Your company is already being talked about on Facebook — with or without you. Why not engage with your brand advocates and the conversation? A Facebook business page enables users to interact with your business and brand in many different ways.
It is also an excellent way to distribute promotions, news and events as each post is distributed to your fans via news feed — potentially distributing your content to thousands of people on Facebook. We can help you to create a content strategy & plan for your Facebook business page or create and design a branded Facebook business page for your company, keeping lead conversion top of mind. Contact your assistant today to get started.
Call us today at (888) 884-3586 or schedule your complimentary consultation.
Holiday Card Mailing!Do you find yourself waiting until the last minute to send out holiday greeting cards for your business? Delegate your card mailing this year and make sure your customers, prospects, employees & vendors receive their cards in time for the holidays!
At Today’s Admin, we can assist you will all aspects of your holiday mailing:
Your assistant will be happy to help you with any and/or all of the tasks listed above. Need help with your family’s holiday mailing as well? No problem, we are happy to help with that as well!
Call us today at (888) 884-3586 or schedule your complimentary consultation.
Where does your website rank on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other leading search engines for the keywords that you would like to target? Are you paying for visitors to your site with services such as Google Adwords or reaping the benefits of organic (free) traffic from a well optimized site? Search Engine Optimization
According to Wikipedia, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.
Not sure how your page ranks? Let us run a complimentary SEO report for your website. We will show you where your page ranks for the keywords you are targeting, how your site is viewed by search engines, potential problems, and a variety of ways you can improve your ranking.
Call us today at (888) 884-3586 or schedule your complimentary consultation.
As a business owner, tasks and deadlines are being hurled at you all day. Your phone continuously rings, emails incessantly flow into your inbox, and a member of your staff has “just one quick question” just about every 30 minutes.
So how are you expected to stay focused? How can you possibly achieve the necessary—but elusive—balance between being productive and communicating with the world away from your desk?
Let’s face it: Not every task desperately needs to be completed right this second. But when the stack of papers is mounting, the inbox is full, you have ten voicemails, and you haven’t even finished your first cup of coffee, prioritizing can seem nearly impossible. Email devours times in a way that totally diminishes its original purpose: a brief, easy way to send messages. With so many people now using it as their primary mode of communication, a trickle has become a deluge in the business world. It’s crucial to manage the time you spend putting up the floodgates.
Set aside, at most, an hour and a half first thing in the morning, an hour after lunch, and up to two hours at the end of the day to respond to people’s emails. Prioritize your responses from most urgent to least. And then leave it. Unless an email comes in specifically regarding an emergency—and let’s admit: they’re pretty rare throughout the day—stay away from the inbox, on the computer and the smart phone.
Project management has become big business, but systems exist to help you communicate and manage your staff in addition to your projects, all in a way that requires very little investment. I recommend a system called Zoho, which is free for up to three admin-level users. This web-based, robust little program gives similar systems on Google a run for their money. Most universally practical for businesses are probably the Projects and CRM applications. Each helps organize information and coordinate projects in ways that sending multiple emails back and forth or having endless meetings just never will. You can also invite people outside the business—clients, vendors, etc.—to view the progress of a particular project. The accessibility of the information cuts down on the number of emails and phone calls you’d be fielding. The CRM manages all your contacts, allowing staff to log emails to contacts, attach relevant documents to their contact records, and assign tasks to them. And Zoho integrates with MailChimp, Constant Contact, and other popular email marketing programs.
Perhaps one of the most abused commodities in today’s business world is time. There are people who understand how to respect colleagues’ and clients’ time, and there are others who never will. One way to minimize interruptions is to clearly publicize both your schedule and your availability for your clients and colleagues to see.
Most of us at Today’s Admin help facilitate this by using Tungle, which is a free scheduling service. By signing up for an account, you can then send an email to those with whom you do business, telling them that calls and in-house visits should be scheduled through your online Tungle page. I also put the link to my Tungle in the signature of my emails, as a reminder to people that they can check in on my availability at any time.
