Author: OneVirtual Solutions

The outsourcing world is divided into different service sectors. Two of these sectors are the most crucial to success: call center services and virtual assistant services.

If you’re starting a career as an outsource service provider, you will have to know which of these options best fit your desire for personal and professional growth.

Let’s look at what each sector can offer along these lines:

Probably the most basic function of call centers is to engage clients. This includes various tasks, from providing technical assistance to handling complaints about a product or service. All you need in handling these tasks is to have a thorough background in customer service as well as a compelling ability to understand clients and influence the decisions they make.

Virtual assistants, on the other hand, are also capable of handling calling tasks, but across a broader spectrum. Unlike call center jobs, virtual assistant jobs allow you to handle a greater variety of related tasks. You can be making cold calls one minute and setting up sales appointments the next.

 

Call centers can help you nurture the skills you need to get ahead in your career. Aside from people skills, a call center is also a great place to sharpen your problem-solving skills and become an expert negotiator. This is also the reason why call centers remain a critical touch point for businesses.

You can acquire the very same skills as a virtual assistant, the only difference is that there’s a greater selection of competencies you can acquire. These include creative skills through tasks such as graphic design, video editing, and content writing, as well as administrative skills such as database management, budgeting, and documentation.

 

Call centers are known for their fast-paced environments. As you receive a larger call quota, you also improve your chances of quickly securing senior-level positions within the company. The work can get monotonous, but so long as you keep producing stellar results, you will be able to reap better benefits and opportunities for growth.

The same can be said about virtual assistants, although the range of activities they handle is not all that repetitive compared to what call center agents deal with every day. Career growth is also fast-paced, but it’s the fact that you get to learn new skills and hone them which makes a virtual assistant career highly advantageous to you in terms of career growth.

Sure enough, you will have to choose the path that offers the most advantages. Become a virtual assistant and do more than just make or receive calls. Send your resume to careers@onevirtualsolutions.

This March 4th, we celebrate National Grammar Day. Established in 2008 by members of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, this annual affair is all about proper language usage.

It may seem silly at best until you read a letter from then-President George W. Bush praising National Grammar Day as an “opportunity to recognize how communication skills can help more Americans prepare for the challenges ahead and compete for the jobs of the 21st century.”

On the other hand, businesses also need to observe good grammar in order to stay relevant and competitive. According to this article from Grammarly, grammatical and even typographical errors can have adverse effects on a business. Poorly written marketing copy creates ambiguity and distracts audiences from the main message. More importantly, bad grammar makes a business seem less credible. Homebuyers, for instance, want realtors that are detail-oriented, so they won’t trust a real estate company that has too many spelling errors on its website.

 

Then again, it’s not always good grammar that marketers should aim for. Substance and form go side by side, so it’s crucial to write marketing copy that’s well-crafted, readable, and perfect – at least to the eyes of a certified Grammar Nazi!

Let’s look at a few tips that should help you with writing crisp, engaging, and effective marketing copy.

You don’t have to sound profound or use technical terms to impress your audience. In fact, potential customers would appreciate it more if you are able to communicate with them as succinctly as possible. In other words, reserve your complex sentences and industry jargon for technical papers and case studies. If you’re out looking for new clients, keep your writing simple and straightforward.

 

One crucial challenge when it comes to writing newsletters for email campaigns is knowing which version is able to generate the most clicks. In that case, it helps to compare different versions together through A/B testing. This method allows you to experiment with words and identify copy that’s bound to generate more business.

 

Thanks to the world of app development, marketers can use a variety of tools that can help them improve their writing. Grammarly, for one, is a useful tool for finding and correcting grammatical errors, especially the more common and frequently overlooked ones such as wrong verb forms and spelling mistakes. You can install this tool as an extension for Chrome. Once installed, Grammarly can help you with editing your emails or documents before you send or publish them. This would help you write error-free messages and spare you from humiliation caused by bad grammar.

 

If you’re writing blogs or text ads by yourself, chances are you aren’t able to provide quality content on a consistent basis. In order to drive engagements, it’s important that you publish unique content every now and then. Hiring a professional marketing writer can do wonders by ensuring your business’ website offers fresh content that also uses correct grammar.

Need help writing blogs, e-books, newsletters, Facebook ads, and everything in between? Get a virtual assistant who’s skilled in both form and substance.

Employees are the lifeblood of any business. They work in both the frontlines and behind the scenes to manufacture and deliver products and services, generate clients, and maintain a constant revenue stream that’s vital to growth.

It’s only proper that employees get the recognition they deserve. After all, a highly motivated workforce is essential to improving your business’ productivity. Glassdoor says that satisfied employees drive tangible business results, so it pays to give your workers a reason to stay.  

As we celebrate Employee Appreciation Day this March 1st, here are some tips on how you can give back to your hardworking employees.

 

It’s important to mention that your employees’ lives don’t just revolve around the entire 9 hours they spend at the office. They need quality time for themselves and their families, so a healthy work-life balance is always essential.

In this infographic from Entrepreneur, at least  69% of employees say they prefer flexible schedules. This gives your employees the impression that they are in control of their time, which motivates them to work even harder. You can also offer other arrangements such as part-time and home-based work.

 

Office politics is toxic and, for sure, bad blood among your employees can potentially ruin your business’ momentum. That being said, you should let your employees know you are promoting healthy professional relationships by setting up an open-door policy.  

Encouraging your employees to speak up about issues in the workplace gives them the assurance that the company is looking out for their best interests. Aside from that, having an HR department with an open-door policy enables you to identify problems straight from the source, allowing you to come up with long-term solutions.

 

Alongside competition in the workplace, cooperation also thrives. Your employees are just as eager to have a good time with their colleagues, so an out-of-town company retreat is a great way to loosen up a few screws and get your employees to warm up to each other.

Team-building exercises should be designed for the purpose of developing a healthy culture of communication. They should also be anchored in effective problem solving, which is a key ingredient of a successful business enterprise. Writing for Medium.com, Alison Beacham says that, aside from giving employees a much needed mental break, company outings can also be a fun way to develop rapport starting with games like a scavenger hunt and a murder mystery game.

 

Though putting in a number of hours may look impressive on an employee’s record, it still won’t impact your ROI just as much as it should. Indeed, it’s always important to balance quality with quantity, in which case, rewarding best-performing employees is always a great idea.

Quantifying the work of your employees affects their capacity to meet quality standards. To fix this problem, you can implement policies that incentivize quality work. For this, have your supervisors assess the outputs of their staff.

Rewards should be based not only on the number of timeline deliverables but also in terms of quality.

 

Successful organizations know the value of keeping employees happy. That’s why they apply the right strategies that ensure workforce retention and prevent burnout.

One effective approach is to delegate repetitive and time-consuming tasks to a capable virtual assistant. That way, you can let your employees focus more on activities that add value to your business.

 

Contact us today so we can start helping your in-house staff with their assigned tasks.

Running a country requires patience and hard work. While it’s true that anyone can become President, it takes exceptional qualities to leave a lasting legacy from which business leaders can learn.

For Presidents’ Day, let’s take this time to read about wisdom in leadership, perseverance, and commitment to a higher ideal from ten consequential US Presidents.

 

Take it from the man who risked his political career in uniting the country during the Reconstruction Era. Hayes’ presidency proves that you can’t always please everyone. What matters is that you’re able to get out of your comfort zone and be able to learn new things.

 

Once the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, Eisenhower’s decision-making liberated France and the Low Countries from Axis control. No doubt he did not waste a single moment worrying throughout the campaign.

 

You might not be a Fortune 500 company today, but the possibility of becoming one is always there. You just have to go the extra mile no matter how difficult it gets like what Obama did when he entered politics and became the 44th President of the United States.

 

Many business empires started out small. It took blood, sweat, and tears for them to build their brands and nurture a loyal customer base. Taft was right. Even today with all the apps and tools at our disposal, one still has to go the extra mile to create a truly successful business.

 

Running a business is not without any risk. Though, at times, we often overestimate the challenges that are coming our way. For Coolidge, the ability of foresight is something that many business leaders should nurture amid a highly volatile economy.

 

To be a great leader means being able to create plans based on rational long-term goals. Indeed, without a sense of purpose, JFK would have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis recklessly and the world would have become a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

 

People tend to compare negotiating with combat sports, but what many don’t consider is the range of emotions that are involved. Ford was on point about making compromises and avoiding disadvantageous deals that could lead to more serious issues later on.

 

If there’s one thing that fuels a business leader, it’s passion. After all, you won’t be in business in the first place if you lack a prime motive or reason. Taking cues from Trump, use your passion to create something worthwhile and useful that will make use of your time.

 

Perspectives matter in your capacity as a leader. In this sense, adopting a mindset that’s focused on success gives you a better chance at accomplishing your goals. Jefferson says to think positively and stop yourself from creating negative scenarios that can only stall you.

 

Finally, leadership is all about making an impact in the lives of your employees, and not just on the bottom line. Empathy fuels productivity, so a leader should do whatever they can to help their employees grow meaningfully.

Which president has the best quote that applies to you and your business? Tell us in the comment section below.

For sure, being president is very much a demanding job, which explains why the Commander-in-Chief has a corps of assistants ready to provide support.

 

If you think you’re handling too much yourself, you might want to increase your productivity by hiring a virtual assistant today!

Valentines Day has always been a lucrative holiday for the greeting card and cut-flower industries. Indeed, businesses will have to focus on creating related content. Aside from giving their audiences some love, businesses will also need to embrace newer and better ways of ensuring profitability and reaching out to as many followers as possible.

If you haven’t built a relationship with outsourcing just yet, here are five reasons why you should start loving it!

 

Effective cost control is valuable when it comes to maintaining a healthy bottom line. By hiring the right outsourcing firm, you acquire better control over your expenses’ financial resources. Rightly so, the main reason why businesses outsource in the first place is to cut costs and, from there, leverage other valuable benefits that outsourcing entails.

 

When it comes to workforce productivity, quality is everything. You will need to look for people who can add value to your business. However, this would be a challenge for businesses based in areas that suffer from a dearth of talent pools. By outsourcing a part of your operations, you are able to access the technical skills you’re looking for. This saves you time and resources in trying to find potential employees locally.

Presently, the Philippines remains to be a robust market for outsourced services. With a relatively high literacy rate and an affinity to the English language, the country remains to be a great source for globally-competitive talents.

 

With cloud computing, big data, and marketing automation becoming more prevalent, your business shouldn’t waste time training people when you can hire outsourcers that are already capable of using these technologies.

 

Spending on outsourced services will rise in the coming years and it will be driven by the need for companies to adopt new tools. Against this background, top outsourcing destinations such as India and the Philippines are expected to grow, especially along the lines of customer relations, IT, and virtual assistant services.

 

This year will see marketing budgets rise as businesses channel more resources toward their digital marketing campaigns. Thought leadership remains an important dimension in digital marketing, so let’s expect more businesses to intensify their blogging and newsletter campaigns and finally set up their own podcast series.

 

To bring out the most value from your marketing campaigns, you can always find freelance digital marketing professionals or partner up with a company that provides virtual assistants.

What’s not to love about outsourcing? Considering your business’ need to scale this year, you will have to improve your operational capacity by having someone else handle the most crucial tasks on your behalf.

Begin your journey through outsourcing with us! Set an appointment today so we can discuss your most urgent needs.

Real estate professionals know exactly how difficult it is to handle client transactions. From marketing using social media to conducting due diligence, realtors will have to spend precious time handling such tasks for their clients.  

While it’s important that you handle these processes more thoroughly, you still need to focus on growing your real estate business. You can’t juggle the two simultaneously, but you can at least outsource some of the grunt work to a real estate virtual assistant.

Increase the time you spend scaling your business by letting a VA handle these processes:

Any experienced realtor worth his salt knows the importance of comparative market analysis or CMA. If you’re helping a seller determine the best listing price for a property, you will have to go through the tedious process of assessing the neighborhood. Using the MLS and sites like Zillow and Realtor.com, you can search for similar properties, make comparisons, and determine a good listing price. It can take a while, but why run a CMA yourself when you can have a real estate virtual assistant do it for you?

 

You don’t want a property to remain in the market for too long, so you will need effective advertising to attract interested buyers. In this case, coming up with a marketing strategy requires expert knowledge of multiple channels, including social media, blogs, e-newsletters, and online advertising platforms such as Craigslist. You can’t expect to learn everything there is to know about digital marketing overnight. Fortunately, you can always outsource your marketing tasks to individuals who are already experienced in the field.

 

Keeping tabs on your listings through the MLS is crucial, whether you’re helping a buyer find the right property or setting a home up for sale. However, preparing your entries to the MLS can get a bit tedious at times, considering the repetitive nature of the task itself. That being said, you can let someone handle your MLS inputs and ensure that the information for each home is accurate.

 

Before listing a property, you will have to hire contractors to make it look more presentable to potential buyers. However, delays and other issues on the contractor’s side can disrupt your timeline, so it helps to have someone monitor your home improvement projects and see to it that you list your home according to schedule.  

 

During the due diligence stage, you will need to set up appointments for home inspections and price negotiations on behalf of your client. In some cases, you won’t be available to make arrangements. A real estate virtual assistant might come in handy in setting up important meetings based on your schedule.

 

Surely, there’s a lot more a real estate virtual assistant is capable of handling. The bottom line is that you can increase your business’ productivity when you have someone with the right skills and know-how. Hire a VA today by giving us a call or filling up this questionnaire.

At present, the number of small businesses across the United States has reached 28 million, with at least 22 million in the non-employer sector. These numbers would tell us a lot about how much technology has revolutionized the world of commerce over the years. With the advent of social media and marketing automation, it has become easier for just about anyone to set up a business.

