virtual assistant services

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!

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!

Top tips to build your online business brand with your Virtual Assistant

When you build your online brand, you create your business signature in terms of your company name, the product or service you offer, your brand logo, the jingle, the tagline etc. Your online brand bolsters your business identity and thus your business becomes more worthwhile in the market. The otherwise naive crowd then starts to visit your website, clicks through your pages, likes and reacts to your social media promotions, and start engaging with your content present online. Gradually your brand buzz turns on. This is how doing right the online branding earns you wonder. However, online branding in itself is a challenging process. Before going to build your business brand, you need to realize the essence of your brand and the risks associated with it. Your online brand speaks for your business. So, before building it, get into the crux of your business, understand it, and determine what impression you want to create for your business. Since your online brand is going to create your business impression in the market, you must ascertain that your brand is strongly likable. The brand elements like logo, name, jingle and tagline should be relevant to your business and attractive enough to make your customers and prospects feel happy whenever they approach your brand. Your brand is going to build the trust amongst your clients; your brand is a promise of the value offered to your clients. In long run it determines whether your clients will like to avail services from you. So, the strength of your online brand determines your revenues and profits. Your brand helps you to stand out of the competition. It convinces your prospects that your service/product is the best out of all the options they can choose from. Though building a strong brand fetches you brownies, it’s not an easy process. You, as a small business owner or an entrepreneur are tied in the limit of resources, whether it is money, people or time. In addition, you are overwhelmed with too many responsibilities to handle. You need to manage somehow everything on your own. Hiring full time experts to help you with branding is too expensive. Despite of all these limitations you need expert inputs to fetch expected returns on your marketing investments. So the best solution is to hire an expert virtual assistant and involve him or her in the brand building process. There are Virtual Assistant service providers that have the knack of marketing and drive your marketing efforts with rich inputs. They will help you to reap the expected returns on your marketing investments. Before hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you in your marketing efforts, you should have some nifty tips to avail the best results of hiring a Virtual assistant. Here are some tips to avail the best out of Virtual Assistance for your brand building. Let your Virtual Assistant be a part of your business: Your Virtual Assistant is your remote assistant, who will serve you without his/ her physical presence in your organization. Your brand is the reflection of your business, its culture and objectives. So your Virtual Assistant should be familiar to these very important elements. Make him a part your business, instead of treating him like a third party agency or part-time worker. Let your Virtual assistant have the full knowledge about your business. Let him have a deep insight about your objective, the purpose of your brand, the culture of the organization. Content Creation: Your brand is closely related to the value offered by you with your products and services. It creates an identity of your business to increase the reputation in the market. Content chosen by you for your brand communication is going to create that identity for your brand. People like to invest in less risky products and services. Your brand identity is going to offset the risks for your prospects. Avail your Virtual Assistant’s help in creating communication message and content for your brand. Content helps you in growing fans for your business and shapes the identity of your brand. Hiring a content expert team in the form of Virtual Assistants is very critical step towards your brand building exercise. Educate the customers through your blogs and other online content: You have to prove the differentiated value your business offers to your customers. Your prospect have lots of other known brands to choose from; to win amongst all, you need to prove that your brand is better and stronger than the rest. Get your Virtual Assistant to create blogs and other informational content for your target audience, where you highlight your unique value proposition. Make your brand relatable: Build social value for your customers. Get the help of your Virtual Assistant to do a proper study of your target segment and understand their self image and social identity that they seek. You may hire a Virtual Assistant with market research skills and build your brand persona to diligently match the social need of your customers. Make an active presence in social media: An active presence in social media requires a lot of time and persistence. A Virtual Assistant offers you the best help in this field. Giving prompt responses to consumer queries, creating engaging content, posts and activities to increase the involvement of your consumers, and increasing the frequency of posts in social media will strengthen the identity of your brand and improve your Social Media Engagement. It’s time to come out of your worries of ‘Brand Building’. Build your online business brand through Internet marketing experts of GetFriday and Relax!

Top tips to build your online business brand with your Virtual Assistant Read More »

