Availlive – Your Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is an entrepreneur that you can partner with to grow your business. They can save you from office space and equipment compared to full-time employees. Taxes, insurance, medical benefits are no longer an issue to have a headache about. I know running a small business can be difficult; the amount of paperwork, administrative task and bookkeeping may be extremely time-consuming. A virtual assistant can take away the pain with this repetitive work you have to do on a daily basis.

A VA only charge on the hours consumed on the time required to do the assigned tasks. Except for the general administrative task such as general work processing, a VA can help you on the following 14 tasks to make your business run smoother and lighten your workload.

1. Desktop Publishing, using desktop publishing software to produce eye-catching documents such as business cards, newsletters, brochures and email champagne.

2. Transcription, if you have a recording of a meeting or an interview, ask your virtual assistant to transcript it into a document.

3. Writing, whether it is writing business letters or writing up articles to submit to directories to expose your business, a VA is ready to do the job.

4. Database Creation & Management, organizing a contact list for your business, such as vendors, customers and competitors.

5. Bookkeeping, this may include generating and sending out invoices to your clients, keeping track of payables and receivables and billing your bills.

6. Phone answering, a VA can act as your customer service and answer enquiries on your business products or services. Your VA may even offer off hours phone answering service, making your hotline 24 hours in service.

7. Website maintenance, keeping the content of your website up-to-date with fresh content and even Search Engine Optimize your website and submitting your website to search engine directories.

8. Email Management, if you decide to go on a trip, business or personal, your VA can handle your email and organize it, so you can call your VA to see what’s new or if any important issues has come up and needs to be settled immediately.

9. Proofreading/Editing, your VA can read through the documents you have written and check for grammar and formatting errors.

10. Translation Service, your VA may speak more than 1 language, that advantage of that and help you expand your business overseas.

11. Computer training or tutoring, to run a business, you will need to acquire skills in various software applications. A VA can pass on their knowledge of the software on a day to day operation.

12. Meeting & Event Planning, in some occasions you would like to host an event for gathering with your clients or even for personal matters such as parties and weddings, your VA can help you organize a guest list and send out invitation, organizing a venue, arrange accommodations, and co-ordinate with any catering services.

13. Scheduling, in many cases, small business owners has a busy schedule. A VA can co-ordinate your schedules to help keep your lives organized and running smoothly. Reminder service can also be provided to ensure you to arrive on meetings or events.

14. Social Media Marketing, social media has dominated the internet and the power from social media to build a public relationship with your clients or potential clients. A VA can maintain your blog, setup a Facebook Fanpage and a Twitter account for your business and gain exposure to your business.

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Viral marketing which is task to encourage passing your newsletter, blog post, articles and video along to other people through email to a friend link on email marketing or through social media networks. Your VA can assist you on sending out your message or syndicate your videos on monitor the progress of each message of video for you.

Blogging, a method that has been adopted by many companies online to maintain updates to clients or attract potential clients to your website and keep contents on your website updated regularly with fresh content. Blogs are extremely search engine optimized and will get index quickly on to the search engine. A VA can help you setup a blog, research on topics you should post of your blog and submit your blog to blog listings to increase traffic.

Social media marketing which is engaging activities such as communicating on social media sites, posting on forums, commenting on other people’s blog who are relevant to the industry and submitting podcast and videos. A Virtual Assistant can help you set up social media profiles on major social media sites and niche social networks to further expose your business on various networks and start branding your business.

Online lead generation is the action when people subscribe to your newsletter for your product or service. This also brings back to affiliate marketing where someone has to complete a form and you pay for the affiliate that provided the lead.

Email marketing that has been the most profitable way of marketing after search engine marketing. Since the people are subscribed to your newsletter, they are most likely interested in your product or service and will make purchase your product or service in the future. There are also companies that offer to send out your email campaign through their opt-in list, which is called renting a contact list. A VA can help you draft up newsletters to your subscribers and monitor the open rate of each email sent out and assess on which type of newsletters are more successful than others. A VA can also keep your subscribers’ list up to date and delete contacts from your subscribers’ list that are no longer active or they have sent out a request to opt-out of your newsletters.

So, have your virtual assistant handle the entire list above tasks or parts of the list for you. This will help you save a lot of time, which you may use to focus on the core business itself. Remember that a virtual assistant only charge by the time spent on these tasks unlike hiring an employee which you have to pay insurance, taxes, office equipment and office space. Virtual assistants often offer free consultations, contact them today and gain freedom from your business!

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Assessment

Do you already have any sort of social media profile set up?  Do you have a blog?  A Facebook fan page? Or a Twitter account?  Are they successful?  For example, do you have a lot of readers at your blog?  Do you have a good number of fans on your Facebook fan page?  Do you have a lot of followers on Twitter?  These are all questions that you have to ask yourself before planning out a strategy.

Check out your competitors

Look for social media profile set up by your competitors and see if they are successful or not.  If they are successful, look closer and see what they are doing to achieve their success.  Is it because of their design?  Their content?  Their engagement with their audience?

Research

Locate where your target audience is engaged in.  There are thousands of networks that serves specific audience.  For example, like myself, I’m a virtual assistant, therefore I have joined specific forums for virtual assistants and online businesses where I can share with others my expertise.  Find these networks and see the latest trends in your industry.

Mind mapping

So you have researched and analyzed, what is your current position in social media?  Mind map what sort of social media you would like to be involved with.  Explore all the options to spread your message across and be recognized for your expertise and brand.

Action

Start registering with the networks you have decided to join.  Setup a blog.  Do whatever that needs to be done in order to get involve.

Setting a goal

What is your expectation of outcomes from these activities?  When it comes to expectations, you have to be sensible.  Establishing a certain amount of good content time to accumulate.  Therefore you should review the outcomes based on at least one month.  Goals such as gaining 500 readers to your blogs or having 200 fans on Facebook is a good way to calculate your outcome as an evaluation over the progress.

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As of the latest press from Facebook, there are now more than 350 million active users on Facebook.  50% of them log on to Facebook daily.  There are more than 1.6 million active business pages on Facebook and more than 700,000 are local businesses and have created more than 5.3 billion fans.  Are you part of it now?  If so, have you been actively engaging conversations with your fans?  If not, why are you not participating?

Yes I know, it can be extremely time consuming to be active on your business page but what is worth less than getting to know your clients or potential clients’ point of view on your product or service?  When you reply or comment on what people have to say about your business, it gives a connection to your fans.  It also provides a sense that you do care about how people feel about your business.

How Do You Get Attention on Facebook?

If you are a small business owner, do not just name your page using your business name.  Add keywords that is related to your business as part of your business page’s name.  Also use the keywords or keyword phrases in your information box so it is SEO friendly.

Provide your fans with contents that they are interested in.  Believe it or not, content is still the king in social media.

Creating an outstanding landing page for new visitors to your page.  Give your audience an image of your business and encourage them to join your page.

Host contest on your page, whether it is for promotion purposes or simply having fans to engage in your page.  It is important for you to keep the traffic up on your page.

Last but not least, advertise your page on Facebook.  Create a pay per click ad specified to your target audience on Facebook, you might be impress with the results you get in return.

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