My Secret Staff Blog

5 Ways to get more done today

Virtual Assistant — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:59:18 +0000

It seems like life just keeps getting busier and there are now more things to monitor than ever before. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest…and let’s not forget Email, Blog’s, RSS Feeds. It is getting harder and harder to focus on what really matters. And that is what separates the winners from the losers. People who get more done, who achieve balance in their lives are most always those who focus on what matters. Easy to say but hard to do – or is it? Personal efficiency, productivity, work life balance – it all comes down to thinking it through and having a plan.

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9100210-check-mark-for-success.php?st=78abca8

Step 1 – What’s your time worth?

If you know what your time is worth, your productive time, you can start to assign things a value. Something that helps you close a sale or get a promotion – valuable. Monitoring social media mentions, lead nurturing – they mat turn into value down the road but right now – not so much. The simplest solution is:

your annual salary (or desired salary) divided by 52 divided by 40

Let’s say we get $50 an hour
If you can delegate to a lower cost provider and fill that time with something useful, then you should
Easy math, should a $50 an hour person do your filing or a $15 an hour person

Step 2 – Automate where possible

Email rules for correspondence

Software that makes your down time productive – Evernote, DropBox, Box.net

(more on these solutions later, but for now remember “automate routine tasks and keep information available in the cloud”)

Step 3 – Focus on what matters

Divide your activities into four buckets

Social Rewarding things – friends, family, hobbies
Career- activities with a direct link to your paycheck
Obligatory – taxes, time sheets, expense reports
The Rest – everything else, some will be trash, some will be “nice to to’s”

(more on this in another post – remember “simple categories” for now)

Step 4 – Delegate Delegate Delegate

You need to make sure you focus on things that fall into buckets 1 and 2 – either personally rewarding or career. The rest you should definitely delegate, outsource or stop ding where possible. A hundred books have ben written about the tyranny of the urgent versus the important. Make sure youa re focusing on things that are important

(more on this in another post – remember the mantra ”don’t do things someone else could do for you”)

Step 5 – Maximum Leverage

How can you get the most leverage on your time. Perhaps you are in a business like Real Estate. You know that as part of Career, you need to nurture a lot of leads. You need to connect with people, past customers and future, on social media. But who has the time to spend 2 hours a day when you should be out meeting clients? so you do it after normal work hours… Why? You need to map it out, using the principals above:

Engage an Assitant to put names in all prospects in a database
Assistant monitors your twitter, facebook pages and posts timely messages to help you connect with your network and remain top of mind
Assistant uses Send out Cards to send Birthday greetings and so forth to past clients, reminding them you care
Assiatnat provides a summary each day of emails, tweets, facebook messages sent and received as well as cards sent

If staying connected get’s you 2 extra deals a year and frees up 8 hours of your time a week, what would that be worth to you. It’s easy math, but people get so bogged down in the urgent they never think it through?

I guarantee that everyone reading this can think of at least 3 things they do in a week that are important but that you could outsource to someone else? What would even 5 extra hours each week spent on career networking or with your family do to the quality of your work and home life?

If you are worried about controlling costs then Virtual Assistance is a must

Virtual Assistant — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:12:16 +0000

Virtual assistance is on the rise. More and more businesses, especially smaller ones are finding that they cannot afford to keep staff on hand. Payroll, taxes, and insurance costs to name a few expenses associated with having employees have caused many companies to have to let go of many of their valued hired hands.

With this being the case, those same folks who lost their jobs are also finding it more difficult to find replacement positions. Why? Often, the job that they lost was outsourced somewhere else, sometimes even somewhere overseas. This can be positive or negative depending on how you choose to deal with it. You can take advantage of this new trend by being one of the people that these jobs are being outsourced to by becoming a virtual assistant expanding your horizons around the world instead of just around the corner or across town to where you used to drive to work.

Who hasn’t heard of a personal assistant? This is usually someone that you hire that takes care of your administrative work for you. They are generally your employee. Due to the downturn of the economy, many business owners can’t afford to have this luxury any longer, enter the virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is someone who works from home, doing the same administrative work as the personal assistant with the same efficiency. The big difference, no overhead costs because the person is their own boss, a freelance or contract worker. If you have a computer, printer, and a VOIP like Skype you are ready to enter the very lucrative world of virtual assistance.