When you build your online brand, you create your business signature in terms of your company name, the product or service you offer, your brand logo, the jingle, the tagline etc. Your online brand bolsters your business identity and thus your business becomes more worthwhile in the market. The otherwise naive crowd then starts to visit your website, clicks through your pages, likes and reacts to your social media promotions, and start engaging with your content present online. Gradually your brand buzz turns on. This is how doing right the online branding earns you wonder. However, online branding in itself is a challenging process. Before going to build your business brand, you need to realize the essence of your brand and the risks associated with it. Your online brand speaks for your business. So, before building it, get into the crux of your business, understand it, and determine what impression you want to create for your business. Since your online brand is going to create your business impression in the market, you must ascertain that your brand is strongly likable. The brand elements like logo, name, jingle and tagline should be relevant to your business and attractive enough to make your customers and prospects feel happy whenever they approach your brand. Your brand is going to build the trust amongst your clients; your brand is a promise of the value offered to your clients. In long run it determines whether your clients will like to avail services from you. So, the strength of your online brand determines your revenues and profits. Your brand helps you to stand out of the competition. It convinces your prospects that your service/product is the best out of all the options they can choose from. Though building a strong brand fetches you brownies, it’s not an easy process. You, as a small business owner or an entrepreneur are tied in the limit of resources, whether it is money, people or time. In addition, you are overwhelmed with too many responsibilities to handle. You need to manage somehow everything on your own. Hiring full time experts to help you with branding is too expensive. Despite of all these limitations you need expert inputs to fetch expected returns on your marketing investments. So the best solution is to hire an expert virtual assistant and involve him or her in the brand building process. There are Virtual Assistant service providers that have the knack of marketing and drive your marketing efforts with rich inputs. They will help you to reap the expected returns on your marketing investments. Before hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you in your marketing efforts, you should have some nifty tips to avail the best results of hiring a Virtual assistant. Here are some tips to avail the best out of Virtual Assistance for your brand building. Let your Virtual Assistant be a part of your business: Your Virtual Assistant is your remote assistant, who will serve you without his/ her physical presence in your organization. Your brand is the reflection of your business, its culture and objectives. So your Virtual Assistant should be familiar to these very important elements. Make him a part your business, instead of treating him like a third party agency or part-time worker. Let your Virtual assistant have the full knowledge about your business. Let him have a deep insight about your objective, the purpose of your brand, the culture of the organization. Content Creation: Your brand is closely related to the value offered by you with your products and services. It creates an identity of your business to increase the reputation in the market. Content chosen by you for your brand communication is going to create that identity for your brand. People like to invest in less risky products and services. Your brand identity is going to offset the risks for your prospects. Avail your Virtual Assistant’s help in creating communication message and content for your brand. Content helps you in growing fans for your business and shapes the identity of your brand. Hiring a content expert team in the form of Virtual Assistants is very critical step towards your brand building exercise. Educate the customers through your blogs and other online content: You have to prove the differentiated value your business offers to your customers. Your prospect have lots of other known brands to choose from; to win amongst all, you need to prove that your brand is better and stronger than the rest. Get your Virtual Assistant to create blogs and other informational content for your target audience, where you highlight your unique value proposition. Make your brand relatable: Build social value for your customers. Get the help of your Virtual Assistant to do a proper study of your target segment and understand their self image and social identity that they seek. You may hire a Virtual Assistant with market research skills and build your brand persona to diligently match the social need of your customers. Make an active presence in social media: An active presence in social media requires a lot of time and persistence. A Virtual Assistant offers you the best help in this field. Giving prompt responses to consumer queries, creating engaging content, posts and activities to increase the involvement of your consumers, and increasing the frequency of posts in social media will strengthen the identity of your brand and improve your Social Media Engagement. It’s time to come out of your worries of ‘Brand Building’. Build your online business brand through Internet marketing experts of GetFriday and Relax!

Taking a Vacation? Try these tips to make a tiptop trip!

Don’t you beam with happiness while narrating the tales of your exotic trips to your friends? You may be a globetrotter who doesn’t want to leave any corner of the world unseen or you may be a busy sales person who drives business outside from office or out of the city you live in. Be it for leisure or work, trips, no matter how small or big, are an inevitable part our lives. By now you would have gotten accustomed to the pros and cons of travelling and your trip diaries are a rich reservoir of your memories. It’s a fact that vacationing, though glamorous on the outside, can be quite tricky. Before reaping the sweet pleasures of a trip, you need to run a long list of dull errands like doing online research for flights, booking cheap flight tickets, reserving rooms in a hotel of your choice and within your budget, arranging commutation in the destination and the like. If you are a busy professional, these odd jobs can be stressful. For instance, you need to meet your clients in Tokyo tomorrow and you have simply not found the time to make the necessary travel arrangements. Making travel arrangements can take a huge chunk of your precious time if you want to get the best of your travel itinerary By focusing on these errands, you may forget to focus on other activities that are important i.e. working on that important presentation, making the necessary arrangements to have your inboxes filtered and checked, getting all the pre-travel shopping done for your spouse and kids or making sure that all your work has been duly handed over to a back-up employee. In simple words, making the arrangements for a trip should not soil the excitement of actually going on the trip and getting to the destination. Here’s what you can do to get all your pre-trip planning sorted. 1. Define and understand the purpose of your trip: Every trip has a strong purpose behind it. If you are a business-owner and you are travelling for business, make sure you are prepped and focused on nailing that important business pitch with your clients and business partners. Focus on the core tasks i.e. making a convincing presentation, charting out new business ideas, etc. If you are planning a family trip, focus on selecting the perfect family-friendly destinations and channel your energies towards doing some research for sightseeing, leisure, shopping, travel etc. 2. Make A List Of What You Want To Do During Your Trip: Once you have understood the purpose of your trip, take the next step and list out the activities you would like to do to make the trip a memorable one. For example if you seek adventure list out the activities that you will love to partake in. Start preparing for the trip accordingly. Get your suitcases packed with the clothes or gear that you will require for a leisure or business trip. Gather as much information as you can about the local adventure sports, the best guides, places to eat, shop and much more! The same applies for a business trip too. You need to jot down what you want to get done during the trip and plan accordingly. 3. Make The Arrangements: Now that you have decided what you want to do on the trip, where you want to go and the purpose behind it, get down to actually booking your travel and sorting out the itinerary. Out of all the steps, arranging for flight/train tickets, accommodation and booking tours will take the longest time. 4. Or.. HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT TO DO IT FOR YOU! If you don’t have the time and expertise to do this, you have a choice to take help from an expert who can get all of it done for you in half the time. A Virtual Assistant, perhaps? There are Virtual Assistant service providers like GetFriday who can help you offload mundane travel arrangement tasks such as these and give you more time to focus on all the other aspects that actually matter. Why break your head planning for the trip, when you should be enjoying it? Remember, going on a trip doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make all the arrangements on your own. As mentioned above, stick to focusing on the purpose of your trip and what you need to do when you get there. . Don’t take the stress of planning or preparing arrangements for a trip.There are Virtual Assistant experts to serve you at every step of your trip, be it booking tickets or picking a romantic restaurant for a candle light dinner during your honeymoon. With reliable Virtual Assistants, you should outsource all trip planning and arrangement tasks. Free up your time, focus just on business in the meanwhile, or just get into the holiday mode before boarding that flight. What use is it if you are going to burden yourself with all the pre-trip hassle? Outsource, sit back and enjoy a fruitful trip!