Of course, unexpected calls will still come in, but by minimizing these, you stand a better chance of staying on track.
With few exceptions, most business owners don’t have too many surprises pop up during the week. You have a decent idea of what you have in the works over the next few weeks and maybe even months. Nonetheless, it is common for especially one- and two-person businesses to get so wrapped up in day-to-day tasks that planning never happens. These businesses suffer from lack of growth or only see it in short bursts, when the owner takes the time to focus on marketing.
Ensure that you leave yourself plenty of time to complete upcoming projects and goals. You’ll improve the quality of the output because you’re eliminating hasty planning and hurried work. Those involved in the project will benefit from a more steady, regulated approach, over the willy-nilly throwing together of something that needs to be shipped out via FedEx by 5 o’clock today!
It’s what your Type B friends and family have been telling you for years. You’re not super-human. Everything will get done. No need to stress out. If you’re like me, that’s just not possible. And, in fact, you’ve nearly given up on telling those Type B-ers to get lost.
The key is achieving just the right level of stress to keep you motivated without getting so tense that your focus and productivity are disrupted. According to Paul J. Rosch, president of the American Institute for Stress:
“It’s much like the stress or tension on a violin string. Not enough produces a dull raspy sound and too much an irritating screech or snaps the string—but just the correct degree of stress creates a beautiful tone. Similarly, we all have to find the right amount of stress that permits us to make pleasant music in our daily lives. You can learn how to utilize and transform stress so that it will make you more productive and less self-destructive.”
If you often feel the pressures of the day weighing on you, take a couple 15-minute breaks mid-morning and mid-afternoon just to sit outside in the sunshine, take a walk around the neighborhood, or play with the dog. Force yourself, for just those few minutes, to forget about work. Taking a brief step back will not only improve your perspective on what you’re working on, but also allow you to approach it in a more focused way.
What measures have you found to be useful in improving your productivity throughout the workweek that haven’t been mentioned here?
Is time melting away because you are so busy? How can you get more done with the time you have? The age-old answer still holds meaning; delegation. The answer is only a call or click away. A virtual assistant may be what will solve the dilemma.
Wikipedia definitions:
Delegation (or deputation) is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person (normally from a manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities. However the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated work.
A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant) is an entrepreneur who provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients from a home office. With a full range of options to choose from, clients can customize their remote receptionist service to meet their exact needs. Calls can be screened, announced and seamlessly connected to clients or their employees anywhere. They usually work for other small businesses, brokers and consultancy groups.
Businesses prosper in a number of ways; some have super-dedicated leaders that shoulder the entire responsibility of the success of the organization by micro managing every aspect of the activity. Other firms hum along marvelously, with the CEO hardly ever in the office. Still more companies have large groups of leaders, all responsible for small, and sometimes worthy but time-consuming portions of the business, whose return on investment might be improved by delegating or outsourcing the tasks.
Who’s to say which style is best? There is no magic answer, no cure-all method to ensure growth and profitability. The answer comes directly from the leader of every organization, and the buck stops at that particular desk. History has clearly shown which companies are the most successful in their industry or niche, and they are similar in one specific facet of management style: effective delegation, both within the organization, and through the use of contract assistance, the “Virtual Assistant.”
The history of most corporations and organizations in general, reflect the failure of this tenet of business management. The principle of delegation is typically ignored, performed poorly or violated all together. To maximize the productivity of a team, the basic principles of effective management dictate that authority shall be “delegated” to a leader to do what is necessary to accomplish company objectives and goals.
The Only Constant – Change
The business world is changing at lightening speed, and getting even faster. To maintain your market position, marketing has gone from outbound messages and advertisements to inbound means, provided by social media, content marketing and a host of other “success-critical” strategies and tactics. Maintaining a blog designed to elicit a response must be regularly updated, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a host of other important social media services reinforce the company brand, but take time, energy and resources, both human and otherwise.
