Virtual Assistance

Barnacle SEO – A key to a winning SEO marketing

If you are an SEO marketer, this phrase, ‘A key to a winning SEO strategy’, must have spontaneously reminded you of keyword marketing, website restructuring, URL structuring, link building, back-linking and the like. In fact, SEO is a mixture of analytical and creative practices and each of these is important to get the benefits of SEO. The importance of each of the SEO practices, be it keyword research or link-building, depends significantly on the algorithm of the search engine you select for marketing. So, a good SEO strategy is implementation of SEO practices according to their relevance. It’s just like a master-chef cooking that perfect recipe using the right ingredients in the right proportions. There are some SEO practices which have not received their due importance from search engine marketers. One of them is Barnacle SEO. If you are a marketer who emphasizes on local search marketing then Barnacle SEO is an important aspect that cannot be overseen. You might be wondering what this Barnacle SEO is all about. What is Barnacle SEO? Barnacle SEO is inspired by the nature of barnacles. A barnacle is a marine creature with a hard shell which sticks permanently to rocks or other huge marine animals like whales. So the motive of a Barnacle SEO is – “attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current”. Barnacle SEO leverages on earning reviews and listings in a high ranking directory or review site. Essentials of Barnacle SEO implementation: Select and prioritize your review sites: First, use the right keywords and track all the top-ranking review sites and directories in the result page. For instance, if your business is about Eco Resorts, then type keywords such as Eco Resorts or Eco Tourism, or Eco Resort in Bangkok considering if your Resort is in Bangkok. Your Search Engine Result page will give you a number of reputed review sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia. You must prioritize reputed sites to get reviews. In fact, a listing in a standard review site will earn you more clicks than an individual website. Build good profiles in reputed sites: Make your profile as attractive as possible in the directory or the review site. Include all basic information details sought by searchers like your business name, address, phone number, website and e-mail. Also include pictures of your business in review sites. Link Building: In order to rank well in a SERP, earn links to your reviews and listings. Link it from your own website as well as other locally oriented websites like charities, Chambers of Commerce and the like. Advantages of Barnacle SEO: Some of the advantages of Barnacle SEO are Brand Equity building: Just imagine you are looking for a family restaurant in your town. You will obviously be interested in a restaurant with a 5 star rating over another with a 3 star rating. Customer ratings are also an important factor considered by Google algorithms for determining a Google rank. Moreover, potential customers are more likely to take reviews published on a reputed site more seriously. Right answer to right audience: Just Getting listed in reputed local directories like Yellow Pages will connect with the right audiences looking for your service or product. This bridges the usual disconnect between the information on your website and your searchers. Mobile friendly experience: Barnacle SEO emphasizes on listings and reviews in reputed sites. The loading time of such sites is much faster than regular websites. These sites are friendly for information extraction and browsing. Reviews are not the only factors for getting better ranking. The recent updates in Google algorithm are increasingly emphasizing on quality and quantity of reviews. The extent of influence of reviews also depends on the industry of your business. Some industries are more influenced by reviews. For instance, the tourism industry and the entertainment industry are more likely to be influenced by user reviews because people seek peer recommendations before opting for these services and products. Barnacle SEO is often a time consuming task. Its takes a lot of effort to find reputed sites and create good content to be listed. Some of these activities related to Barnacle SEO are better outsourced to a SEO expert assistant. It is inexpensive as well as more efficient.

Barnacle SEO – A key to a winning SEO marketing Read More »

If you are an SEO marketer, this phrase, ‘A key to a winning SEO strategy’, must have spontaneously reminded you of keyword marketing, website restructuring, URL structuring, link building, back-linking and the like. In fact, SEO is a mixture of analytical and creative practices and each of these is important to get the benefits of SEO. The importance of each of the SEO practices, be it keyword research or link-building, depends significantly on the algorithm of the search engine you select for marketing. So, a good SEO strategy is implementation of SEO practices according to their relevance. It’s just like a master-chef cooking that perfect recipe using the right ingredients in the right proportions. There are some SEO practices which have not received their due importance from search engine marketers. One of them is Barnacle SEO. If you are a marketer who emphasizes on local search marketing then Barnacle SEO is an important aspect that cannot be overseen. You might be wondering what this Barnacle SEO is all about. What is Barnacle SEO? Barnacle SEO is inspired by the nature of barnacles. A barnacle is a marine creature with a hard shell which sticks permanently to rocks or other huge marine animals like whales. So the motive of a Barnacle SEO is – “attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current”. Barnacle SEO leverages on earning reviews and listings in a high ranking directory or review site. Essentials of Barnacle SEO implementation: Select and prioritize your review sites: First, use the right keywords and track all the top-ranking review sites and directories in the result page. For instance, if your business is about Eco Resorts, then type keywords such as Eco Resorts or Eco Tourism, or Eco Resort in Bangkok considering if your Resort is in Bangkok. Your Search Engine Result page will give you a number of reputed review sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia. You must prioritize reputed sites to get reviews. In fact, a listing in a standard review site will earn you more clicks than an individual website. Build good profiles in reputed sites: Make your profile as attractive as possible in the directory or the review site. Include all basic information details sought by searchers like your business name, address, phone number, website and e-mail. Also include pictures of your business in review sites. Link Building: In order to rank well in a SERP, earn links to your reviews and listings. Link it from your own website as well as other locally oriented websites like charities, Chambers of Commerce and the like. Advantages of Barnacle SEO: Some of the advantages of Barnacle SEO are Brand Equity building: Just imagine you are looking for a family restaurant in your town. You will obviously be interested in a restaurant with a 5 star rating over another with a 3 star rating. Customer ratings are also an important factor considered by Google algorithms for determining a Google rank. Moreover, potential customers are more likely to take reviews published on a reputed site more seriously. Right answer to right audience: Just Getting listed in reputed local directories like Yellow Pages will connect with the right audiences looking for your service or product. This bridges the usual disconnect between the information on your website and your searchers. Mobile friendly experience: Barnacle SEO emphasizes on listings and reviews in reputed sites. The loading time of such sites is much faster than regular websites. These sites are friendly for information extraction and browsing. Reviews are not the only factors for getting better ranking. The recent updates in Google algorithm are increasingly emphasizing on quality and quantity of reviews. The extent of influence of reviews also depends on the industry of your business. Some industries are more influenced by reviews. For instance, the tourism industry and the entertainment industry are more likely to be influenced by user reviews because people seek peer recommendations before opting for these services and products. Barnacle SEO is often a time consuming task. Its takes a lot of effort to find reputed sites and create good content to be listed. Some of these activities related to Barnacle SEO are better outsourced to a SEO expert assistant. It is inexpensive as well as more efficient.

Give your business a winning edge with effective content marketing strategy

Content marketing is an aspect of marketing which focuses on creating, distributing and analyzing content for target audience. In fact, content marketing is a cyclic process which includes the broad steps of content creation, content distribution, evaluation, analysis and content optimization. Nowadays content marketing is usually driven online but it is not limited to online activities. Billboard ads, TV ads, FM ads, jingles and the like are all various forms of content and their effects are augmented with content marketing. Content marketing is usually objectified to draw in more customers but nowadays the use of content has moved beyond merely attracting prospects. Nowadays content marketing is used even for sales conversion and closing. Thus, content marketing has evolved to be a broad field with deep influence in multiple aspects of the overall marketing. Content is an umbrella word with its significance in every step of marketing, whether it is in introducing a new brand in the market or closing sales with a customer of the brand. In fact, the process of fan building for a brand starts with the making of good content. Thus, content is important in every step of a marketing process and so is content marketing. A mere content marketing is not enough to fetch the best benefits. The results you reap from your content marketing depend on the quality of your content marketing. But it is also very important to strategize the marketing of the generated content. A good way to begin this would be to align it with the fundamentals of your business – the basic objectives of the business, the customer value proposition, brand value et al. Strategizing content marketing is an expansive term to be explained in this blog. A lot depends on the present state of your business, its target audience, it short and long term goals. So, content marketing strategies would differ according to these factors. Yet, a few standard rules must be followed by every content marketer and they are stated as below. The entire content marketing includes broadly the steps of creation, distribution, evaluation and analysis. Each of these steps must be fortified with some rules as follows: Rules for the making of great content: Understand your target audience: Understand your target audience in terms of their lifestyle, behavior, demographics and similar relevant parameters. Once you understand your target audience, analyze and list out their needs and how they react to their needs, what information they seek in regards to their needs and what information might excite them. Make your content easily understandable: Make your content easily understandable for your audience by avoiding jargons, using a reader friendly language, including infographics, etc. Enrich your content with information: Customize your content with relevant information by understanding where your audiences stand in the buyer’s journey. This will help to create useful content. For instance, if your audience is in the state of comparing you with your competitors for making the purchase decision your content must assist the decision making by reflecting how your service or product is differentiated from your competitors. And if your audience is interested in making the purchase, make it easier by using simple easy to navigate payment options and call to action buttons. Tips for content distribution: Reflect and decide: As you start with your content distribution you must reflect upon the following questions: Why do you want your audience to use your content? Where do your audiences mostly consume content? How frequently do they use content? The answers of these questions will set the guidelines for your content distribution. For instance, if you want your content to boost engagement and talk about your brand, a social media platform like Facebook is a good bet for you. Otherwise, if you want a large reach, you should opt for a paid search advertising network. If you want high returns with reach to niche audience, you should stress on SEO or organic marketing of your content in a media like LinkedIn. Optimize for Social Media: Optimize your social media distribution strategy by posting your content at the optimum frequency, using share buttons, using visuals, sharing bite-sized succinct and attractive content. Distribute your content uniformly: You may distribute your content in multiple media yet there must be a uniformity of your content throughout all media. The essence of your content like the value proposition, unique selling proposition should be the same in all the media. It will enhance your brand equity in your audiences. Measuring ROI: The right parameters reflect right ROI: If you want to measure the success of your content marketing, select the right parameters to measure it. Selection of parameters for measuring ROI depends on your content marketing objectives. If your want more fans for your brand then engagement rate and rate of shares found are two parameters which will give you the right ROI. Analyze and improve: Once you measure ROI for your content marketing, start analyzing to close the gaps and opportunities. Make a SWOT matrix and utilize the scope for improvement. This way, you will step up your content marketing strategy towards perfection at every cycle. The above discussed rules of content will help you meet the expectations of your audience, it enhances the success of your business. Content marketing is often a time consuming task. It requires regularity, dedication and most importantly professionalism. Specially, if you are already occupied with other tasks, content might become an unmanageable burden for you. A worthier way of managing content marketing is to outsource it to content expert virtual assistants, may be a content expert from GetFriday.

Give your business a winning edge with effective content marketing strategy Read More »

Content marketing is an aspect of marketing which focuses on creating, distributing and analyzing content for target audience. In fact, content marketing is a cyclic process which includes the broad steps of content creation, content distribution, evaluation, analysis and content optimization. Nowadays content marketing is usually driven online but it is not limited to online activities. Billboard ads, TV ads, FM ads, jingles and the like are all various forms of content and their effects are augmented with content marketing. Content marketing is usually objectified to draw in more customers but nowadays the use of content has moved beyond merely attracting prospects. Nowadays content marketing is used even for sales conversion and closing. Thus, content marketing has evolved to be a broad field with deep influence in multiple aspects of the overall marketing. Content is an umbrella word with its significance in every step of marketing, whether it is in introducing a new brand in the market or closing sales with a customer of the brand. In fact, the process of fan building for a brand starts with the making of good content. Thus, content is important in every step of a marketing process and so is content marketing. A mere content marketing is not enough to fetch the best benefits. The results you reap from your content marketing depend on the quality of your content marketing. But it is also very important to strategize the marketing of the generated content. A good way to begin this would be to align it with the fundamentals of your business – the basic objectives of the business, the customer value proposition, brand value et al. Strategizing content marketing is an expansive term to be explained in this blog. A lot depends on the present state of your business, its target audience, it short and long term goals. So, content marketing strategies would differ according to these factors. Yet, a few standard rules must be followed by every content marketer and they are stated as below. The entire content marketing includes broadly the steps of creation, distribution, evaluation and analysis. Each of these steps must be fortified with some rules as follows: Rules for the making of great content: Understand your target audience: Understand your target audience in terms of their lifestyle, behavior, demographics and similar relevant parameters. Once you understand your target audience, analyze and list out their needs and how they react to their needs, what information they seek in regards to their needs and what information might excite them. Make your content easily understandable: Make your content easily understandable for your audience by avoiding jargons, using a reader friendly language, including infographics, etc. Enrich your content with information: Customize your content with relevant information by understanding where your audiences stand in the buyer’s journey. This will help to create useful content. For instance, if your audience is in the state of comparing you with your competitors for making the purchase decision your content must assist the decision making by reflecting how your service or product is differentiated from your competitors. And if your audience is interested in making the purchase, make it easier by using simple easy to navigate payment options and call to action buttons. Tips for content distribution: Reflect and decide: As you start with your content distribution you must reflect upon the following questions: Why do you want your audience to use your content? Where do your audiences mostly consume content? How frequently do they use content? The answers of these questions will set the guidelines for your content distribution. For instance, if you want your content to boost engagement and talk about your brand, a social media platform like Facebook is a good bet for you. Otherwise, if you want a large reach, you should opt for a paid search advertising network. If you want high returns with reach to niche audience, you should stress on SEO or organic marketing of your content in a media like LinkedIn. Optimize for Social Media: Optimize your social media distribution strategy by posting your content at the optimum frequency, using share buttons, using visuals, sharing bite-sized succinct and attractive content. Distribute your content uniformly: You may distribute your content in multiple media yet there must be a uniformity of your content throughout all media. The essence of your content like the value proposition, unique selling proposition should be the same in all the media. It will enhance your brand equity in your audiences. Measuring ROI: The right parameters reflect right ROI: If you want to measure the success of your content marketing, select the right parameters to measure it. Selection of parameters for measuring ROI depends on your content marketing objectives. If your want more fans for your brand then engagement rate and rate of shares found are two parameters which will give you the right ROI. Analyze and improve: Once you measure ROI for your content marketing, start analyzing to close the gaps and opportunities. Make a SWOT matrix and utilize the scope for improvement. This way, you will step up your content marketing strategy towards perfection at every cycle. The above discussed rules of content will help you meet the expectations of your audience, it enhances the success of your business. Content marketing is often a time consuming task. It requires regularity, dedication and most importantly professionalism. Specially, if you are already occupied with other tasks, content might become an unmanageable burden for you. A worthier way of managing content marketing is to outsource it to content expert virtual assistants, may be a content expert from GetFriday.

Tips for Successful E-mail Marketing

If the title of this blog fascinated you, you must be an e-mail marketer. As you start your e-mail marketing you must reconcile the varied experiences invoked by e-mails – your inbox brimming with numerous mails every morning, finding useful information from an unexpected yet valuable mail, getting bombarded by spam e-mails, your delight at the reception of a long awaited mail and the like. In simple words, your e-mails are an intimate part of your daily life. E-mails are a mode of daily communication for over billions across the world Over 144 billion e-mails are sent daily all over the internet. In an era of versatile communication channels, e-mail remains one of the choicest channels of marketing communication all the time. There are a number of reasons behind this lasting popularity of e-mails. A few of them are: E-mails have a large reach. E-mails reach the recipients at their individual level. E-mails allow you a speedy communication at a lesser price. No wonder, E-mail is an expedient tool for marketers. E-mail marketing, if supported by an effective strategy, might drive the fortune of your business. Here, we sort out some useful tips to make your e-mail marketing all the more effective: Segment your e-mail recipients: As you start your e-mail marketing journey, you must segment your recipients. Segmenting is a very systematic process, which may be based on different parameters like demographics, geographic or psychological. Once you segment your audience in a systematic manner you will be able to understand many other aspects like at what frequency you must send your e-mails to different segments, tone of writing a message for striking the interest of a segment and the like. This way you will be able to tailor customized e-mails for each segment and address the specific needs of each segment. This improves your e-mail open rate. Reach your recipients at their individual level: Taking a step forward on segmentation as discussed above, marketers may create mails to reach recipients at their individual level. In fact, customizing mails is an art reinforced by segmentation. E-mails are an excellent mode of one- to-one communication, so make the recipient feel special by addressing his/her specific needs. Segmenting helps you in understanding the specific behavior, emotions and lifestyle of your audience and thus write unique e-mails to each segment of your audience. Make your e-mails mobile friendly: Survey shows that 64% of American e-mail users delete their mails if they are not mobile friendly. So, making your e-mails mobile friendly is an obligation to avoid high bounce rate. Generate a pleasurable experience for your audience by sending them mobile friendly e-mails i.e. write crisp messages suiting mobile screens, include visuals, include call to action points etc. Mobile screens occupy audience attention for most of the time. Hence customizing e-mails for mobile phones will improve the open rate as the recipient will be able to check your e-mail immediately. Well Written Subject Lines: Subject lines are the first impression makers of your e-mail. A well written subject line intrigues your readers and motivates them to open and read the entire mail. A well- written subject usually reflects the essence of your mail in a short one-liner. Good subject lines are usually limited to 50 characters. It is not a hard bound limit but try to keep your subject line as short as possible. Incentivize e-mail subscription in social media: Incentivizing e-mail subscription will help to draw in new e-mail subscribers and increases the number of your prospects. It will also improve the open rate of your mails. Sharing sign-up forms, giving discounts on subscription, winning subscribers with sweepstakes are a few ways to use social media for adding subscribers. Develop and maintain an e-mail list: You must own and maintain an e-mail list which includes all the people who showed interest in your marketing initiatives and who are likely to open and read your mails. You must update the e-mail list from time to time with systematic analysis of email statistics, open rates, engagement rates, active subscribers, new prospects, new segments and the like. A systematic execution of e-mail marketing will enhance your customer loyalty and value. Keeping your fans updated about your brand will increase your brand value and recognition amongst your fans. It will also add new fans and improve the success rate of your business. The rewards of e-mail marketing are remarkable but it needs a string of regular activities to drive successful e- mail marketing. If you are already occupied with other marketing activities you might not have enough time for e-mail marketing. A cost effective option for busy marketers is to outsource e-mail marketing to virtual assistants. Errands like keeping and maintaining e-mail list, research and segmentation, sending regular mails are easily and efficiently handled by Virtual assistants.

Tips for Successful E-mail Marketing Read More »

If the title of this blog fascinated you, you must be an e-mail marketer. As you start your e-mail marketing you must reconcile the varied experiences invoked by e-mails – your inbox brimming with numerous mails every morning, finding useful information from an unexpected yet valuable mail, getting bombarded by spam e-mails, your delight at the reception of a long awaited mail and the like. In simple words, your e-mails are an intimate part of your daily life. E-mails are a mode of daily communication for over billions across the world Over 144 billion e-mails are sent daily all over the internet. In an era of versatile communication channels, e-mail remains one of the choicest channels of marketing communication all the time. There are a number of reasons behind this lasting popularity of e-mails. A few of them are: E-mails have a large reach. E-mails reach the recipients at their individual level. E-mails allow you a speedy communication at a lesser price. No wonder, E-mail is an expedient tool for marketers. E-mail marketing, if supported by an effective strategy, might drive the fortune of your business. Here, we sort out some useful tips to make your e-mail marketing all the more effective: Segment your e-mail recipients: As you start your e-mail marketing journey, you must segment your recipients. Segmenting is a very systematic process, which may be based on different parameters like demographics, geographic or psychological. Once you segment your audience in a systematic manner you will be able to understand many other aspects like at what frequency you must send your e-mails to different segments, tone of writing a message for striking the interest of a segment and the like. This way you will be able to tailor customized e-mails for each segment and address the specific needs of each segment. This improves your e-mail open rate. Reach your recipients at their individual level: Taking a step forward on segmentation as discussed above, marketers may create mails to reach recipients at their individual level. In fact, customizing mails is an art reinforced by segmentation. E-mails are an excellent mode of one- to-one communication, so make the recipient feel special by addressing his/her specific needs. Segmenting helps you in understanding the specific behavior, emotions and lifestyle of your audience and thus write unique e-mails to each segment of your audience. Make your e-mails mobile friendly: Survey shows that 64% of American e-mail users delete their mails if they are not mobile friendly. So, making your e-mails mobile friendly is an obligation to avoid high bounce rate. Generate a pleasurable experience for your audience by sending them mobile friendly e-mails i.e. write crisp messages suiting mobile screens, include visuals, include call to action points etc. Mobile screens occupy audience attention for most of the time. Hence customizing e-mails for mobile phones will improve the open rate as the recipient will be able to check your e-mail immediately. Well Written Subject Lines: Subject lines are the first impression makers of your e-mail. A well written subject line intrigues your readers and motivates them to open and read the entire mail. A well- written subject usually reflects the essence of your mail in a short one-liner. Good subject lines are usually limited to 50 characters. It is not a hard bound limit but try to keep your subject line as short as possible. Incentivize e-mail subscription in social media: Incentivizing e-mail subscription will help to draw in new e-mail subscribers and increases the number of your prospects. It will also improve the open rate of your mails. Sharing sign-up forms, giving discounts on subscription, winning subscribers with sweepstakes are a few ways to use social media for adding subscribers. Develop and maintain an e-mail list: You must own and maintain an e-mail list which includes all the people who showed interest in your marketing initiatives and who are likely to open and read your mails. You must update the e-mail list from time to time with systematic analysis of email statistics, open rates, engagement rates, active subscribers, new prospects, new segments and the like. A systematic execution of e-mail marketing will enhance your customer loyalty and value. Keeping your fans updated about your brand will increase your brand value and recognition amongst your fans. It will also add new fans and improve the success rate of your business. The rewards of e-mail marketing are remarkable but it needs a string of regular activities to drive successful e- mail marketing. If you are already occupied with other marketing activities you might not have enough time for e-mail marketing. A cost effective option for busy marketers is to outsource e-mail marketing to virtual assistants. Errands like keeping and maintaining e-mail list, research and segmentation, sending regular mails are easily and efficiently handled by Virtual assistants.

Social Media: A nifty way for your business

Social media is a significant facet of this digital era. Its influence is reflected by the striking metrics like over a billion audiences in popular social media sites, the annual user increment of around 11%, the remarkable engagement rate and the like. With its evolution over the last decade, social media has eventually become a reliable medium of commercial information. 65% of social media users consider information which is shared on social media while making their purchase decision. No wonder, social media has come to be an effective weapon for business professionals, especially savvy marketers. Some specifics about social media which will encourage you to use social media for your business are sorted out as follows:   Social media offers you low – cost platform for advertising: Developing a social media strategy is the best way to decrease the marketing expenses in a business. While a 30 seconds TV ad pricing $350000 reaches a national audience a Facebook ad at a lesser cost reaches the global audience. So, social media gives you a better harvest for your marketing investments. Social media offers you a wide audience reach: If your aim is a wide reach then social media is your best bet. Facebook has over 1 billion active users across different demographics, geography and cultural parameters. Twitter which is logged in by over 100 million users daily is mostly used by the age ran. The twitter users aging above 60 are also increasing. Social media enables your faster reach to audience: There is hardly anyone who does not have a social media account. More than 60% of the social media account holders use their social media accounts daily. This justifies the fact and assures you that social media has a faster and ascertained reach to your target audience. Social media offers you an intense user engagement: User generated content in social media earns sincere attention of users. Apart from this, most of the content comes off in appealing forms like engaging games, queries, video ads and the like. Social media hikes brand loyalty of your fans: Most of the content in social media is user generated and it flows in from reliable sources. Moreover social media exposes your brand to a wide audience and it enables you to interact with the audience. It’s a three tier effect: it introduces your brand to your young prospective fans, invokes curiosity about your brand and emboldens the faith of your already existing fans. All these help you to earn brand loyalty from your fans. Social media offers you the scope of better customer service: Social media helps you in understanding the sentiment of your audience for your brand. By following the social buzz and analysing social sentiment of your target audience you understand the exact needs of your customers and follow them up with the required service. While the above stated advantages of social media gives you good returns, using social media for your brand is not free from risks. One of the risks arises from the fast reach of social media. So, if it’s a positive buzz your brand may become the king of the market while if it’s a negative buzz, you brand may get affected. So, using social media requires your vigilance all the time. You have to keep an eye on the reactions of your audiences to your marketing activities and keep the buzz about your brand under control. Giving prompt responses to your audience queries, regulating negative posts with an appeasing reply and pivoting audience attention to positive posts help you to regulate the reactions of your audience. If you are infusing social media in your business strategies you must not miss out on these tips:   Learn about the behaviour of your audience: Learning audience behaviour is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative process. It requires your intent observation, social sentiment analysis, search analysis etc. Learning about audience behaviour will help you to tune in your brand with your target audience. Do not beat the drum about your brand: Over promoting your brand will hamper your brand reputation. So, social media strategies must be objectified to win the heart of your audience rather than promoting your business. It should be customer oriented. Respond to messages and queries on time: Apt response to messages and queries from your audience helps you to earn new fans and maintain the relationship with already existing fans. Do not abuse the use of hash tags: The hash tags you use must be relevant to your business and must be popular at the time you make your post. Post at optimal frequencies: Posting at optimal frequencies increases the visibility of your brand in a social site. So, learn about the optimal frequency of posting in a particular site with real time posting as well as secondary research and post accordingly. Use the right parameters to measure the success of your brand: The ROI parameters tell you how effective have been your social media strategies and how you should proceed in the future. Choose the right parameters to evaluate your social media activities and earn rich returns. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Social Media: A nifty way for your business Read More »

Social media is a significant facet of this digital era. Its influence is reflected by the striking metrics like over a billion audiences in popular social media sites, the annual user increment of around 11%, the remarkable engagement rate and the like. With its evolution over the last decade, social media has eventually become a reliable medium of commercial information. 65% of social media users consider information which is shared on social media while making their purchase decision. No wonder, social media has come to be an effective weapon for business professionals, especially savvy marketers. Some specifics about social media which will encourage you to use social media for your business are sorted out as follows:   Social media offers you low – cost platform for advertising: Developing a social media strategy is the best way to decrease the marketing expenses in a business. While a 30 seconds TV ad pricing $350000 reaches a national audience a Facebook ad at a lesser cost reaches the global audience. So, social media gives you a better harvest for your marketing investments. Social media offers you a wide audience reach: If your aim is a wide reach then social media is your best bet. Facebook has over 1 billion active users across different demographics, geography and cultural parameters. Twitter which is logged in by over 100 million users daily is mostly used by the age ran. The twitter users aging above 60 are also increasing. Social media enables your faster reach to audience: There is hardly anyone who does not have a social media account. More than 60% of the social media account holders use their social media accounts daily. This justifies the fact and assures you that social media has a faster and ascertained reach to your target audience. Social media offers you an intense user engagement: User generated content in social media earns sincere attention of users. Apart from this, most of the content comes off in appealing forms like engaging games, queries, video ads and the like. Social media hikes brand loyalty of your fans: Most of the content in social media is user generated and it flows in from reliable sources. Moreover social media exposes your brand to a wide audience and it enables you to interact with the audience. It’s a three tier effect: it introduces your brand to your young prospective fans, invokes curiosity about your brand and emboldens the faith of your already existing fans. All these help you to earn brand loyalty from your fans. Social media offers you the scope of better customer service: Social media helps you in understanding the sentiment of your audience for your brand. By following the social buzz and analysing social sentiment of your target audience you understand the exact needs of your customers and follow them up with the required service. While the above stated advantages of social media gives you good returns, using social media for your brand is not free from risks. One of the risks arises from the fast reach of social media. So, if it’s a positive buzz your brand may become the king of the market while if it’s a negative buzz, you brand may get affected. So, using social media requires your vigilance all the time. You have to keep an eye on the reactions of your audiences to your marketing activities and keep the buzz about your brand under control. Giving prompt responses to your audience queries, regulating negative posts with an appeasing reply and pivoting audience attention to positive posts help you to regulate the reactions of your audience. If you are infusing social media in your business strategies you must not miss out on these tips:   Learn about the behaviour of your audience: Learning audience behaviour is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative process. It requires your intent observation, social sentiment analysis, search analysis etc. Learning about audience behaviour will help you to tune in your brand with your target audience. Do not beat the drum about your brand: Over promoting your brand will hamper your brand reputation. So, social media strategies must be objectified to win the heart of your audience rather than promoting your business. It should be customer oriented. Respond to messages and queries on time: Apt response to messages and queries from your audience helps you to earn new fans and maintain the relationship with already existing fans. Do not abuse the use of hash tags: The hash tags you use must be relevant to your business and must be popular at the time you make your post. Post at optimal frequencies: Posting at optimal frequencies increases the visibility of your brand in a social site. So, learn about the optimal frequency of posting in a particular site with real time posting as well as secondary research and post accordingly. Use the right parameters to measure the success of your brand: The ROI parameters tell you how effective have been your social media strategies and how you should proceed in the future. Choose the right parameters to evaluate your social media activities and earn rich returns. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Prepare to save cost for your business post Brexit: hiring a VA can help you great deal

Julia Brown (name changed), a successful doctor and founder of an scientific event hosting firm, found her business in trouble when Britain voted to exit EU in June 2016. Suddenly, she saw a huge dip in signups for the events she hosts. There was a sense of procrastination from the sponsors because of the uncertain market sentiments. Moreover, the trend seemed like it would continue for the next one year at least. In these troubled times, when she is expecting a reduction in work for her employees, one way to reduce costs and save her business is to downsize. Generally, while deciding on large scale layoffs, employers are faced with questions like how to ask employees to leave, how to manage the exit, and how to decide whom to retain and whom to hand the pink slip over to? All these questions, in themselves, are enough to give any business owner sleepless nights; dealing with reduced business just makes it even worse. Thankfully for Julia, she had acted smart a few years back when she began to outsource her repetitive, non-core activities to a highly effective virtual assistant firm ‘GetFriday’ in India. She did not have to worry about the negative effects of downsizing; instead she could focus on her business. All she had to do was send an e-mail to GetFriday about her decision to reduce usage hours and it was done. NO Hassle, NO overthinking..!! Now she will be using 120 hours of GetFriday’s assistants every month till the uncertainty surrounding small businesses in UK fades away. She was, earlier, utilizing 250 hours of GetFriday’s assistant’s time per month for her business activities. GetFriday provided her, the flexibility to upgrade or downgrade the usage without any hassle and with the assurance of availability of skilled resources whenever she requires. Julia is willing to upgrade her plan with GetFriday once her business picks up pace. Katie Green, Consultant at Palms Resourcing in UK, is also going through a similar downfall in her business due to Brexit. She also downgraded her monthly plan to use fewer hours of GetFriday.“GetFriday has been a great support at the time of Brexit, a time of financial uncertainty for England. GetFriday has provided the flexibility for me as a small business. We have cut back on hours for a month or so without being rigorously held to the terms of my contract notice and also provided great support on working on the company website. As ever, I can rely on GetFriday to be there for me”, she said while sharing her experience of working with GetFriday during Brexit. GetFriday had experienced this pattern of downgrading, cancellation, then upgrading, and re-signing of the clients last year, when the Australian market was in trouble. GetFriday supported its Australian business clients the same way it is supporting its Brexit affected clients. These market conditions are cyclical and as a small business owner you need to be flexible with your workforce to effectively manage costs without compromising on the optimum number of resources required to handle a sudden spurt in your business. Having a balanced team with a combination of permanent employees and a team of virtual assistants, provide the much needed flexibility to your business. A virtual assistant team is fully capable of handling any process oriented business tasks with proper backups with the added advantage of it being fairly economical if planned well. One more advantage associated with these virtual assistant firms is the flexibility of downgrading and cancelling the contract at any point of time. Moreover, there won’t be any negative ripple effects on your business due to this immediate lay-off. We, at GetFriday, provide business support services to clients from all over the world with our closely knit team of Virtual Assistants. With more than 10 years of experience in handling business requirements using Virtual Assistants, GetFriday is the best option for any SME looking to offshoring their non-core repetitive business processes without worrying about the availability of skilled resources due to political turbulence in their country.

Prepare to save cost for your business post Brexit: hiring a VA can help you great deal Read More »

Julia Brown (name changed), a successful doctor and founder of an scientific event hosting firm, found her business in trouble when Britain voted to exit EU in June 2016. Suddenly, she saw a huge dip in signups for the events she hosts. There was a sense of procrastination from the sponsors because of the uncertain market sentiments. Moreover, the trend seemed like it would continue for the next one year at least. In these troubled times, when she is expecting a reduction in work for her employees, one way to reduce costs and save her business is to downsize. Generally, while deciding on large scale layoffs, employers are faced with questions like how to ask employees to leave, how to manage the exit, and how to decide whom to retain and whom to hand the pink slip over to? All these questions, in themselves, are enough to give any business owner sleepless nights; dealing with reduced business just makes it even worse. Thankfully for Julia, she had acted smart a few years back when she began to outsource her repetitive, non-core activities to a highly effective virtual assistant firm ‘GetFriday’ in India. She did not have to worry about the negative effects of downsizing; instead she could focus on her business. All she had to do was send an e-mail to GetFriday about her decision to reduce usage hours and it was done. NO Hassle, NO overthinking..!! Now she will be using 120 hours of GetFriday’s assistants every month till the uncertainty surrounding small businesses in UK fades away. She was, earlier, utilizing 250 hours of GetFriday’s assistant’s time per month for her business activities. GetFriday provided her, the flexibility to upgrade or downgrade the usage without any hassle and with the assurance of availability of skilled resources whenever she requires. Julia is willing to upgrade her plan with GetFriday once her business picks up pace. Katie Green, Consultant at Palms Resourcing in UK, is also going through a similar downfall in her business due to Brexit. She also downgraded her monthly plan to use fewer hours of GetFriday.“GetFriday has been a great support at the time of Brexit, a time of financial uncertainty for England. GetFriday has provided the flexibility for me as a small business. We have cut back on hours for a month or so without being rigorously held to the terms of my contract notice and also provided great support on working on the company website. As ever, I can rely on GetFriday to be there for me”, she said while sharing her experience of working with GetFriday during Brexit. GetFriday had experienced this pattern of downgrading, cancellation, then upgrading, and re-signing of the clients last year, when the Australian market was in trouble. GetFriday supported its Australian business clients the same way it is supporting its Brexit affected clients. These market conditions are cyclical and as a small business owner you need to be flexible with your workforce to effectively manage costs without compromising on the optimum number of resources required to handle a sudden spurt in your business. Having a balanced team with a combination of permanent employees and a team of virtual assistants, provide the much needed flexibility to your business. A virtual assistant team is fully capable of handling any process oriented business tasks with proper backups with the added advantage of it being fairly economical if planned well. One more advantage associated with these virtual assistant firms is the flexibility of downgrading and cancelling the contract at any point of time. Moreover, there won’t be any negative ripple effects on your business due to this immediate lay-off. We, at GetFriday, provide business support services to clients from all over the world with our closely knit team of Virtual Assistants. With more than 10 years of experience in handling business requirements using Virtual Assistants, GetFriday is the best option for any SME looking to offshoring their non-core repetitive business processes without worrying about the availability of skilled resources due to political turbulence in their country.

Clash Of The Social Media Giants – Twitter Or FB, What Works Better For your Business?

The results you reap from your social media marketing depend a lot on the social platform you select. The social media sites you choose must satisfy your objectives of marketing. An astute marketer relates his social media marketing to the fundamentals of his business like branding, the value offered to customers, the target segment served etc. Before setting your foot in social media you have to reflect upon these fundamentals. There are a few questions which you must reflect upon mandatorily as you embark on your social media marketing. What type of content is compatible for your business marketing? Is the platform selected compatible with your content type? Is your target audience active in the social platform you have selected? How deep are the insights of ROI available in the social platform you use?   These questions help you justify your selection of the social media platform for marketing. When you select a social media platform you must ensure that your marketing activities are harmonious to the platform features. For instance, your advertisements must appeal to the active audiences; your post timings must match the time when a majority of your target audiences on the platform are active. Facebook and Twitter have been two most sought after social media platforms by a majority of the marketers worldwide for more than a decade. Despite the emergence of many new social media platforms such as Instagram, tumbler, facebook and twitter have managed to retain their positions of leadership as the ‘go-to’ platforms for most marketers. If you have to choose between facebook and twitter for marketing your business, it is good to find out the differences and benefits of each of these platforms. Whichever serves your business purpose, make it the focus of your social media presence. Here we take a quick look at the two giants:   Facebook     Twitter   Facebook started as a social site to reconnect with your school friends. Eventually facebook has started linking its users to experts and celebs apart from old friends. Twitter is a more formal networking site where the users express their opinions in crisp 140 characters. It’s still an informal social site for sharing information, personal and otherwise and creating noteworthy engagement of users. Every 1 million followers in facebook make 700 interactions while the same number of followers in twitter make 300 interactions. Twitter is very useful for spreading the word. Twitter tweets can be retweeted and shared. So, if you have great content that is likely to be shared, Twitter is a good bet. Facebook has a magnum audience of over 1.5 billion and the average age range of this crowd is 25-45. Twitter has a smaller audience of about 4 million and mostly in the age group of below 40. 60% of facebook users are female and 40% are male. Twitter is very mobile friendly. The user engagement in facebook is longer than Twitter. If you boost your facebook posts then the engagement lifespan increases even more. This is because facebook users spend more time on the site. It is a good platform for sharing news, running contests and seeking quick response from companies. Facebook indulges creativity. It allows multi-media content in the form of videos, images and graphics which is easily attracts audience. No wonder users stay intensely engaged in facebook. Twitter gives you the option of buying Twitter cards, which helps you to gather e-mail IDs and generate leads. This, in turn, helps you to track your ROI from your Twitter campaign. Facebook allows marketers the flexibility to choose from various advertising formats that are visually appealing. Twitter is slowly bringing in flexibility to its 140 character limit. Nowadays, Twitter allows vine videos and images which have enhanced the soulfulness of tweets. Based on the above facts, it might be safe to say that if your business is all about fashion, food, travel, film making or the like where visual imagery is important, then Facebook is more preferable. On the other hand, if your business is into services, twitter is a better site for you. It will associate you with the right industry professionals as well as your target audience. If you are a start-up, you can use twitter to generate leads at a low cost. Deciding upon your social marketing site needs some real-time learning. As you start with your social media activities you should make use of both twitter and facebook sites and make a note of the returns yielded by the sites. Whichever site yields you higher engagement and visibility; make it the crux of your social strategies to earn rich returns on your efforts. GetFriday is your personal virtual assistant helping you offload your time-consuming & mundane tasks. You just don’t get an assistant, but get access to an entire team with specialized skills to handle the entire spectrum of your business needs. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Clash Of The Social Media Giants – Twitter Or FB, What Works Better For your Business? Read More »

The results you reap from your social media marketing depend a lot on the social platform you select. The social media sites you choose must satisfy your objectives of marketing. An astute marketer relates his social media marketing to the fundamentals of his business like branding, the value offered to customers, the target segment served etc. Before setting your foot in social media you have to reflect upon these fundamentals. There are a few questions which you must reflect upon mandatorily as you embark on your social media marketing. What type of content is compatible for your business marketing? Is the platform selected compatible with your content type? Is your target audience active in the social platform you have selected? How deep are the insights of ROI available in the social platform you use?   These questions help you justify your selection of the social media platform for marketing. When you select a social media platform you must ensure that your marketing activities are harmonious to the platform features. For instance, your advertisements must appeal to the active audiences; your post timings must match the time when a majority of your target audiences on the platform are active. Facebook and Twitter have been two most sought after social media platforms by a majority of the marketers worldwide for more than a decade. Despite the emergence of many new social media platforms such as Instagram, tumbler, facebook and twitter have managed to retain their positions of leadership as the ‘go-to’ platforms for most marketers. If you have to choose between facebook and twitter for marketing your business, it is good to find out the differences and benefits of each of these platforms. Whichever serves your business purpose, make it the focus of your social media presence. Here we take a quick look at the two giants:   Facebook     Twitter   Facebook started as a social site to reconnect with your school friends. Eventually facebook has started linking its users to experts and celebs apart from old friends. Twitter is a more formal networking site where the users express their opinions in crisp 140 characters. It’s still an informal social site for sharing information, personal and otherwise and creating noteworthy engagement of users. Every 1 million followers in facebook make 700 interactions while the same number of followers in twitter make 300 interactions. Twitter is very useful for spreading the word. Twitter tweets can be retweeted and shared. So, if you have great content that is likely to be shared, Twitter is a good bet. Facebook has a magnum audience of over 1.5 billion and the average age range of this crowd is 25-45. Twitter has a smaller audience of about 4 million and mostly in the age group of below 40. 60% of facebook users are female and 40% are male. Twitter is very mobile friendly. The user engagement in facebook is longer than Twitter. If you boost your facebook posts then the engagement lifespan increases even more. This is because facebook users spend more time on the site. It is a good platform for sharing news, running contests and seeking quick response from companies. Facebook indulges creativity. It allows multi-media content in the form of videos, images and graphics which is easily attracts audience. No wonder users stay intensely engaged in facebook. Twitter gives you the option of buying Twitter cards, which helps you to gather e-mail IDs and generate leads. This, in turn, helps you to track your ROI from your Twitter campaign. Facebook allows marketers the flexibility to choose from various advertising formats that are visually appealing. Twitter is slowly bringing in flexibility to its 140 character limit. Nowadays, Twitter allows vine videos and images which have enhanced the soulfulness of tweets. Based on the above facts, it might be safe to say that if your business is all about fashion, food, travel, film making or the like where visual imagery is important, then Facebook is more preferable. On the other hand, if your business is into services, twitter is a better site for you. It will associate you with the right industry professionals as well as your target audience. If you are a start-up, you can use twitter to generate leads at a low cost. Deciding upon your social marketing site needs some real-time learning. As you start with your social media activities you should make use of both twitter and facebook sites and make a note of the returns yielded by the sites. Whichever site yields you higher engagement and visibility; make it the crux of your social strategies to earn rich returns on your efforts. GetFriday is your personal virtual assistant helping you offload your time-consuming & mundane tasks. You just don’t get an assistant, but get access to an entire team with specialized skills to handle the entire spectrum of your business needs. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Tips to steer your small business with an e-book

An intelligent marketer strives to create awareness, educate and aid in the decision making of his customers. These days, marketers lure their target segment using an array of nifty digital tools. An important one amongst them is the E-book. An e-book augments a small business’s entry into the market and reinforces its identity from the very beginning. Every small-business marketer will benefit if he/she uses E-books prudently to further the business. An e-book has benefits for both, the customers as well as the marketers. It is the source of maximum information for customers at minimum cost for marketers. So, e-books are value marketing in the true sense. So, your E-book must be designed strategically to appeal to a large number of visitors and close your business with a majority of them. Before embarking on the design of your E-book, you should reflect upon the objectives of your marketing and relate them to your e-book. This will further decide the content of the e-book, the tone and style of the content and the like. Such prudence in the making of an e-book will reinforce your marketing strategies and align them with the same. So, if you are a small business marketer and you are going to launch an e-book, take a look at the following tips on e-book marketing. They will enhance the benefits you harvest from your e-book. Tailor your e-book for your right audience: Your e-book should meet the expectation of your target audience. They should get the exact information they are seeking and further it should entice them to choose your products or services over your competitor’s. Get good book-reviews for your e-book: Good book reviews increase the merit of your book. They corroborate the faith of your readers in your book and entice them to read it. Get reviews from reputed personalities and industry experts. It will establish and affirm your expertise in your business. Delight your readers by gifting: Delight your readers by gifting your e-book as a prize. You may decide the winner by holding an engaging contest or any other pull strategy like e-mail sweepstake. It’s a good bait. Send e-mail scripts of your e-book to relevant customers: Send best liners and e-mails to the relevant customers and prospects. By doing this, you will make your e-book an attractive portal which invites qualified prospects. Get links from reputed link sharing social websites: Getting your link shared by a reputed social network is useful to trigger the word of mouse. But be mindful to respect the rules of such reputed social sites. Take care to state a few key insights from your book briefly without being over promotional. Address the buyers from the perspective of their journey: Your e-book should help close sales with your buyers. So, it should be linked to your landing pages. You e-book’s content should address the whole journey of your buyers. It should be informative, differentiating your business from your competitors by stating facts and figures, helping your buyer to make the decision by giving details of the buying procedure. The above tips of e-book marketing will add value to your marketing efforts and help you reap good results. So if you are a passionate digital marketer, you must steer your business to success by the right usage of an e-book. In fact, there are no hurdles for e-book marketing. If you are losing out on time for e-book marketing, you have a smart option to outsource the same. Or if you want an expert’s advice on e-book marketing, the same might be availed through outsourcing. Right from sending e-mail scripts to content writing, there are virtual experts to handle everything about e-book marketing. One stop Virtual Assistance service providers like GetFriday are one of your best bets in this regard. So, get started with your e-book marketing from today!

Tips to steer your small business with an e-book Read More »

An intelligent marketer strives to create awareness, educate and aid in the decision making of his customers. These days, marketers lure their target segment using an array of nifty digital tools. An important one amongst them is the E-book. An e-book augments a small business’s entry into the market and reinforces its identity from the very beginning. Every small-business marketer will benefit if he/she uses E-books prudently to further the business. An e-book has benefits for both, the customers as well as the marketers. It is the source of maximum information for customers at minimum cost for marketers. So, e-books are value marketing in the true sense. So, your E-book must be designed strategically to appeal to a large number of visitors and close your business with a majority of them. Before embarking on the design of your E-book, you should reflect upon the objectives of your marketing and relate them to your e-book. This will further decide the content of the e-book, the tone and style of the content and the like. Such prudence in the making of an e-book will reinforce your marketing strategies and align them with the same. So, if you are a small business marketer and you are going to launch an e-book, take a look at the following tips on e-book marketing. They will enhance the benefits you harvest from your e-book. Tailor your e-book for your right audience: Your e-book should meet the expectation of your target audience. They should get the exact information they are seeking and further it should entice them to choose your products or services over your competitor’s. Get good book-reviews for your e-book: Good book reviews increase the merit of your book. They corroborate the faith of your readers in your book and entice them to read it. Get reviews from reputed personalities and industry experts. It will establish and affirm your expertise in your business. Delight your readers by gifting: Delight your readers by gifting your e-book as a prize. You may decide the winner by holding an engaging contest or any other pull strategy like e-mail sweepstake. It’s a good bait. Send e-mail scripts of your e-book to relevant customers: Send best liners and e-mails to the relevant customers and prospects. By doing this, you will make your e-book an attractive portal which invites qualified prospects. Get links from reputed link sharing social websites: Getting your link shared by a reputed social network is useful to trigger the word of mouse. But be mindful to respect the rules of such reputed social sites. Take care to state a few key insights from your book briefly without being over promotional. Address the buyers from the perspective of their journey: Your e-book should help close sales with your buyers. So, it should be linked to your landing pages. You e-book’s content should address the whole journey of your buyers. It should be informative, differentiating your business from your competitors by stating facts and figures, helping your buyer to make the decision by giving details of the buying procedure. The above tips of e-book marketing will add value to your marketing efforts and help you reap good results. So if you are a passionate digital marketer, you must steer your business to success by the right usage of an e-book. In fact, there are no hurdles for e-book marketing. If you are losing out on time for e-book marketing, you have a smart option to outsource the same. Or if you want an expert’s advice on e-book marketing, the same might be availed through outsourcing. Right from sending e-mail scripts to content writing, there are virtual experts to handle everything about e-book marketing. One stop Virtual Assistance service providers like GetFriday are one of your best bets in this regard. So, get started with your e-book marketing from today!

How you can get Your VA to help manage your blog while you start business

The marketing of your business is comprised of a number of different activities and blogging is indisputably one of them. If you are a perfectionist or used to doing everything on your own, you might find it difficult to outsource activities. But doing every little task yourself dilutes your focus and leaves you with little time for core activities. First, one needs to prioritize all the activities and decide which of these need your personal attention and which can be delegated or outsourced. The key to driving a successful business lies in allocating the right amount of time and efforts towards the activities that are strategic to the business. You must give the lion’s share of your focus to those tasks. At the same time, you must maintain the quality of other activities such as blogging, book keeping and such other activities. Now you might be wondering why blogs matter so much. Blogs help in generating interest among the target audiences and thereby increase the traffic to your business. Your blog educates your potential customers about the services and products you offer and their value proposition. Now blogging consists of many sub-tasks like content creation, SEO i.e. hyperlinking, keyword usage etc., using the right blog format and the like. In addition to the informational aspect of your blog, its format should be easy to browse and well connected to the relevant pages of your business website. It thus requires a range of professional inputs. Compromising on these aspects might lower the quality of your blog and result in a loss of traffic. Such insights might be best filled in by a professional blogger but at times hiring a full time professional blogger might be expensive. That’s where Virtual Assistant providers like GetFriday come into the picture. They lend the services of professional bloggers at pocket-friendly rates. If you look for a list of best tasks to outsource to Virtual Assistants, blogging and the sub-tasks related to blogging will definitely find a mention in it. But to reap the benefits from outsourcing blogging to a Virtual Assistant, proper planning is required. When you choose your assistant, you must be careful that he/she is the right person to perform your task. Moreover it?s best to have all facets of your blog looked into by your Virtual Assistants. Blogging is a special task which involves content writing, graphic/web designing and developing. So your blog will be better managed by a team of Virtual Assistants who handle different aspects of the blog. While outsourcing your blog, do not miss out on these tips. Make the most of the designers: An attractive blog design gives a sharp edge to your competitiveness. So, you must make sure you have professional designers in your team and they understand the purpose of your blog. Get backlinks to your blog: Submit your blog to directories so that you get backlinks from relevant sources. This is a highly time demanding task and it’s wise to outsource it. Your Virtual Assistant must know the right platforms to submit your content because the quality of backlinks impact your SEO. Let your Virtual Assistant update your blog post: When you outsource blogging to a Virtual Assistant, give him/her a clear idea about the agenda of blogging. Let him know about the monthly or weekly schedule for updating your blog. You don’t need a specialist for that activity but it consumes a lot of time. Let it be handled by your Virtual Assistant. Integrate SEO to your blogging: Make sure your Virtual Assistant takes care of SEO for the blog. The content must also be created accordingly. It should have the right keyword density and variation. An SEO specialist can enrich you blog with expert inputs. Make the content writer familiar with your business: You content speaks for you. So, your content writer should have a deep understanding of your business; its brand goals and most importantly the purpose of your blog. Only then will your content serve its intended purpose. Once you outsource these activities of blogging, you can give your valuable time to the core activities of your business. So get started with these tips to outsource blogging today!

How you can get Your VA to help manage your blog while you start business Read More »

The marketing of your business is comprised of a number of different activities and blogging is indisputably one of them. If you are a perfectionist or used to doing everything on your own, you might find it difficult to outsource activities. But doing every little task yourself dilutes your focus and leaves you with little time for core activities. First, one needs to prioritize all the activities and decide which of these need your personal attention and which can be delegated or outsourced. The key to driving a successful business lies in allocating the right amount of time and efforts towards the activities that are strategic to the business. You must give the lion’s share of your focus to those tasks. At the same time, you must maintain the quality of other activities such as blogging, book keeping and such other activities. Now you might be wondering why blogs matter so much. Blogs help in generating interest among the target audiences and thereby increase the traffic to your business. Your blog educates your potential customers about the services and products you offer and their value proposition. Now blogging consists of many sub-tasks like content creation, SEO i.e. hyperlinking, keyword usage etc., using the right blog format and the like. In addition to the informational aspect of your blog, its format should be easy to browse and well connected to the relevant pages of your business website. It thus requires a range of professional inputs. Compromising on these aspects might lower the quality of your blog and result in a loss of traffic. Such insights might be best filled in by a professional blogger but at times hiring a full time professional blogger might be expensive. That’s where Virtual Assistant providers like GetFriday come into the picture. They lend the services of professional bloggers at pocket-friendly rates. If you look for a list of best tasks to outsource to Virtual Assistants, blogging and the sub-tasks related to blogging will definitely find a mention in it. But to reap the benefits from outsourcing blogging to a Virtual Assistant, proper planning is required. When you choose your assistant, you must be careful that he/she is the right person to perform your task. Moreover it?s best to have all facets of your blog looked into by your Virtual Assistants. Blogging is a special task which involves content writing, graphic/web designing and developing. So your blog will be better managed by a team of Virtual Assistants who handle different aspects of the blog. While outsourcing your blog, do not miss out on these tips. Make the most of the designers: An attractive blog design gives a sharp edge to your competitiveness. So, you must make sure you have professional designers in your team and they understand the purpose of your blog. Get backlinks to your blog: Submit your blog to directories so that you get backlinks from relevant sources. This is a highly time demanding task and it’s wise to outsource it. Your Virtual Assistant must know the right platforms to submit your content because the quality of backlinks impact your SEO. Let your Virtual Assistant update your blog post: When you outsource blogging to a Virtual Assistant, give him/her a clear idea about the agenda of blogging. Let him know about the monthly or weekly schedule for updating your blog. You don’t need a specialist for that activity but it consumes a lot of time. Let it be handled by your Virtual Assistant. Integrate SEO to your blogging: Make sure your Virtual Assistant takes care of SEO for the blog. The content must also be created accordingly. It should have the right keyword density and variation. An SEO specialist can enrich you blog with expert inputs. Make the content writer familiar with your business: You content speaks for you. So, your content writer should have a deep understanding of your business; its brand goals and most importantly the purpose of your blog. Only then will your content serve its intended purpose. Once you outsource these activities of blogging, you can give your valuable time to the core activities of your business. So get started with these tips to outsource blogging today!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow Read More »

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

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