Taking a Vacation? Try these tips to make a tiptop trip! Read More »

Don’t you beam with happiness while narrating the tales of your exotic trips to your friends? You may be a globetrotter who doesn’t want to leave any corner of the world unseen or you may be a busy sales person who drives business outside from office or out of the city you live in. Be it for leisure or work, trips, no matter how small or big, are an inevitable part our lives. By now you would have gotten accustomed to the pros and cons of travelling and your trip diaries are a rich reservoir of your memories. It’s a fact that vacationing, though glamorous on the outside, can be quite tricky. Before reaping the sweet pleasures of a trip, you need to run a long list of dull errands like doing online research for flights, booking cheap flight tickets, reserving rooms in a hotel of your choice and within your budget, arranging commutation in the destination and the like. If you are a busy professional, these odd jobs can be stressful. For instance, you need to meet your clients in Tokyo tomorrow and you have simply not found the time to make the necessary travel arrangements. Making travel arrangements can take a huge chunk of your precious time if you want to get the best of your travel itinerary By focusing on these errands, you may forget to focus on other activities that are important i.e. working on that important presentation, making the necessary arrangements to have your inboxes filtered and checked, getting all the pre-travel shopping done for your spouse and kids or making sure that all your work has been duly handed over to a back-up employee. In simple words, making the arrangements for a trip should not soil the excitement of actually going on the trip and getting to the destination. Here’s what you can do to get all your pre-trip planning sorted. 1. Define and understand the purpose of your trip: Every trip has a strong purpose behind it. If you are a business-owner and you are travelling for business, make sure you are prepped and focused on nailing that important business pitch with your clients and business partners. Focus on the core tasks i.e. making a convincing presentation, charting out new business ideas, etc. If you are planning a family trip, focus on selecting the perfect family-friendly destinations and channel your energies towards doing some research for sightseeing, leisure, shopping, travel etc. 2. Make A List Of What You Want To Do During Your Trip: Once you have understood the purpose of your trip, take the next step and list out the activities you would like to do to make the trip a memorable one. For example if you seek adventure list out the activities that you will love to partake in. Start preparing for the trip accordingly. Get your suitcases packed with the clothes or gear that you will require for a leisure or business trip. Gather as much information as you can about the local adventure sports, the best guides, places to eat, shop and much more! The same applies for a business trip too. You need to jot down what you want to get done during the trip and plan accordingly. 3. Make The Arrangements: Now that you have decided what you want to do on the trip, where you want to go and the purpose behind it, get down to actually booking your travel and sorting out the itinerary. Out of all the steps, arranging for flight/train tickets, accommodation and booking tours will take the longest time. 4. Or.. HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT TO DO IT FOR YOU! If you don’t have the time and expertise to do this, you have a choice to take help from an expert who can get all of it done for you in half the time. A Virtual Assistant, perhaps? There are Virtual Assistant service providers like GetFriday who can help you offload mundane travel arrangement tasks such as these and give you more time to focus on all the other aspects that actually matter. Why break your head planning for the trip, when you should be enjoying it? Remember, going on a trip doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make all the arrangements on your own. As mentioned above, stick to focusing on the purpose of your trip and what you need to do when you get there. . Don’t take the stress of planning or preparing arrangements for a trip.There are Virtual Assistant experts to serve you at every step of your trip, be it booking tickets or picking a romantic restaurant for a candle light dinner during your honeymoon. With reliable Virtual Assistants, you should outsource all trip planning and arrangement tasks. Free up your time, focus just on business in the meanwhile, or just get into the holiday mode before boarding that flight. What use is it if you are going to burden yourself with all the pre-trip hassle? Outsource, sit back and enjoy a fruitful trip!

