My Virtual Blog

Having staff is necessary.  There are tasks that must be delegated and there is a need for bodies to delegate the work to.  Your business thrives in large part based on the productivity of the work force you hire.  But in today’s economy, staffing is tough.  Recent April 2009 United States Department of Labor statistics of an 8.9% unemployment rate prove that.  So, how do you remain productive and profitable without staff?  One alternative is Virtual Assistance. 

A Virtual Assistant is not an employee and is not hired, but is rather a business owner who has an interest in helping you succeed.  Virtual Assistants work the way you work.  They can work on a retainer basis for a specified number of hours per month or they will work on a project basis.  Both the IVAA (International Virtual Assistant Association) and The Virtual Assistant Networking Association (VANA) provide a place to post an RFP (Request for Proposal) for your specific need.  VANA also provides a great description of how using a virtual assistant can save your firm time and money. From their website:

“Although the Virtual Assistant’s hourly rate is more than the employee’s rate in the first place, you save the cost of benefits and overhead that would have to be applied to the new employee’s wage. And, because Virtual Assistants are usually more experienced, more efficient, and better connected than the employee, you’ll need to devote far less time to the project to get the same results, only 480 hours a year versus 2,080 for the new employee.

**Remember, with a Virtual Assistant, you only pay for the time on task by the minute! No more paying for socializing, hour long lunches or frequent trips to the washroom.

Your employee’s 8 hour day can be crunched into 3-4 hours with a Virtual Assistant.

Simply put, you should contract with a Virtual Assistant because it’s more cost-effective and Virtual Assistants go above and beyond the normal assistant’s duties to impact your own productivity. No task is too big or small for a Virtual Assistant to handle. Even if you only have 1 hour of work a month for a Virtual Assistant to do, a VA can (and will) do it.”

Virtual Assistants need not be purely administrative.  Virtual Assistants come in all sizes and flavors.  In addition to the typical administrative skills you might expect to see from a Virtual Assistant, take a look at a partial list of the other skills you can contract with a VA for:

• Article Marketing
• Blog Creation and Administration
• Bookkeeping
• Contact & Database Management
• Copywriting
• Desktop Publishing
• Domain Name Research & Registration
• E-mail Management
• E-mail Marketing Campaigns
• Event Planning
• Graphic Design
• Internet Marketing
• Internet Research
• Logo Design
• Online Reputation Management
• PDF Conversions
• Personal Shopper
• Project Management
• Real Estate Assistance
• Shopping Cart Account Management
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking Strategy and Account Management (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Software Research and Testing
• Software Training
• Surveys
• Vendor Management (Reconciling bills, invoices, etc.)
• Voice Mail Management
• Web-based Newsletters & Ezines
• Website Administration
• Website Design and Maintenance

Today’s economy may be challenging, but the work can still get done.  Let a responsible, trained, skilled Virtual Assistant take care of the tasks they have so much experience doing so you can take care of your business.

 My friend and colleague, Rachel Rasmussen from Rescue Desk Virtual Assistant Services just tagged me in her blog and asked me to write 7 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me. This is a fun sport so I’m happy to oblige! Without further ado, here they are:
 

1. I’m a Chicago transplant to Wisconsin. I moved here 4-1/2 years ago. I think this little town called Lisbon it’s actually Wisconsin’s best kept secret. I lived in Schaumburg when I was in Illinois – home of the great Woodfield Shopping Mall and IKEA. One thing I should have realized before the move – IT’S EVEN COLDER AND SNOWIER HERE. What was I thinking?? Truth be told, however, I’m actually more at home here than I think I’ve ever been in my life.
2. I’m a newlywed. OK, so it’s the second time – it still counts. I was married on July 11, 2008 to the man I should have met 30 years ago. We had a formal wedding with the works – dress, flowers, rock band and all! I planned every little detail to perfection (See #6) because it was my first “real” wedding (eloped first time) and because it is definitely my LAST wedding. My husband and best friend, Chuck, is also my business partner!
3. I love to draw – and paint – and play a little piano.  I won’t call myself an artist, but I sure give it the old college try. I have done several pencil sketches and recently took up painting. I did my first acrylic painting a couple of weeks ago and we’ll just let that be a secret.
4. In the 70s, I briefly taught Ballroom Dance. I think I would have kept this up had it not been for the smarmy sales tactics this dance studio wanted me to use to entice new students. But I have loved and enjoyed dance for years. My husband and I actually hooked up with some dance lessons to choreograph a Foxtrot to “Just In Time” for our first dance at our wedding. That was fun! As an even more amazing note – I even won a DISCO contest in the 70s – Whoa! You SO want to hang with me now.
5. I LOVE BIG DOGS. (Maybe that’s why my favorite saying is “If you’re gonna’ run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch!”)  About a year and a half ago, I had to put my beloved golden/lab mix down at the tender age of 14. If you’ve read the book Marley & Me, you know my dog. She was his clone with the exception of gender. I’m still not over it. But, the upside is that we still have Samantha, our 13-year-old small black lab who thinks she’s 2, is exceptionally obedient but certainly is a BOR (box of rocks).
6. I am a perfectionist. It’s sometimes a bad thing and sometimes a great thing. When I’m locked into a project, it’s great because the end result will be great. When I’m attempting to get my hair and makeup and outfit to coordinate for that special occasion – well, let’s just say – How much time do you have? Or if I have to get the last harness painted on the last reindeer cookie at 2 a.m., NOT TOO PRETTY.
7. My 7th thing – let’s see – vacations – I LOVE VACATIONS. My favorite, hands-down, undeniably, the bomb vacation is anywhere on a beach, but most notably, JAMAICA. Been there twice and can absolutely hear the ocean crashing against the beach at night, picture dancing reggae style to the steel band, feel the warm sun, taste the “bang” sauce and sing out loud to “One Love” by Bob Marley. What’s not to love?