A virtual assistant can solve these “mission-sensitive” duties, thereby freeing up valuable time for other bottom line improvement responsibilities. VA’s pay for themselves through timesavings, improved branding, content supply and inbound customer generation, creating leads for the marketing and sales departments to focus on. A worthy VA is one that understands the company mission and vision, supports both through their contracted responsibilities, and reports their performance on a regular basis, offering metrics, analytics and other specific reporting.
The Time-Value Relationship
Entrepreneurs and emerging enterprises operate under extreme pressure to perform in a profitable manner, and must utilize every opportunity to enhance their position in the marketplace, reinforce their brand offering, provide enough content to create enough buzz to attract interested prospects and customers. Virtual Assistants provide that needed edge to surpass the competition, and offer scalable services that can be added as their value escalates. The inclusion of a quality VA on the team can improve market share without the burden of additional headcount. They can save the most valuable of all resources of small and medium sized businesses: time.
All businesses have a barrel of tasks that must be performed or completed for the business to progress. Everyone in the business should have a group of tasks, and work cohesively so that all tasks done in a timely manner produces profit. What happens when the employee fails to perform, or perhaps transfers their tasks to someone else? Chaos. There is a reason successful people are effective delegators. They recognize the strengths and capabilities of their teammates, and enlist their support in the completion of portions of projects. Through clear establishment of expectations, managers can therefore inspect the outcomes, adjusting performance as needed. “Inspect what you expect” is perhaps one of the most important management principles any successful leader must indelibly burn into their daily routine.
Have a productive day; hire a VA!
Not all companies take the time to keep the gap between strategy and execution. Inherently, the gap is often caused by periods of significant change, akin to the environment of change today’s companies face.
Any number of factors causes the chasm to widen, typically:
Being able to control the “tip of the spear” position in your chosen market segment or niche requires a minimal gap in all of the above stated facets…
Read the entire article on my Business Blog (dailyBLOGMA)
I made my national television debut this morning on Lifetime network’s The Balancing Act. If you missed it, you can view the segment below.
Does anyone remember the episode of the Brady Bunch when Cindy was on the children’s quiz show? She was fine until that little red light above the camera came on – and then she looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Well, the night before the taping, I had a dream that it happened to me! Yikes – pretty scary! I think I ended up doing okay and was actually very comfortable in front of the camera, but I’ll let you be the judge 
Is Conversation Becoming the Next Dinosaur?Scott Asai asked this question in a recent article on Daily Blogma’s Business Blog. He said that “social media and other forms of technological communication strip away the ability to have a decent face to face conversation.” It is a very interesting question.
The more I thought about it, I ended up with conflicting opinions. On one hand, I agree with what Scott says and the great points he makes in the article. My inner devil’s advocate (does everyone have one of those or just me?) on the other hand, wonders if technology may actually help people refine their communication skills. After all, social media and technology do allow us to communicate with infinitely more people on a daily basis than we would be able to “in-person.”
Here is an example of this theory: Before I became the social media and networking nut I am today, I really only attended a handful of face-to-face networking events each year, and I was pretty uncomfortable speaking to and/or networking with people. I went anyway because it is such an important part of growing your business. A few years ago when I jumped into the online world of business networking. After only a few months of networking with hundreds of people online and non-stop communication with people from many different backgrounds, I became completely at ease speaking with others. It doesn’t matter if it is virtually or face-to-face, speaking to one person or one thousand – I am comfortable.
Is this because of the experience and ‘practice’ I received with the help of technology and social media OR in spite of it? I’m not sure…
I would love to hear what you think. Is technology and social media helping us by adding additional platforms by which to reach out to a greater number of people or is it hindering our ability to communicate effectively? Is Conversation Becoming the Next Dinosaur?
You can also read Scott’s article here.
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