How You Can Leverage Social Listening To Boost Business Growth- What It Is & What You Can Do

So, you are familiar with blogging and make sporadic appearances on message boards, commenting forums and your blog page. You are active on all social media accounts and as a result have an enviable digital presence. Does this make you feel like you have an advantage and can outdo your competitors? Don’t be too sure just yet. While forums, social media and blogging are essential for survival in a competitive business landscape, social listening is a crucial tool and can help you scale your business. Social listening is the act of monitoring or tracking various social media accounts, blogs, wiki pages, message boards and the like, to gauge the level of sentiments that people have towards a business and what they are saying about it. For instance, if you are following industry influencers, other well-known personalities who operate in the industry you work for and have a strong following by potential clients, there’s a very good chance that you will be followed or at least noticed too. Imagine what earning a blog link or a mention from an established personality can do for your following, brand and business growth. Social Listening Tips For Business Effective social listening can help boost sales for your business and more specifically, give you a competitive edge over your competitors. The question you need to be asking yourself is, how to leverage social media monitoring for better business. 1.By Tracking Your Competitors’ Activities If you are active on social media accounts, you should ideally be tracking what your competitors are doing too. Check for their success stories and make a note of their slipups. By monitoring your competitors across social media platforms, you will also be able to keep a close eye on any new, development from their side be it improved product/services offerings, policies or other prominent changes that could positively impact their businesses. 2.By Monitoring Your Online Reputation It is imperative to learn what the world thinks about your business. Monitor all the social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online review sites, blogs, forums and other platform for mentions of your company or brand. If you want to boost credibility (and also visibility!) ensure that you always respond to your clients on time, with thoughtful replies, apologies or other appropriate comments for every mention you get on the World Wide Web. Fail to do this and you might risk your reputation. 3.By Discovering New Ideas & Trends Set up social alerts to identify the emerging trends and fresh ideas that may be relevant to your industry. In doing so, you will be able to update your products or services and keep them up-to-the-minute. What You Should Do Now, that you know why it is important, it is crucial to understand ‘what’ you should ideally be doing to get started with social listening. Social listening is a fairly simple practice and can be done easily with the use of platforms such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Topsy, Hootsuite and Icerocket. Platforms like these can help collect aggregate data, track keywords and mentions across important social media channels. All you have to do is set up your alerts and monitor your social conversations on a day-to-day basis. Remember that social listening is not a quick process. It requires a thorough understanding and dedicated commitment of at least half an hour everyday, apart from working on other activities. You will additionally need to schedule alerts, manage your inbox and maintain commitment with the other work you do on a daily basis for your business. If you are just starting out with social listening and you have a lot on your platter, you might end up making mistakes, losing out on time and patience. If you want to save on time and still get your social listening right, why not outsource and hand over this responsibility to a reliable, social media virtual assistant from a virtual assistance provider like GetFriday? Talk to your social media virtual assistant about what you are expecting, what is relevant to the industry you operate in, map out your competitors, etc. You can also monitor your virtual assistant’s work along the way and ask for regular reports, alerts or other notifications for the social listening activities. Why should you compromise on your productivity and do complex, specialist work when you can have a professional do it for you in half the time? Think about it. Wouldn’t it be better for you if someone else could take care of your social media accounts while you focused on growing your business or doing other activities that interested you? In order to stay competitive, it is essential to learn about your clients, competitors and what the Internet has to say about your brand at large. If you partake in social listening activities, you will be able to take online conversations from being a one-way street to interactive and thus, boost business growth.

How You Can Leverage Social Listening To Boost Business Growth- What It Is & What You Can Do Read More »