I bet there’s a lot more you probably don’t know about me, but that’s OK. A little glimpse into someone’s life gets the ball rolling anyway. So, to Carrie Anderson and Lauren McMullen, TAG – you’re it! Won’t you please give us a little peak into your life?

Here are 5 things most avid computer users know:

1.            How to add shortcuts to popular programs in the Taskbar.

2.            How to empty their recycle bin.

3.            That CTRL+F in Microsoft Word = Find.

4.            That you can “paint” formatting from one paragraph to another in Microsoft Word.

5.            That ALT + PrintScreen will capture the screen you are on and CTRL + V will paste that into Word.

Did you find anything that you didn’t know? What are some other common tasks that you THINK everyone knows? Sometimes we take our own knowledge for granted and what may be simple to us is not at all familiar to someone else. So share your wisdom – it is the season of giving after all!  Let us hear your tips and tricks.  And we promise to answer or elaborate on any of the 5 tips above!

It used to be that when we wanted to locate goods and/or services, we would look to the Yellow Pages to find local businesses. They were alphabetically listed by category and once a potential was found, we would call or visit them for what we needed. But this is now a virtual world and more times than not customers will turn to the internet to locate their goods and services. Some have turned solely to the internet for all their purchasing needs. Typically, they will choose a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, type a few keywords based on what they’re looking for, hit enter and BAM, 10,000 – 100,000 hits are brought back in the blink of an eye with websites and related items based on what they entered in the search line. A quick scan down the list for a possible choice, a click on the link and you’re instantly visiting the related website. This is today’s shopping experience. It is uncommon for this type of customer to look past the first few pages of the returned result.

If you are a supplier of goods and services, and you have a website, you want YOUR website to show up on the coveted first page of the potential customers search and the one that is clicked on. This is a tall order and most times, your website is found 10, 20 even 50 pages down the list and because of that, it is basically never seen. So how do we get our website viewed by those that don’t already know it exists? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the answer. SEO is a technique of designing your website to be search engine friendly. When you publish your website to the search engines, they use what is called a “Spider” or “Crawler” program to examine your website for things like material content, keywords, links in, links out, links within, age, frequency of maintenance, and this program finds all the places your website is referenced throughout the entire internet. The better your content, the more links and external references that are found, the higher the score assigned to your website and the higher the ranking in the pecking order of results.

A great many business owners are unaware of the potential marketing impact that exists with a website. You should take advantage of all the capabilities that the internet has to offer. This includes not only website design and SEO tuning, but also blogging and social networking. If you invest the time to learn and set up accounts with networking sites like “Facebook”, “Linkedin” and “Twitter”, AND take the time to maintain the information there, it will not only help with your social networking efforts to build contacts and business relationships, but it will also help with SEO for your website. At the end of the day, you want your name and your website mentioned online as often as possible and in as many places as possible.

If you don’t have the knowledge or the resources to do these things on your own, you should enlist the assistance of someone who is trained in this area. You’ve spent time and money on putting up a website, now go to the next level and actually use this tool and the internet to your maximum advantage.

Thoughts?

If you are like me, trying to keep a regular fitness routine going is difficult when the first thing you do when you get up in the morning is head to the computer. I try to carve out a half hour to stop and work out, but many times, I end up getting involved with work, forum posts or emails and I tend to shrug off the workout.

So, here are a few things that you can do to at least try to keep yourself on track:

1) Make sure you get up and take a quick walk around the house every half hour or so.

2) Sign up for www.myfitnesspal.com. This is a great FREE site that allows you to manage not only your food intake, but also your fitness routine and how many calories, carbs, etc. are burned. You can set goals and this really has helped me stick to them!

3) Drink LOTS of water.

4) Don’t eat the same food for lunch every day – your body gets used to the same foods and if you mix it up, you will fire your metabolism.

5) Make a list of foods that you can eat large quantities of without guilt (plain air popcorn, raw veggies, etc.). Stick to those and stay away from sweets and carbs like white bread which tend to spike blood sugar and lead to water retention and puffiness. (This one is VERY hard for me – I’m a sweet freak and I do tend to get puffy!)

6) If you’re on a webinar, and your headset will allow it, stand for the bulk of the webinar!

I’m sure there are other tips out there, but these are things I try to do when I’m having one of those “oops too late to work out” days.

What kinds of things help you?

Enjoy!

In today’s challenging economy, one might seriously question whether starting a new business is really the right thing to do. I have just done this and, in all honesty, it was and is a somewhat scary feeling. I do feel very lucky, however, because I have the total support of my family and friends, not to mention incredible organizations like VANetworking.com and the IVAA (International Virtual Assistant Association). I’d like to share an article published by Barb Bartlein* of The People Pro on the “Five Essentials for the Entrepreneur”. She has a fantastic newsletter that I signed up for a long time ago and it is always a worthy read. This particular article is geared toward the Milwaukee area, but the points made are applicable in any new startup. And as another budding entrepreneur recently remarked to me, “There is no bad time to do something you love”!

Five Essentials for the Entrepreneur

The economy may be tanking but new research from Barclays suggests that entrepreneurs are far from being discouraged by reports of an economic slowdown.  They report an estimated 98,000 new start-ups formed in the first three months of 2008, which is the highest number of start-ups in the last three quarters.  According to statistics, the most popular industries for start-ups were business and financial services, construction and the retail sector.   As John Davis, Marketing Director for Local Business at Barclays said, “…there is a feeling there is never a bad time to start a good business.”

Now there is a new group in Milwaukee helping entrepreneurs do exactly that.  BizStarts Milwaukee launched last month with the resources, networking and know how to help create a vibrant, innovative and prosperous entrepreneurial business climate.  The goal of BizStarts is to create an infrastructure designed to nurture and grow innovative, fast-track companies. 

The Milwaukee 7 region has long ranked in the lowest third of states for business start-ups.  This means slower job and wage growth as most new jobs are created by small companies.  BizStarts know that the majority of new jobs are created by entrepreneurial companies and jobs are what build a strong community.  They have identified five essentials for an entrepreneur to start a business:

1.    A great idea that fills a need.  Successful entrepreneurs identify a “burning customer need” and their product or service must meet that need.  Dan Steininger, one of the BizStart founders says, “The product or service must have market differentiation; something unique that distinguishes them in the market place.  And most importantly, that delivers the customers.”
 

Make sure you do your homework.  You need to understand how the competition is meeting the need the need today and how your product or service must perform and be priced in order to compete.  Who is your target buyer and how do you reach them?  And most importantly, why should they buy from you?

2.    A business plan.  Statistics from the Small Business Administration indicate that a business with a plan is 40% more likely to survive than a business without a plan, yet 60% of small businesses do not have a written business plan. A comprehensive plan is essential and includes a mission statement, business description, market analysis, marketing plan, executive summary, management and operations and financial projections.  A business plan should be a living document with frequent review and updates to stay current.

3.    Capital.  Many entrepreneurs start their companies by “bootstrapping,” using personal resources along with sales revenue to sustain and grow a company.  This offers them flexibility and control without answering to outside investors.  Numerous successful companies including Dell Computers were founded this way.  But to grow past the initial level, an entrepreneur may need outside investors and angel capital to grow.  BizStarts Milwaukee helps network entrepreneurs to investors who are looking for start up companies. 
     

4.    Mentors.  I have owned and operated three businesses and come from a family of entrepreneurs.  My mother owned her own company and all of my siblings are business owners.  When I wanted to start my latest business, Great Lakes Consulting Group, I received nothing but encouragement and advice.  Not all new entrepreneurs are so fortunate.  Too often, more people give you reasons why it won’t work than why it could. 

Having mentors and guidance from people who have been there is invaluable. They provide the answers, the resources, and encouragement to help new business owners be successful.  Mentors are the role models that demonstrate that it can be done.

5.

“Barbara Bartlein, CSP, is The People Pro ®, and President of Great Lakes Consulting Group, LLC, which helps businesses sell more goods and services by developing people. She presents keynotes and seminars on stress management, balance, productivity, customer service and leadership. She can be reached at 888-747-9953, by email at: barb@ThePeoplePro.com or visit her website at http://www.thepeoplepro.com