Why should you hire the Services of a Virtual Secretary?

Once you have your smart small business web design in place, you would obviously look around for a virtual secretary to help you manage your business affairs and online transactions. Hiring the services of a virtual assistant can help you remove plenty of hours from your workweek and provides you higher degrees of efficiency and productivity. However, you should know which task to outsource to your virtual secretary—who in all probability is a freelancer or contract worker.

Most virtual assistants work from the comfort of their homes and take care of administrative and secretarial jobs; which could have been done by full time in-house workers. With an increase in the number of virtual assistants ready to take up the challenges of maintaining your books of accounts, handling your ticketing and schedules, addressing customer service calls or simply posting out “thank you “ cards to loyal clients; finding the right one for your business is not a difficult affair.

Some tasks which can be safely delegated to these virtual contract workers are:

Bookkeeping: They go a long way in helping you keep a tab on your bills, maintain your accounting entries and make sure that your basic finance issues are in place. Many small business owners are now sharing their confidential bookkeeping information with virtual agents who are ready to follow up on tasks like pending bills, bills receivable and payable and outstanding invoices. They maintain the books of accounts in order and make sure that all accounting details and documents are in place at the time of filing your yearly tax returns.

Online Research: Time consuming tasks connected with online research can be outsourced to virtual assistants. Paid websites and specialty search tools may require pre defined user names and passwords, so remember to send all details to facilitate proper research and save time and other valuable resources. Once the research is over, virtual helpers send in their feedback and formatted reports to you—to help you take the more strategic decisions for the your business growth.

Data presentations: If you have good virtual help to help you make your PowerPoint presentations from raw data or summarize data from well researched word documents just before your meetings, then you are certainly a winner. Apart from saving your valuable time, hiring a virtual assistant helps you get access to higher levels of expertise and experience in these fields.

Scheduling: Easy availability of scheduling tools and software are making it easy for virtual helpers to manage the calendars of their clients. Along with streamlining their travel needs and ticketing to making sure that all appointments and meetings are held on time, your secretary also helps you plan your events and other marketing schedules. You simply need to be comfortable and let go of your schedules into the hands of a remote worker!

Valuable Tips for Bringing About Improvements in your Website Design

The colors, designs, graphics and fonts used in your website design can make a world of difference between success and failure. Whereas a carefully planned website design Cairns can attract high conversion and low exit and bounce rates, a badly designed web presence can mean low sales and high rates of abandonment.

So, how do you make sure that visitors do not exit your site as soon as they land there? Valuable tips offered by professionals linked with website design cairns make sure that they linger on your portal and click to buy stuff.

Logo: You need to have a carefully chosen logo in place and make sure that you highlight the same on a very prominent place on your homepage and other embedded links. The logo on other pages should be effectively linked back to the home page—to enable easy navigation within the website.

Intuitive navigation: You must remember to have your primary navigation links on the menu bar which is placed alongside the top portion of your site; and on a horizontal bar. The secondary links and navigation options can be placed beneath the primary bar or on a vertical space on the left hand portion of the page called the sidebar. Intuitive navigation plays an important role in helping surfers find their way around your website--rather than quitting after getting confused.

Remove all clutter: Don’t give your visitor too many options. Keeping the web design simple helps you avoid all clutter. Overloading customers with too much information or making the page heavy with visual graphics, info graphics, animated gifs and videos can backfire in a big way. They divert the attention away from important textual content and make your site less effective than what it really is.

Keep Textual content short: Another vital tip for streamlining pages is linked with keeping the textual matter specific and short. Ideally, a single page should contain at least 250 words of text and short paragraphs of maximum 5-6 lines. So keep it short and precise and you have a winning website on hand.

Provide room to breathe: Having enough breathing space around paragraphs and images allow your guests to absorb all the essential features and relax as they go through your website. Effective web design techniques encourage the presence of white space on the landing pagers and other linked addresses. Increasing breathing space enhances visitor experience and helps a business garner greater profits and returns. Visual competition on mobiles and the internet have set the grounds for the new designing mantra—where less is more. So stick to the essentials and remember to cut out on the flab.

With these tips and tricks in place, you can look forward to great business opportunities and dividends—and in more ways than one.