So, you are familiar with blogging and make sporadic appearances on message boards, commenting forums and your blog page. You are active on all social media accounts and as a result have an enviable digital presence. Does this make you feel like you have an advantage and can outdo your competitors? Don’t be too sure just yet. While forums, social media and blogging are essential for survival in a competitive business landscape, social listening is a crucial tool and can help you scale your business. Social listening is the act of monitoring or tracking various social media accounts, blogs, wiki pages, message boards and the like, to gauge the level of sentiments that people have towards a business and what they are saying about it. For instance, if you are following industry influencers, other well-known personalities who operate in the industry you work for and have a strong following by potential clients, there’s a very good chance that you will be followed or at least noticed too. Imagine what earning a blog link or a mention from an established personality can do for your following, brand and business growth. Social Listening Tips For Business Effective social listening can help boost sales for your business and more specifically, give you a competitive edge over your competitors. The question you need to be asking yourself is, how to leverage social media monitoring for better business. 1.By Tracking Your Competitors’ Activities If you are active on social media accounts, you should ideally be tracking what your competitors are doing too. Check for their success stories and make a note of their slipups. By monitoring your competitors across social media platforms, you will also be able to keep a close eye on any new, development from their side be it improved product/services offerings, policies or other prominent changes that could positively impact their businesses. 2.By Monitoring Your Online Reputation It is imperative to learn what the world thinks about your business. Monitor all the social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online review sites, blogs, forums and other platform for mentions of your company or brand. If you want to boost credibility (and also visibility!) ensure that you always respond to your clients on time, with thoughtful replies, apologies or other appropriate comments for every mention you get on the World Wide Web. Fail to do this and you might risk your reputation. 3.By Discovering New Ideas & Trends Set up social alerts to identify the emerging trends and fresh ideas that may be relevant to your industry. In doing so, you will be able to update your products or services and keep them up-to-the-minute. What You Should Do Now, that you know why it is important, it is crucial to understand ‘what’ you should ideally be doing to get started with social listening. Social listening is a fairly simple practice and can be done easily with the use of platforms such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Topsy, Hootsuite and Icerocket. Platforms like these can help collect aggregate data, track keywords and mentions across important social media channels. All you have to do is set up your alerts and monitor your social conversations on a day-to-day basis. Remember that social listening is not a quick process. It requires a thorough understanding and dedicated commitment of at least half an hour everyday, apart from working on other activities. You will additionally need to schedule alerts, manage your inbox and maintain commitment with the other work you do on a daily basis for your business. If you are just starting out with social listening and you have a lot on your platter, you might end up making mistakes, losing out on time and patience. If you want to save on time and still get your social listening right, why not outsource and hand over this responsibility to a reliable, social media virtual assistant from a virtual assistance provider like GetFriday? Talk to your social media virtual assistant about what you are expecting, what is relevant to the industry you operate in, map out your competitors, etc. You can also monitor your virtual assistant’s work along the way and ask for regular reports, alerts or other notifications for the social listening activities. Why should you compromise on your productivity and do complex, specialist work when you can have a professional do it for you in half the time? Think about it. Wouldn’t it be better for you if someone else could take care of your social media accounts while you focused on growing your business or doing other activities that interested you? In order to stay competitive, it is essential to learn about your clients, competitors and what the Internet has to say about your brand at large. If you partake in social listening activities, you will be able to take online conversations from being a one-way street to interactive and thus, boost business growth.

Things You Should NEVER Outsource As a Small Business

As a small business owner, it can be a real struggle to stay at the “top of things”. What you should ideally be focusing on is how to run your business and attract new prospects. Like any business however, the things you may want to do may slam into the things that have to be done on a daily basis. A great way to free up some time so that you can focus on growing the business is by engaging an experienced Virtual Assistant from an experienced outsourcing provider like GetFriday. A Virtual Assistant could be the answer to your growing business demands and help offload run-of-the-mill tasks like handling social media accounts as well as mundane jobs like contacting clients, email management, setting up reminders or devising a travel itinerary for you. The possibilities are endless! If you have decided to take the leap, be wary, because a bad outsourcing decision can be costlier than not outsourcing in the first place. Keeping that in mind, this post highlights three of the major things that you should NOT outsource as a small business and that are best handled internally. Take a look! 1. NEVER Outsource Your Core Competencies Never make the mistake of farming out your core competencies to virtual assistants. If you are a tech start-up, do not subcontract your technology or if you are a recruiting firm, don’t outsource your recruiters. Figure out what your company is really good at doing and outsource the auxiliary services that are related to these core competencies, if you must. Let us take the following example. You could hire virtual assistant specialists to write and edit the content that you want to include in your inbound marketing efforts. But make sure that your in-house team makes the business or the editorial decisions as to how the content has to be written, what topics should be covered or the channels that should be used to propagate the content. Part of developing an effective outsourcing plan is to understand what your company is really good at doing and keep it in-house. Outsource the rest to a dependable, virtual assistance service provider. 2. NEVER Outsource What You Don’t Understand There are probably a hundred things that you might want to outsource at the moment, such as getting an assistant to manage your CRM, designing a shopping cart, developing a WordPress website and so much more! While most of these can be outsourced, if you don’t really comprehend how they work precisely in accordance to what you need – be it now or later, you could end up investing a lot of money on something that you’ll end up substituting very soon. For example: You are unsure of how to create an online shopping cart, but you know that you require one that connects to your catalogue, can be easily modified, agrees for coupons etc. Even if you don’t know how to manually design a shopping cart, you will at least know how it works from an operational point of view. This is a situation that is considered safe for outsourcing. However, if you don’t understand the basics of how online shopping carts work at all, it is not advisable to blindly outsource it to a third party like a Virtual Assistant company. Chances are, you will never find out if the solutions they have recommended are effective enough. This is especially true when it comes to outsourcing software issues or technology and if you are a start-up. By relying on Virtual Assistants from the onset, you may miss out on the chance to understand the full picture on how the technology works. Outsource only what you need to. Ensure that the teams in charge have at least a basic understanding of what needs to be accomplished and the yardsticks that will be used to evaluate the final suggestions. 3. NEVER Fully Outsource Your Brand Identity If you are starting out, you need to focus on brand-building. Understand that you will attract more opportunities if you have built an effective brand strategy. Think of whether you have created an effective logo or brand message that will go on to resonate with your future clients. While there are Virtual Assistant professionals who can help build your brand message, tag lines or designs; your message and your brand identity need to strictly come from YOU. This is because, only you and your in-house teams know what it stands for and how the brand needs to be communicated to target audiences. Even if you insist on outsourcing this aspect to the experts because you don’t have the time for it yourself, you need to at least be involved in the logo/brand creation process every step of the way so, that your brand still retains your identity. For example, would you mind walking into a tattoo studio and letting the tattoo artist instinctively create what he/she wants to, onto your skin? Tattoos are permanent and the first impressions that people get of your brand, are equally indelible. Though the tattoo artist will be creating the final art work, your inputs on how you want it done, the styles, colours or the design will solely come from you and will echo your thoughts/experiences. Now, think of your brand in the same way Would you want to fully outsource your brand identity to a third party? You might think that you can subcontract every small task to your Virtual Assistant. Though there are a lot of tasks that you CAN outsource to your virtual assistants, certain aspects such as the ones mentioned above, could risk colossal business damage. You need to do some prior homework on what your company does best, understand when the right time is to outsource and the credibility of your outsourcing provider. What do you think? What are some of the functions or tasks that you will never outsource?

