productivity tools

10 To-Dos A Virtual Assistant Can Get Done

Heather Allard — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:21:37 +0000

Link:

http://www.openforum.com/articles/10-to-dos-a-virtual-assistant-can-get-done

As small business owners, we struggle with the balancing act between life and work. We long for free time but feel our work is never done. That nagging feeling that there's something we could or should be doing? Yeah, it's always there.

Fortunately, there's help. It's called a "virtual assistant." A virtual assistant is a magical person who can take tasks off our plates, help us grow our businesses, and make striking the work/life balance a reality. Upwork is one place to find a VA. Contracting with a large, offshore VA firm is another. Wherever you find your help, here are ten “to-dos” a virtual assistant can do for you.

1. Create weekly reports.

Ask your virtual assistant to create weekly reports for you with whatever numbers and stats you like to monitor. Things like Google Analytics, sales leads, new subscribers, payables and receivables, etc. Have your VA send the report to you on the same day each week (Monday works well for me) and then go over your numbers.

2. Review your week past and your week ahead.

Have your virtual assistant look at both your past week and your week ahead – this'll keep you well prepared and help you tie up loose ends before everything unravels. Is there anything you missed or need to follow up on from last week? Are there preparations or appointments you need to make for this week?

3. Spiff up your social profiles.

Your virtual assistant can check all of your social media profiles to see if there’s any outdated or missing information or if it's time for a fresh profile picture or a bio update.

4. Google you.

Ask your virtual assistant to Google you. No, really.

Googling you and your business helps you stay on top of your placement on the Internet, what’s being said about you and your company, and the keywords that you're ranking for highest.

While you’re at it, have your VA set up Google Alerts for you, your business name, competitors and anything else you would like to monitor online.

5. Give thanks.

Did you land a new client? Have an affiliate do an amazing job at helping you launch a new product? Were you honored at a luncheon?

Have your virtual assistant send out a simple hand-written thank you card that will let folks know how grateful you are for their business or friendship.

6. Make everything old new again.

You know all of those fantastic blog posts you’ve written? Isn’t it about time you did something more with them? Well you can have your virtual assistant make everything old new again.

Break a post up into an autoresponder series to send out to your list;
Pull quotes from posts and schedule them on your social networks with a link to the post;
Reformat posts into new articles that you can submit to article directories like EzineArticles.

7. Improve audience engagement.

Sign up for a HootSuite account and have your virtual assistant schedule status updates for you to help keep your audience engaged, even when you're on vacation or taking a day off. Your VA can also monitor and flush out all of those annoying Auto DM’s and mark the ones that are important for you to follow up on.

8. Recruit new talent.

If you're looking for some fresh content for your blog, give your virtual assistant a list of people that you’d like to have as guest bloggers or have her (or him) come up with a list for you to review. Then, ask your VA to invite them to do a guest blog and organize when they’ll be posting.

And, if you are looking to do some guest blogging yourself, have your VA send out your bio and suggested post topics to other bloggers.

9. Outsource your inbox.

Tim Ferriss isn't the only one who can hand off his inbox to a virtual assistant. Nope, you can do it, too. Having a virtual assistant handle your email will free up countless hours that you can spend on more productive activities.

10. Make bean counting effortless.

As if accounting wasn't easy enough with Outright, it can get even easier by handing it off to your virtual assistant. Your VA can monitor your income and expenses, create profit and loss reports, and even keep track of taxes with just a few clicks of the mouse.

With all those to-dos taken off your list, you’ll have more time to … add more things to do.

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This article is from Heather Allard of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

6 Cloud Tools for Small Business

Heather Allard — Tue, 31 May 2011 16:46:46 +0000

Link:

http://www.openforum.com/articles/6-cloud-tools-for-small-business

Whether you’re running your small business out of your home, your garage, or even Timbuktu, there are incredible technologies, tools, and services that’ll make managing your small business easier and help you work and earn better, faster and smarter. Here are a few I've found particularly helpful.

Accounting

I know, I know. Accounting’s not my thing either. But like many things in life (and business), it’s is a necessary evil.

So make it easy – and automatic – with Outright, a company whose tagline is,“Free yourself from accounting”.

Outright was created specifically for small business owners like us and provides a simple way to record income and expenses, pay the right taxes, and keep our businesses on track and growing. The nifty (and comprehensive) reports alone make the $9.95 monthly fee well worth it.

Outright takes just minutes to set up and then all your business stuff is safe, secure, and accounted for.

File Storage

Have you ever lost a file that you’d been working on for hours? Forgot to save your big presentation on your laptop? Or how about this – your computer crashed and you lost your entire email database, contacts and all. Sounds familiar, right?

Yep. We’ve all been there, lost that.

Fortunately the folks at Dropbox offer a free service that lets you safely store 2 GBs of photos, docs, and videos in one place. Of course, they'll sell you more GBs if you need them.

Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Even if you accidentally spill a juicebox on your laptop, you can relax knowing that Dropbox always has you covered. Beyond safe backups and easy file synching, Dropbox lets you quickly share files and folders with clients and colleagues.

Time Tracking

Working from home certainly has its upside, but one of the biggest downsides is how easy it is to lose track of time and spend the whole day surfing the web. One minute you’re busily working and the next, you’re sharing The Oatmeal cartoons with your Facebook friends wondering how it got to be 5 o’clock.

Losing track of time is especially bad for service providers who bill clients by the hour and have to provide a project status update each day. Ruh-roh.

Enter Chrometa, the app that tracks your time without notes or timers. Chrometa logs all your computer activity and breaks down your time by application, e-mail, Web page, and document.