Tips for Making Your Website Attract More traffic

Of the various tools in your marketing arsenal, your web design for small business is certainly the most powerful. A well designed and laid out website can fetch you the competitive edge and add that little extra to your online presence. If you have a smart website in place, then you can make your customers stay, browse and purchase your products—instead of moving on to the websites of your competitors. This in turn means more sales revenues and higher profits for your business.

Whether it is about availing the services of small business bookkeeping agents or finding experienced professionals to help you with an innovative web design for small business houses, you can now implement your vision and set yourself on the path of success by achieving your purpose—quickly and in an easy way.

Given below are some valuable tips to keep in mind before investing in a user-friendly and eye catching website for your business.

Branding: A professional looking website requires a strong brand identity to instill higher levels of confidence in clients and perspective buyers. Fortunately, you can achieve your target of looking bigger than what you actually are by placing your logo in a prominent position and making using of some smart branding techniques to boost your overall sales. Your other marketing materials should also have the same logo—to make your brand all the more familiar and consistent.

Simplicity: Keep it simple. Too much of information and clutter makes customers wary and weary of clicking around for information. Clear site designs and well organized links allow clients to relax and make them enjoy their visits to your website.

Fonts: Readability should be the guiding force behind your choice of font style and size. You website may be accessed by people having different levels of vision and so it is important to make the sites as inclusive as possible—rather than focus solely on design and attractive fonts.

Graphics: Pictures always speak louder than words and more so when they highlight your products or business services. They are both eye catching and attractive and enhance the areas which demand greater attention from your clients. The relevancy of your site and search engine ratings is connected with the correct mix of text and graphics—making it important to resist the temptation to put in a lot of clipart and pictures. Too many visual images can also make your website slow.

Text: At least 250 words of text should go on each page of your website. Bullet points, formatting and numbered lists allow you to lay more emphasis on the important parts of your textual content—and should be used wherever possible.

Along with a high degree of transparency and navigability, your website should also be readily accessible on search engines and easily understood by your customers.

Hiring Professional Copywriters for Smarter Solutions

Whether it is about using magnetic headlines, strong calls to action, fascinating bullet points or the beneficial techniques used by professional copywriters; hiring the experience and expertise of graphic designers and copywriters goes a long way in improving bottom line figures and the overall success rate of your firm.

Though it makes a lot of business sense to do this yourself, it sometimes becomes important to hire the services of reputed agencies providing the best graphic design Cairns. So, what are the various situations in which need to hire a pro?

When you are just not good at it

Though talent constitutes 80 percent of the function of getting work done, you simply cannot put in your efforts into something about which you have no clue. You may also find yourself hard pressed for time and find it inconvenient to do the task on your own. Under the circumstances, you have no other option than to find a partner with better writing skills or hire a professional copywriter to give that particular area of your business the attention it needs.

You need to communicate the strengths and positive attributes of your products and services to your perspective and existing clients—and this requires the talents of a professional, well versed in strong writing techniques.

You Lack the Bandwidth

Even if you have a flair for writing, you will find it difficult to match the requirements of words on each page/screen on an everyday basis. After all, there is a limit to how much you can write. Though marathon sessions of writing seem to work for certain people, they can also lead to a complete loss of productivity and burnout over a long period of time. Professional copywriting service providers are well versed with the fact that the more a business writes about itself, the more it sells. This is all the more true in the world of content marketing, where stronger customer connections are the result of content written with authority and expertise.

Well, you should not strive to add on the expenses of a writer only to increase the volume of content generation. You should have a well planned strategy in regards to your business purpose and make realistic plans to achieve success through your published materials.

You want Specialized Expertise

You may be well versed in the art of writing blogs to make fans but are you equally confident of writing a persuasion letter to convert these very fans into clients? For this you require a specialist. You will also require the services of a subject matter expert to write your white papers or an SEO expert to help your business rank well on search engines and generate higher volumes of traffic. You will certainly have to pay more to get these specialized services—but then it is worth the cause.

Hiring of professional graphic designers and writers reaps rich dividends and make your business sound far from ordinary. Just go for it!

The Futuristic Platform of Websites for Mobile Devices

The amount of time and money people are now spending on mobile devices is on the rise and yet many businesses skipped the reation of a mobile friendly website. The mobile devices are an important and growing channel for all future businesses and to adapt to this world, redesigning is the buzzword!