Things You Should NEVER Outsource As a Small Business Read More »

As a small business owner, it can be a real struggle to stay at the “top of things”. What you should ideally be focusing on is how to run your business and attract new prospects. Like any business however, the things you may want to do may slam into the things that have to be done on a daily basis. A great way to free up some time so that you can focus on growing the business is by engaging an experienced Virtual Assistant from an experienced outsourcing provider like GetFriday. A Virtual Assistant could be the answer to your growing business demands and help offload run-of-the-mill tasks like handling social media accounts as well as mundane jobs like contacting clients, email management, setting up reminders or devising a travel itinerary for you. The possibilities are endless! If you have decided to take the leap, be wary, because a bad outsourcing decision can be costlier than not outsourcing in the first place. Keeping that in mind, this post highlights three of the major things that you should NOT outsource as a small business and that are best handled internally. Take a look! 1. NEVER Outsource Your Core Competencies Never make the mistake of farming out your core competencies to virtual assistants. If you are a tech start-up, do not subcontract your technology or if you are a recruiting firm, don’t outsource your recruiters. Figure out what your company is really good at doing and outsource the auxiliary services that are related to these core competencies, if you must. Let us take the following example. You could hire virtual assistant specialists to write and edit the content that you want to include in your inbound marketing efforts. But make sure that your in-house team makes the business or the editorial decisions as to how the content has to be written, what topics should be covered or the channels that should be used to propagate the content. Part of developing an effective outsourcing plan is to understand what your company is really good at doing and keep it in-house. Outsource the rest to a dependable, virtual assistance service provider. 2. NEVER Outsource What You Don’t Understand There are probably a hundred things that you might want to outsource at the moment, such as getting an assistant to manage your CRM, designing a shopping cart, developing a WordPress website and so much more! While most of these can be outsourced, if you don’t really comprehend how they work precisely in accordance to what you need – be it now or later, you could end up investing a lot of money on something that you’ll end up substituting very soon. For example: You are unsure of how to create an online shopping cart, but you know that you require one that connects to your catalogue, can be easily modified, agrees for coupons etc. Even if you don’t know how to manually design a shopping cart, you will at least know how it works from an operational point of view. This is a situation that is considered safe for outsourcing. However, if you don’t understand the basics of how online shopping carts work at all, it is not advisable to blindly outsource it to a third party like a Virtual Assistant company. Chances are, you will never find out if the solutions they have recommended are effective enough. This is especially true when it comes to outsourcing software issues or technology and if you are a start-up. By relying on Virtual Assistants from the onset, you may miss out on the chance to understand the full picture on how the technology works. Outsource only what you need to. Ensure that the teams in charge have at least a basic understanding of what needs to be accomplished and the yardsticks that will be used to evaluate the final suggestions. 3. NEVER Fully Outsource Your Brand Identity If you are starting out, you need to focus on brand-building. Understand that you will attract more opportunities if you have built an effective brand strategy. Think of whether you have created an effective logo or brand message that will go on to resonate with your future clients. While there are Virtual Assistant professionals who can help build your brand message, tag lines or designs; your message and your brand identity need to strictly come from YOU. This is because, only you and your in-house teams know what it stands for and how the brand needs to be communicated to target audiences. Even if you insist on outsourcing this aspect to the experts because you don’t have the time for it yourself, you need to at least be involved in the logo/brand creation process every step of the way so, that your brand still retains your identity. For example, would you mind walking into a tattoo studio and letting the tattoo artist instinctively create what he/she wants to, onto your skin? Tattoos are permanent and the first impressions that people get of your brand, are equally indelible. Though the tattoo artist will be creating the final art work, your inputs on how you want it done, the styles, colours or the design will solely come from you and will echo your thoughts/experiences. Now, think of your brand in the same way Would you want to fully outsource your brand identity to a third party? You might think that you can subcontract every small task to your Virtual Assistant. Though there are a lot of tasks that you CAN outsource to your virtual assistants, certain aspects such as the ones mentioned above, could risk colossal business damage. You need to do some prior homework on what your company does best, understand when the right time is to outsource and the credibility of your outsourcing provider. What do you think? What are some of the functions or tasks that you will never outsource?