Many companies today are looking for people who are able to do this type of work. They have to otherwise they will have to close their doors. There are companies and websites that virtual assistants can join to outsource their services. The work is out there. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved. The business owner(s) and the virtual assistant who contracts with them because one saves money while they other makes money they may not have otherwise been able to make because of the scarcity of jobs.

If you own a business and you need help, yet you can’t figure out how in the world you will ever be able to hire the assistance you need, you need a virtual assistant. This is a sure fire way to get all your administrative tasks done and save your company a ton of money. The money you save can be put towards other areas that need it to enhance your visibility and viability in the market you have chosen to work in. Virtual assistants are the answer to the tough economic employment question today and perhaps they are even the answer for the foreseeable future. As the world becomes smaller due to the internet, virtual assistance makes more sense than having to pay to have someone at your side consistently that you will find that you really didn’t need there are all because of virtual aid.

Your business needs a blog – let your virtual assistant do it for you

Virtual Assistant — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:25:58 +0000

Why have a Virtual Assistant manage your blog for you? There are many things that you as a professional have to do to keep your business running at top efficiency. You may have a receptionist or answering service to field your incoming calls, freeing you up to deal with so many of the necessities of growing your business into a lucrative enterprise.
Today, the internet is as important a part of the mass marketing arena as television, newspapers, billboards, and radio. The difference is that the information on the internet goes “stale” much faster than these other venues, because millions upon millions of people are literally looking at it in a fairly small amount of time.
One way to keep the information fresh is to have a blog about your business. If you have heard the term but were never sure what it meant, it stands for “Web Log”. It is a “regularly” updated diary or journal posted to the internet. It can be about any subject. The most important part is that it has to be regularly maintained or it will very quickly lose the interest of your readership or customer base.
Unless you have the time to do this you will want to have someone you can count on to do execute this task on a regular basis. This is where a virtual assistant comes in. Your virtual assistant will consistently update your businesses blog with relevant, updated information that will not only attract new clientele, but it will keep your existing customers coming back for more. This will give your site increased rankings resulting in greater profits for you.
Even with social media taking the internet by storm, blogging is still a very huge marketing tool. Although, Facebook and Twitter have their own individual niches, they have not overridden the need for your business to have a good, up-to-date blog.
A virtual assistant can take the information you supply about your business and spin it like a well trained weaver, crafting it into an informative and intriguing blog about you, your company’s roots, offerings, and prospects for the future. It is not enough to just have great deals, today’s environmentally and tech savvy consumer wants to know what you and your company are about and why they should spend their hard earned income with you. Allowing a virtual assistant to blog about this without the pressure of having to get to other tasks that may be pressing to be done, means that your blog will have the desired effect each day it is published because it had the attention to detail it required and deserved.
It is said that “no man is an island” and it is very true that no one can do everything by themselves, at least not efficiently. You really have a couple of choices when running your company. You can either try to juggle all the areas of your business and lose many customers before you even have them, or you can get the affordable help of a virtual assistant and blog your companies way to economic and virtual success.

Want to know how a Virtual Assitant can help you grow your business?

Virtual Assistant — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:27:17 +0000

Want to know how to grow your business fast?

I know the answer to this, because I see it work for my clients every day. Break out of your paradigm. Stop doing exactly what you have been doing, do something different. Learn from others. Join a coaching program, find another, successful business owner who can coach you and provide honest feedback. Leverage tools that make you more efficient. A virtual assistant can be a big part of that.

1. Hiring Virtual Assistants to help you grow your business
2. Delegate mundane tasks you don’t enjoy or are low margin to them – book keeping, invoicing, building your social media presence, cold calling, appointment setting.
3. Focus on things that grow your business.

A virtual assistant won’t be faster than you at mundane tasks. you know what you want… but your virtual assistant wlll be a lot cheaper. If you could do book keeping for 2 hours or generate $100 of revenue is it worh it to pay a VA $20 to do that? You bet your business it is. It really pays off if it’s something you are not good at like facebook integration or SEO’ing your web site. That’s where you really increase your leverage. You should focus on what generates revenue for your business and have your virtual assistant focus on the rest.