Let’s discuss the key steps for redesigning websites for mobile devices:

Modify the existing site

Businesses cannot afford to ignore the fact that more than a billion populace primarily access the web from handheld devices. It is the worst business strategy to ignore your mobile audience altogether.

If you are not prepared to reconstruct your site immediately, the least you can do is edit the design in websites for mobile devices.

— Editing site design.

First of all, pull up your website on a smart phone and view it on Google and you will probably feel the need for design changes. The key aspects of a mobile friendly website lies in making simpler page styles, layout, large font sizes, minimal use of heavy images, clear name and contact details and full-sized touch keys that are finger-proof. These small steps go a long way in conveying key information and making the data effortlessly accessible on any device.

— Mobile version of the site.

As an alternative to editing your site, create a similar version. However, if your mobile site has a secondary URL, search engines may perhaps not find the site as most search engines promote one-URL approach for searching and SEO. The other better option is to create a mobile site that links to your main site and users have a choice to get redirected to the mobile site.

Redesigning the site

Start the planning for the rebuilding process, by firstly deciding whether your website necessitates being adaptive or responsive in design. There are two basic strategies for building websites compatible to mobile devices:

— Adaptive website design is a high end, expensive design option used by big corporate houses that invest profoundly to reach the largest possible online audience. This design senses and categorises the user's device and then spawns a webpage matched to the device’s capabilities.

— Responsive website design is an affordable solution, which uses the technology of Cascading Style Sheets, to generate a single version of website that automatically fine-tunes to exhibit properly on all devices. This design permits you to reach the majority of active net audiences

The road ahead

Along with all other major investment decisions for your company, make the website redesigning high on priority, as you need to steer your reach to customers in all possible ways including all hand held devices, computers and latest televisions. A professional designer can create a good customised website with the right technology to suit your business needs. Create your website with a futuristic outlook to give your surfers quick and easy access, give them links to maps and directions, and then insert video or other delights to keep them hooked on to your site.

Outsourcing Effectively with a Virtual Personal Assistant

The simple expression of a virtual administrative assistant can make a business owner either delighted or apathetic, depending on one’s exposure with this increasingly popular administrative help. By means of well-done research and a detailed working guideline, one can definitely make a smart choice of opting for an administrative help for a small business.

Small businesses categorically require a virtual personal assistant, if they are encompassing any of these situations:

The loss of a new or an old business client, because of not adhering to project deadlines.

Business development work has taken a back seat, devoid of an updated prospective database.

Receipt of new profitable projects for business stalled, owing to routine business work.

Staying busy working on the weekends and on night shifts to keep up with routine administrative job.

Engagement in work schedules, which can be delegated and in its place, more creative and important tasks can be handled.

Once you ascertain the need of a virtual assistant, let’s simplify the arduous task of outsourcing with these steps: 

Setting the Model

Firstly, decide on the work and tasks, which you would delegate to a virtual personal assistant.

List down the potential places to acquire a virtual assistant for your small business.

Start the search process from your own network of people, for recommended agencies or assistants through mailers or telecom.

Meticulously screen the recommended list and add your own online searched virtual assistant list, to suit your business requirements.

Start interacting with the assistants, review their websites, and conduct telephonic interviews to decide on the right agency or candidate.

Set up the communication model to manage your online project.

Decide as to how and when you expect to be notified. This is necessary, and makes it easier for you and everyone on your team to know what’s happening at any given time.

The Project delegation

Start with a small trial project as a way to test the communication and workflow channels with the virtual assistant.

Create a business overview document and share the same with him/her.

Create process documents and checklists for your virtual assistant and ask to update the work and tasks on the same document.

The more your virtual assistant comprehends your business model, stakeholders, and your business vision, it is easier for that person to facilitate and achieve your business goals.

Set away some time in a day or in a week specifically, for reviewing the outsourced work.

It’s your own business after all, and to facilitate virtual administrative assistant to give his/her best for you, collaborate and spend time in training the individual rather than being simply a task master. It’s well worth the effort, as work will be done more efficiently and you will have additional time and energy to assign to the growth of your business!