Category: Articles

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.

For a while now, businesses have been outsourcing essential processes to the Philippines. With the emergence of the creative process outsourcing industry, the country is being exposed to new service areas.

According to the Oxford Business Group (OBG), the right conditions are already in place for this new industry to grow in the country. Local policy-makers will, therefore, need to leverage existing strengths in digital marketing and other creative areas. For OBG Asia Regional Editor Patrick Cooke, several factors will play a crucial role in this:

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, at least 62% of the population belong to the over 18 age bracket. This also happens to be the largest age group in the country.

Furthermore, the Philippines currently has one of the lowest median ages in Asia at 24.3 years old. For Cooke, this young population is highly capable of understanding and handling new technologies.

Young entrepreneurs are running many business startups in the country that offer creative and virtual assistant services for various industries. It only goes to show that age does matter in a business landscape that’s increasingly digitally-driven.

 

Despite challenges in the global market, the Philippines’ consumer culture remains upbeat.

Indeed, the high prices of goods did little to dilute spending. In fact, the Consumer Expectation Survey for Q4 shows increased consumer confidence. This has indicated the presence of a workforce that has ready access to new technology and that doesn’t lag behind in terms of tech adoption.

 

Heavily influenced by new media, young adults dominate the local outsourcing industry. From real estate virtual assistants to creative associates, they form a great source of digitally-savvy skills for businesses to utilize.

“This creates a fertile ground for a vibrant youth culture to flourish, sustained on a diet of music, film, fashion, arts and online content,” Cooke says in a report by the Philippine News Agency. “The innate Filipino creativity and all-pervasive musicality (are) impossible for first-time visitors to the country to ignore…”

Cooke adds that this environment will produce individuals that are skilled in handling “high-value activities like graphic design, online marketing, and web development…”

 

The business process outsourcing industry and foreign remittances have buoyed the Philippine economy for such a long time.

However, we are seeing an easement of these economic drivers as remittances have dropped considerably during the first quarter of this year. The BPO industry, meanwhile, has projected slower growth up until the year 2022 as AI remains a critical threat.

Policymakers should, therefore, seek new areas for maintaining a sustainable local market. This would involve searching for “new growth engines” in the creative industry.

Therefore, a clear framework is important for developing the local creative industry and nurture an ideal business ecosystem where it is allowed to grow.

 

Creative process outsourcing will definitely provide new opportunities for the Philippines. The country has always been a top destination for hiring offshore call center workers and virtual assistants. We can only expect it to prosper as it branches out across different creative fields.

One thing’s for sure, several companies are already at the forefront of this sector. You can count OneVirtual Solutions among them. With our top-of-the-line facilities and a highly dynamic workforce of virtual assistants and creatives, we are an essential partner for your business’ growth. Contact us today to get started.

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