Superhero Syndrome At Large Among Small Business Owners

Being a superhero for your children, spouse, parents or partner is great, but the same cannot be said about your business. Sure, you may run a successful single-office agency and could be the jack of all trades for your business. But do you realize it could be detrimental if you are the master of none? Most entrepreneurs take great pride in completing every task and jump at every small opportunity to be the only ones at the helms of their businesses. Chris Ducker, the author of ‘Virtual Freedom’ has coined a term for this situation and calls it the ‘Superhero Syndrome‘, a prevalent condition wherein entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that they can handle everything on their own without having to delegate or subcontract work. Though there is nothing wrong with handling everything yourself, it is only prudent to outsource dreary business processes to specialized Virtual Assistants at the right time. This could save you from facing a burnout in the long run, can positively impact your business and give you the opportunity to let professionals handle specialist tasks at a fraction of the cost! What’s more, you have access to a large pool of skills and can outsource practically any aspect of the business you like! So, what do you do, you ask? What you should really be focusing on as a small business owner is to give more value to your clients, measure results, build ideas and re-strategize your business for the future. Take a look at what you need to know about overcoming the ‘Superhero Syndrome’ Repetitiveness And Systemization In a business, you’ll find that a lot of processes are repetitive and the repetition can in fact, be systemized. Consider a car service centre, for example. When a car has been taken to a service centre, mechanics take their time to gauge the problems with the car before they get down to fixing them. However, when it comes to specialized jobs such as fixing the filters in the car or changing the cover for the seats, mechanics may not be able to handle these tasks themselves. There are specialized contractors and suppliers who provide these products and/or services. When a filter or a seat cover needs to be changed, service centres will not waste their clients? time and their resources by learning how to change these filters internally or manufacturing leather seat covers themselves. They will instead, outsource the work to the professionals who carry out bulk supplies of these certain products outside the service centre. A final markup to the price is added, before handing your car back to you. Ergo, the service centre is benefitting from making additional money out of a job that they are not even doing and are building a name for themselves. This is all thanks to the fabulous job done by the specialist suppliers/vendors, who helped the centre with their timely ? ‘behind-the-scenes’ support. Okay, So How Does It Help My Business? Think about a similar situation for your business. You could outsource everyday functions to a professional Virtual Assistance company like GetFriday and end up saving a lot of time and money. This will ensure that you don’t work your way out of your own business and will also give you the time to re-focus on the core functions while your able team of Virtual Assistant professionals work behind the scenes and handle other aspects of your business for you. On The Lighter Side? It is okay to have delusions of being a superhero. But learning when to get your sidekicks (in this case, your Virtual Assistants) into the picture and sharing the load with them can help you do a better job of running the business and still give you the opportunity to govern the work being done. Let’s take the classic examples of Batman and Robin for instance. Though we know which one of the two shoulders the mantle all the way through, Robin’s character was created for two very simple yet important reasons- 1.Batman needed a friend, a brother and a confidante. Someone he could talk to because a hero can very often find himself ‘alone’ in the humdrum of everyday life. 2.Robin, the Boy Wonder, was not just a wingman, but also a vigilante who kept Batman from making the wrong choices and was always around to ‘help’ Batman fight crime. The reasons are straight forward. No matter how big a superhero you are, you will, at some point, require ‘help’. Whether it is a boy in green hot-pants who comes to the rescue or a resourceful Virtual Assistant, halfway across the world from you, a helping hand is all you need to ease your work burdens and can make you and your business a better one. Got It. What Do I Do Now? Take control and start by making a list that contains the following three columns- Outsourcing what you don’t like to do Outsourcing what you shouldn’t be doing Outsourcing what you can’t do Once you have written down your tasks under each column, it will become easier for you to delegate your work to your professional Virtual Assistants. Your online virtual assistants will work flexibly to understand and learn the ways of your business and probably do your work better than what you would have done! Rest assured, your Virtual Assistants can handle pretty much all your boring business functions and do a lot more specialist tasks that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself i.e. handling all your web page requirements, writing blogs, graphic designing, specialized SEO services, email management, accounting and so much more! Be a real superhero by outsourcing unimportant functions in your business and take out more time to do high-value work, build networks or make time for the family. This will help you focus better on doing the things you love, can do and should do!