Chrometa installs in minutes on both Mac and PC and makes time tracking an easy task. And the depth of its reporting may also keep you on task and off Facebook.

Scheduling

Ring, ring…

If your business involves booking appointments, then check out Schedulicity, a web-based scheduling tool that will instantly plug your business into three of the fastest growing trends in America – social media, mobile internet, and online scheduling.

With Schedulicity, you have full control over your calendar and can access it anytime, anywhere.

And Schedulicity puts your calendar where your clients are, online. Clients can book appointments with you 24/7 – on your website , on your Facebook page, or from their iPhone, Android, or Blackberry – instead of using them to play phone tag.

Information Organization

Let’s face it, we’re all on information overload.

Sticky notes covering the fridge, mile-long bookmarks online, and a desk somewhere beneath all those papers.

Enter Evernote, digital storage that lets you capture anything and remember everything, right from your computer, desktop, and even your mobile devices.

Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable with Evernote. You can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks. Later, you can search your notes by keywords, titles, and tags. Evernote even makes printed and handwritten text inside your images searchable.

So go ahead, type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Record a voice memo.

Evernote will keep it all safe and ready for you when you need it.

Email Signature

If you’re looking for an easy way to transform your boring old email into a powerful marketing tool, Wisestamp is the coolest way to do it.

With Wisestamp, you can easily customize your email signature with your social profiles and add auto-updating dynamic content to your outgoing email, like your newest eBay item for sale, most recent blog post, your latest tweet or a cause that you promote. You can also make your Wisestamp signature match your branding by getting creative with fonts and colors, and by adding images and logos to your Wisestamp signature.

The recipients of your email will see the updated content of the Email App and will be able to interact with it directly from the email – for example, they can link over to your latest blog post, follow you on Twitter or buy an item in your eBay shop.

Pretty cool, huh?

Wisestamp is currently available for the Firefox, Chrome (my favorite browser) and Safari browsers and works with Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail email platforms. It’s fast and easy to install and configure, which means your email will be ready to do your marketing for you in no time.

This article is from Heather Allard of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

An Easier Way to Manage Your To-Do's

Kate Luther — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:55:27 +0000

I love lists. I can't help it - I just do. Lists make me feel as if I'm making progress. They are my first step in taking any kind of action. The idea is no longer just rolling around in my head - its on a list, which makes it more concrete and doable, if only to me.

My lists range from sticky notes and scrap paper in my purse to a running list of random thoughts and ideas that I keep on my computer in Notepad. Its not sophisticated, but it ensures that I'll be able to access that brilliant idea later when I realize that I've forgotten what it was.

And I will forget. I always do. Not that I had the idea, just what the idea was. Its enough to drive you insane.

So, being the Queen of Lists, it occurred to me that there's probably some fabulous freebies out there on the web that can help me manage my lists better than the sticky notes and scrap paper.

I was right. There's tons. Here's my top 5 so far:

And I will forget. I always do. Not that I had the idea, just what the idea was. Its enough to drive you insane.

So, being the Queen of Lists, it occurred to me that there's probably some fabulous freebies out there on the web that can help me manage my lists better than the sticky notes and scrap paper.

I was right. There's tons. Here's my top 5 so far:

Remember The Milk
A wonderful alternative to sticky notes and dayplanners, Remember the Milk gives you all sorts of ways to organize and plan all of your to-do's. You can create as many lists as you want, make each one public or private and share with others if needed. Set due dates for your tasks, set tasks to repeat on a regular schedule and even create tags that show up in your "task cloud" - choose a tag from the cloud and see all the tasks related to that keyword.

Remember the Milk also allows you to see your list offline, set reminders that can be sent via email, IM or SMS and with the paid Pro version, you can sync with Windows Mobile.

Here's my sample list - made public for your enjoyment :)

43 Things
By now, just about everyone has heard of 43 Things but if you haven't (or just haven't figured out what to do with it) here's your chance.

While the other sites I've reviewed here are geared toward shopping lists and household chores, 43 Things is more of a "life's goals" to-do list, giving you the ability to track your goals, dreams and aspirations along with anything else you might like to add. Want to learn a foreign language? Add that here. Wish you knew how to juggle? You can add that here too. Can't think of any ways to challenge yourself? No problem... just browse what others are doing for inspiration.

You can also sync your 43 Things account to your blog so everytime you add a new to-do or update its status, you can post it to your blog as well.

You can see my 43 Things list here .

Ta-Da
From 37 Signals (who by the way has some other cool online tools) comes the Ta-da List. It has a user-friendly interface and can be shared with certain people or made public for all the Net to see.

You can check off items as you complete them so you'll always have a running list of what you've done so far.

You can see my Ta-da list here .

Bla-Bla List
Bla-Bla has a really simple interface but if you're looking for something to just manage your many to-do's, this is a great solution. You can share your lists with certain people or publish it for public viewing. You can see mine at http://blablalist.com/list/ivygirl/things_to_ponder and if you'd like to subscribe to the feed and discover other things I'm pondering, Bla-Bla has an RSS feature too.

Zoho
For those of you looking for something a bit more all-encompassing, Zoho's for you.

Zoho is kind of like an online day planner combined with a web conferencing feature combined with project management software combined with a Wiki, an online presentation tool and... well, you get the idea.

Using Zoho strictly to manage your grocery list is probably a waste of its capabilities but if you need something to help you manage, track, collaborate and create, then Zoho is definitely what you're looking for.

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This article is from Kate Luther of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: