Look out for anything fishy during the New Year’...

We as Virtual assistants try to save money for the clients’, which means we are trying to our best to keep the client’s business running smoothly. Time to time we do periodical review of problems faced by the clients. After all, Virtual assistants work on one to one basis, it means that we are concerned about the clients’ and their operations.

Lots of scams and fishy activities go around the Christmas and the New Year’s time, when people are trying to do all kinds of promotions just to get your credit card number in some way or another. Lots of our clients have reported things like getting emails from Pay pal, or other major companies trying to offer money, or even a jackpot sometimes!!

So here are few tips that might keep your accounts safe and will keep you festive season hassle free:

• All the emails which are not personally addressed to you and talk about some specific things which are related to you should be just marked as spam. Banks will rarely email you, so if you are getting emails and then follow up emails for something—better stay out of it.
• Check the email address, there are always variation of email addresses that are used by the spammers and the scammers. A no-reply email address is definitely a good runner in such cases.
• Always read the hyperlinks in the email. DO NOT click them directly, instead place the mouse on the hyperlinks and try to find the site that the link is pointing to.
• Above all, the content in the email will be of suspicious nature. Ask yourself if you would ever write such an email to somebody you don’t know?

Have a great Christmas and New Years from the entire TG’s VA family.

How much are your Virtual assistants taxing you?...

One of the most important things you would want to consider when you decide that virtual assistants can help to save you some time and money—is that they really do so? Evaluating the various options takes a little thought depending on how much money you want to spend.

This economy makes our job even more difficult, since we have to decide how much you want to work and how much you want to make? Some of the assistants are tempted to lower the prices to adjust to the economy and help the businesses, but the approach might compromise the quality. All these things usually become the part of something called a business plan when we are ready with the business model. There are various things we as Virtual assistant providers have to ponder upon when we are trying to provide high quality services at competitive prices:

• We have to pay the bills in the end; obviously, we cannot keep your prices less than the desk space.
• We are required to pay for the entire resources like Internet, FAX, phone, so we have to make sure that we cover all the expenses
• We have to pay for our marketing expenses: The website, advertisements, and the personals charge associated with the same.

At the end of it, the prices you charge are dependent on the kind of services you provide. If you are providing services that demand specialized skills, a certification, then you might consider charging accordingly.

Can I keep my charges low at the beginning and raise my rates as I do well?

That’s a good question; it is always difficult to raise the prices with your existing or the new clients who is referred to you by another business. Well, the price may be raised gradually, over a period of time, by trying to provide more services and covering up the price of other services that we are selling for lower prices.

Stay tuned for some more analysis of this new business that many have been trying to venture into.

Trends in search volumes for Virtual assistants...

I guess every business relies on facts and figures, some of them more than others. The idea of Virtual assistants is relatively new concept that is still exploring the available market space.  As the recession-struck year is about to end, I guess one would expect that lots of businesses (e.s.p. the small and medium sized) would have capitalized the chance to offshore some of their tedious work to less expensive regions of the world.

As the graph suggests, the volume of searches reached peak levels two times in the year. May be the search volumes (and hence the demand for professionals) peak whenever companies venture out more, and seek to unload their work to other companies. Apart from that, the search volume has pretty remained the constant through out the year, and a little drop towards the end is something easily explainable (as the businesses wrap up their yearly cycle).

Interestingly Philippines have most of the searches for the same keyword. One wonders if people there are actually providing Virtual assistants services, or seeking services. Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of IT talent, and hence the results are not surprising at all. In U.S, the assistant services are gaining pace as indicated by the search volumes of Houston, Denver, Miami and San Francisco areas.

Let us keep an eye on the search trends as we break in to the new year, and global businesses are flattening more and more, one would expect this new form of business to gain rapid strides in the future.

What are Virtual business solutions anyway?...

Do you sometimes feel any of the following?

• Do you think your business is running you instead of you running the business?
• Do you sometimes wonder if someone could help you with all the tedious work that keeps you running off the track?
• But do you budge because you think the thing will cost you a fortune?

Well this is what Lawrence from Sunnyvale had to say about it:

“I felt it was only the Wall Street journal executives who are capable of availing a service like this, but finally, I came across the concept of virtual business assistants. I was a bit skeptical to start, but I can advice everyone to give the idea a thought”.

The situation of Lawrence is not very different—There are countless small things that we spend our time on everyday, some of them are:

• Reading your own documents
• Find the papers on which you made notes
• Tracking your expenses
• Remembering who you were supposed to call
• Paying the bills
• Planning a business or personal tour
• Backups of important documents

Well, now you can just email or call someone and say “can you please do this?”

It is not about the free time, it is what you do with the free time that counts. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have your stuff taken care off by someone else while you do the real business?

Time-sourcing is the order of the day; why not take advantage of it when it is available?

We have recently started the services, and the response has been better than good, is your business ready to go virtual?