Superhero Syndrome At Large Among Small Business Owners Read More »

Being a superhero for your children, spouse, parents or partner is great, but the same cannot be said about your business. Sure, you may run a successful single-office agency and could be the jack of all trades for your business. But do you realize it could be detrimental if you are the master of none? Most entrepreneurs take great pride in completing every task and jump at every small opportunity to be the only ones at the helms of their businesses. Chris Ducker, the author of ‘Virtual Freedom’ has coined a term for this situation and calls it the ‘Superhero Syndrome‘, a prevalent condition wherein entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that they can handle everything on their own without having to delegate or subcontract work. Though there is nothing wrong with handling everything yourself, it is only prudent to outsource dreary business processes to specialized Virtual Assistants at the right time. This could save you from facing a burnout in the long run, can positively impact your business and give you the opportunity to let professionals handle specialist tasks at a fraction of the cost! What’s more, you have access to a large pool of skills and can outsource practically any aspect of the business you like! So, what do you do, you ask? What you should really be focusing on as a small business owner is to give more value to your clients, measure results, build ideas and re-strategize your business for the future. Take a look at what you need to know about overcoming the ‘Superhero Syndrome’ Repetitiveness And Systemization In a business, you’ll find that a lot of processes are repetitive and the repetition can in fact, be systemized. Consider a car service centre, for example. When a car has been taken to a service centre, mechanics take their time to gauge the problems with the car before they get down to fixing them. However, when it comes to specialized jobs such as fixing the filters in the car or changing the cover for the seats, mechanics may not be able to handle these tasks themselves. There are specialized contractors and suppliers who provide these products and/or services. When a filter or a seat cover needs to be changed, service centres will not waste their clients? time and their resources by learning how to change these filters internally or manufacturing leather seat covers themselves. They will instead, outsource the work to the professionals who carry out bulk supplies of these certain products outside the service centre. A final markup to the price is added, before handing your car back to you. Ergo, the service centre is benefitting from making additional money out of a job that they are not even doing and are building a name for themselves. This is all thanks to the fabulous job done by the specialist suppliers/vendors, who helped the centre with their timely ? ‘behind-the-scenes’ support. Okay, So How Does It Help My Business? Think about a similar situation for your business. You could outsource everyday functions to a professional Virtual Assistance company like GetFriday and end up saving a lot of time and money. This will ensure that you don’t work your way out of your own business and will also give you the time to re-focus on the core functions while your able team of Virtual Assistant professionals work behind the scenes and handle other aspects of your business for you. On The Lighter Side? It is okay to have delusions of being a superhero. But learning when to get your sidekicks (in this case, your Virtual Assistants) into the picture and sharing the load with them can help you do a better job of running the business and still give you the opportunity to govern the work being done. Let’s take the classic examples of Batman and Robin for instance. Though we know which one of the two shoulders the mantle all the way through, Robin’s character was created for two very simple yet important reasons- 1.Batman needed a friend, a brother and a confidante. Someone he could talk to because a hero can very often find himself ‘alone’ in the humdrum of everyday life. 2.Robin, the Boy Wonder, was not just a wingman, but also a vigilante who kept Batman from making the wrong choices and was always around to ‘help’ Batman fight crime. The reasons are straight forward. No matter how big a superhero you are, you will, at some point, require ‘help’. Whether it is a boy in green hot-pants who comes to the rescue or a resourceful Virtual Assistant, halfway across the world from you, a helping hand is all you need to ease your work burdens and can make you and your business a better one. Got It. What Do I Do Now? Take control and start by making a list that contains the following three columns- Outsourcing what you don’t like to do Outsourcing what you shouldn’t be doing Outsourcing what you can’t do Once you have written down your tasks under each column, it will become easier for you to delegate your work to your professional Virtual Assistants. Your online virtual assistants will work flexibly to understand and learn the ways of your business and probably do your work better than what you would have done! Rest assured, your Virtual Assistants can handle pretty much all your boring business functions and do a lot more specialist tasks that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself i.e. handling all your web page requirements, writing blogs, graphic designing, specialized SEO services, email management, accounting and so much more! Be a real superhero by outsourcing unimportant functions in your business and take out more time to do high-value work, build networks or make time for the family. This will help you focus better on doing the things you love, can do and should do!

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