Category Archives: Business Building
5 Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant
As a business owner it is nearly impossible for you to do everything on your own. Whether you have a strictly online business, a direct sales business, or a traditional bricks and mortar business you are going to need help getting various tasks done either due to not enough hours in the day, or due to a lack of skill. Thankfully, with the wonders of computer technology, and the speed of broadband, the great thing is, you can do all this without hiring a single employee. Instead, contract with an independent contractor that markets themselves as a Virtual Assistant (VA). Here are five benefits of hiring a Virtual Assistant.
1. Free Up Your Time - Hiring a VA can help you pass off various tasks to others so that you can concentrate on the money makers in your business rather than tedious tasks you don’t want to do, but are still essential to a well run business. Virtual Assistants may offer a variety of skills such as bookkeeping, customer service, uploading information to your website, posting blog posts, article marketing and many, many others.
2. Business Building Strategy – Hiring a Virtual Assistant can help you take your business to the next level. It does not matter if you have a bricks and mortar business, or a solely online business, you can still hire a VA to do various tasks that either you find tedious, or that you don’t know how to do well. You could be holding yourself back from having a successful business if you don’t let go of some of these activities by assigning them to a Virtual Assistant.
3. Saving You Money - When you hire a Virtual Assistant you only pay for the actual time spent on your tasks, not benefits, breaks, or extra taxes. In fact, everything you pay your VA is a deductible business expense, dollar for dollar. You don’t even pay for training because a VA is an expert in his or her niche. Virtual Assistants can be terrific resources regarding technology and business organization so take advantage of that fact by asking your VA for advice regarding various aspects of your business.
4. Supporting Another Business Owner - When you hire a VA, you are helping to support a small business owner. Most Virtual Assistants are independent business owners in their own right. Their Virtual Assistant business is an income stream, possibly to help subsidize, or support their own family – just as your business is for you. Hiring a VA is a win/win situation for both of you.
5. Peace of Mind - The very best reason to hire a Virtual Assistant is the time savings and freedom that you will experience due to outsourcing some of your tasks to a VA. You will once again regain your nights for movies and family, your weekends for time with your spouse and your friends all without even one employee being on the payroll. Instead, you’ll have an assistant who will be conducting these tasks on your behalf and cares about your return on investment because if you’re successful they are successful.
As you see, hiring an experienced and dependable virtual assistant to help you run your business, or manage your blog can pay off in many ways. You’ll have more time for family, or other money making activities, and if you play your cards right you’ll have one or more experts at your finger tips to help make your business more successful than you ever imagined.
Thinking about hiring a Virtual Assistant. I offer several VA services to help online business owners get back to building their business. I enjoy doing what others might consider “the meniil tasks”. Lets see what I can do for you!
Are Your RSS Feeds Auto Discovery Friendly?
Just imagine. Every time someone visits your website, their browser notifies them of your RSS feed. No, it’s not as interuptive and no where near as annoying as pop-up subscription boxes but still a good chance to get people to subscribe to something you have to offer. In a nutshell, that’s how auto discovery works. There ‘s usually a small flag somewhere in the browser telling people your feed is available for them and if the visitor is interested in subscribing, they will simply click subscribe – much like bookmarking a page.
Now you know how it works, why is it so important? For one, many feed readers and browsers already support auto discovery RSS feeds. But perhaps what’s more important, Microsoft is incorporating this starting with Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer still commands a good chunk of browser share out there, especially those who are new to the Internet or non technical Internet users. If your RSS feeds are not auto discovery enabled, it’s a good chance you’ll lose out on a bunch of subscribers.
As it is today, browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari can auto discover feeds. Many use this to subscribe because it’s just so much easier. While this group may not be that large but why should you not take advantage? If just making your feeds auto discovery friendly you get an extra subscriber, even if it’s only one it would be worth it because it costs nothing but maybe 2 minutes of your time.
So how do you find out if your feeds are auto discovery friendly? The good news is, if you’re using a blog to manage your content, many have this feature built in. But it doesn’t hurt to just check it anyway. If you don’t use a blog, chances are, your feed is not auto discovery enabled.
Before I go, here are two little tips that would help your RSS distribution and subscription using auto discovery.
1. Put the auto discovery tag in other web pages too. Just because it’s not a blog doesn’t mean you can’t have an RSS feed on it. Take advantage of that, put your feed in your main website’s template. Now you have two opportunities to get in touch with people. When you update your website and when you update your blog.
2. If you use a service like FeedBurner to track your subscriptions, remember to update the feed URL in your blog or website template. This way, you’re capturing all your feed traffic statistics.
What’s next? Go make your RSS feeds auto discovery friendly right now. Because RSS is not always visible to us, don’t run the risk of forgetting this.
About the author
Lynette Chandler helps entreprenuers leverage readily available technology for their marketing. Learn more about RSS and blogging at TechBasedPlugins.com
Outside My Comfort Zone
As a WAHM, I have a circle of WAHM friends that I have met online. We share in our successes, offer advice when we get stuck and we’re there for each other whenever any of us have a bad day. We understand and support each other as we each live life as a work at home mom.
However, to grow as a person and a business professional, I’m thinking I’m going to have to step outside of my WAHM comfort zone here pretty soon. You may be asking “You own an online greeting card business, why on Earth would you want to do that?” Well, there are a couple of reasons.
I have been a WAHM now for 4 years, and so far I’ve been able to conduct all of my business online. But now that I’m looking at both kids being in school for the first time this Fall, I’m looking at ways to take advantage of the business in my own ‘backyard’! That’s right – I’m branching out offline.
I’ve already checked the local paper for the times and locations for meetings of business networking groups, and plan to call our local Chamber of Commerce to find out when they hold their meetings. (Hopefully this won’t conflict with my youngest’s school schedule – don’t know if he is in morning or afternoon Kindergarten yet.)
Let’s say I go to the next meeting and there are 30 people there; statistics show that the average person knows 250 people…. Well, if each of those 30 people in this networking group knows 250 people, who knows how many of them may need my greeting card service?
By showing up regularly for meetings and events, eventually I will get to know the other members. The conversation will eventually lead to the subject of what each of I do for a living. When they, or someone they know, are in need of my services, I will be the first person they think of to ask for help.
Besides, it might be nice to get dressed up and get out of the house!
