you will attract fewer customers. In fact, there are a plethora of marketing ideas out there that will cost you almost nothing but time to implement. For example, if you are a business with a web site, consider adding a blog. Aside from being a great tool to increase search engine rankings, a blog is a great way to demonstrate your expertise in your field by offering tips and advice while generating the trust of your readers. When a visitor to your blog trusts you and views you as an authority in your field, they are more likely to purchase your product or service when the time comes to do so.
Other great tools designed to improve the exposure of your business are online press releases and article marketing. Press releases are a great way to spread news about your business and attract new customers, while articles are a way to show your expertise and make people want to visit your website to learn more about your company. Both can be distributed completely free of charge. As long as you can write, you won’t have to pay a penny for this great promotional tool. There are hundreds of article banks and press release sites out there willing to distribute content at no cost. An added bonus to these marketing methods is that if done consistently, you also end up creating back-links to your website which in turn increases your visibility and your search engine ranking. If you don’t have the time or the skill to write and distribute articles yourself, you may consider hiring a Virtual Assistant, or a ghost writer at the fraction of the cost of advertising in print.
Another economical way to market your business is to join your local chamber of commerce, or other such organizations in your area. These are for the most-part relatively inexpensive to join, and the return on the investment can be tremendous.
You don’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to market your business. A little research and some creative thinking could have you on the way to increasing your revenue while saving thousands!