Still, as the number of small businesses continues to grow, we should expect competition to intensify and make it harder for newcomers to scale. To get some measure of success, a small business has to optimize its website in order to generate more potential customers.

Let’s look at a few things to remember when sprucing up your small business website.

 

Content is indispensable in terms of converting visitors into leads. Your site has to have a good mix of text blogs, audio recordings, and downloadable e-books. This ensures that your prospects are continuously informed and nurtured throughout the sales process.

When creating a content strategy, you will need to know what your audience wants. This will depend entirely on the types of content that resonate best with the specific segments of your market. For instance, young adults or Millennials respond better to videos and GIFs, so consider building a content strategy that includes these types of informational material.

 

If you have been managing your website for quite some time now, then you’re no stranger to SEO. Sites that rank high in the search results are in a better position to attract more web traffic. The challenge here is for you to come up with a keyword list that could make your site visible to your ideal clients.

In this sense, long-tail keywords can help in optimizing your site for specific audience niches. If you’re promoting a small-scale cleaning company, the keyword “cleaning company” is too broad a search term. When you narrow down your keyword to “commercial cleaning company Toronto.” This has better chances of getting high-quality traffic since it engages a highly specific niche.

To get a good list of long-tail keywords, you can use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, SpyFu, BuzzSumo, and KW Finder. Sure enough, these tools are very useful especially if you’re building a content strategy from scratch.

 

Regardless of your target niche, your audience can be a great source of marketing intelligence. Since opinions matter in the world of business, you should always treat every comment or reaction from your audience as an opportunity to improve your products or services.

When a visitor leaves a comment on a blog post – even if it’s negative – you should be able to respond. While the main aim here is to get people to talk about your product or service, it also helps in bolstering your reputation. This adds to your brand’s authority, which in turn attracts more potential customers.

 

User experience is an important metric you will have to focus on if you want your small business website to produce more conversions. To retain visitors, effective web design is second to none. No doubt, your website’s appearance matters a lot since it helps visitors navigate from content to content and keeps them engaged.

Designing your website has to involve a great deal of planning. You also need to follow the principles of effective design that centers on better accessibility. When it comes to crafting a website, improving user experience is of utmost importance. For this, it’s important that you make your content highly readable by providing enough whitespace, using bullet points and subheadings, writing straightforward content, and using transition words or phrases that would keep potential customers engaged.

Considering the resources and manpower that you have at the moment, outsourcing your web development and web design tasks is a solution you would want to try out. Sure enough, it’s never too late to delegate these tasks and other core business activities to a service provider.

Want to improve your small business website? Contact us today for virtual assistant services you can get from nowhere else!  

As we bid 2018 goodbye, a mandatory throwback is in order. Just in case you want to catch up or simply equip yourself with enough knowledge to take on another year of possibilities, here are the top 10 blog posts we have published for 2018.

 

“It shouldn’t take you forever to find the right creatives to handle your branding and audience engagement efforts. It’s only a matter of finding a company that has everything you need to run a successful digital marketing campaign.”

 

“As business owners want to focus on core operations and resolve capacity issues, outsourcing companies will have to use new business practices and technologies to better meet these goals for their clients.”

 

“The purpose of your newsletter is to convey information about your products and services in a straightforward manner. Using technical terms and lengthy sentences defeats this purpose.”

 

“Setting appointments is one thing, but handling them is another. You may want to focus on your appointments, and at the same time, ensure your business is running smoothly.”

 

“Being a leader isn’t always about getting power and position. For most people, it’s a never-ending process of self-improvement.”

 

“Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one coming. – Richard Branson”

 

“Blogging forms an essential part of marketing a business. According to Hubspot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018, companies that blog get more engagement than those who do not. In fact, publishing 16 blog posts per month gets 3.5 times more traffic than publishing 0-4 monthly posts.”

 

“Back then, home sellers use satellite imaging to provide low-resolution top view images of their homes. Today, people are using drones to produce high-quality videos and photographs of their properties from any angle they wish.”

 

“Digital marketing demands a great deal of your attention, so you will have to put off other important business activities in order to meet your promotional targets. With outsourcing, you won’t have to switch your focus from marketing to your core business operations.”

 

“Cloud services are becoming popular nowadays. And it’s not because they’re a trend everyone has to follow. It’s what we can use them for that matters the most.”

 

Sure enough, there are plenty of topics to write about for 2019. Like you, we’re also looking forward to new innovations that will impact the world of business.

You may also want to give your brand a needed boost along the lines of digital marketing. On that note, you may need professional virtual assistants who can help you with your goals. Contact us and see how we can make 2019 a productive and profitable year for your business.