Increase Your Bottom Line by Hiring Help

by Alicia Forest

Do you do everything yourself when it comes to running your business? Or are you like me and find it difficult to delegate to others, at least sometimes? Do you think you don't have the money to hire help? Well, I'm going to show you how hiring help can help increase your bottom line dramatically.

Not delegating is one of the major hurdles my private clients seem to struggle with. They are doing everything themselves and are so busy with the little administrative things that they have little time to devote to their "genius" work - developing products and services for their niche and working directly with their clients. Once they've hired help, either a virtual assistant or an in-office assistant, and move through the growing pains of delegating and trusting that the work will get done (and might even get done faster and better than they could do it themselves), I can always sense a feeling of freedom and excitement as the space opens up for them to work on the things that are really creative and inspiring to them, instead of dealing with invoices or fixing a glitch with their web page. And very soon after, their business really starts to move forward because they have the time and focus to dedicate to increasing their product and services line, which, of course, translates into more profits.

There are many ways that you can work with an assistant. You can hire someone on an hourly basis, or hire someone on a monthly retainer, which is often less expensive. You can hire someone for a single project only or you could hire someone fulltime to work in your office with you. Think about which of these scenarios might work best for you.

A tip: If you hire someone as an employee, remember to check with your accountant about filing the appropriate paperwork. The beauty of working with a freelancer, independent contractor or virtual assistant is that they cover their own overhead, including any insurance needs.

Here are 10 ways you can use an assistant:

1. submitting your articles to hundreds of submission sites
2. handling registrations for your teleclasses/workshops
3. proofing and formatting your written material
4. creating graphics for your products
5. maintaining your website
6. inputting any necessary updates to your products/services
7. as a sounding board for new ideas
8. responding to your customer/client inquiries
9. bookkeeping
10. packaging and shipping your products

If you can't quite see how an assistant could help you deal with all the time-suckers in your business, keep a log of your business activities for a week, including how long each task takes you to complete. Then at the end of the week, review it and circle all the tasks that an assistant can help you with (there should be quite a few!). Consider the number of hours those things have taken you to accomplish, and decide if the $30-$50 an hour for an assistant would be worth the investment. Statistics tell us that your bottom line could increase as much as 40% once you hire help - now that's a pretty good return on investment, isn't it?

And if you still think you can't afford to hire someone, then start asking around in your network for someone who would be interested in an exchange of services, or for an intern or apprentice.

If you're ready to start the process of hiring a VA in particular, I recommend these services:

www.MultipleStreamsTeam.com - VAs particularly well-versed in helping entrepreneurs who use a multiple streams approach
www.AssistU.com - VA training program
www.IVAA.org - the International Virtual Assistants Association

Or ask your colleagues who are happy with their own VAs to see if any of their assistants are looking for additional clients.

So before you burn out and lose the passion for owning your own business that you started off with, hire someone to help you. You'll reach more people with your message and make more money at the same time. Start small and add hours as you feel comfortable and for what you find necessary. You'll never regret it and you'll never go back to being a lone ranger!



Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & CoachT, founder of ClientAbundance.com and creator of 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success SystemT, teaches professionals how to attract more clients, create profit-making products and services, make more sales, and ultimately live the life they desire and deserve. For FREE tips on how to create abundance in your business, visit http://www.ClientAbundance.com.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Top 10 Marketing Tips

by Shonda Miles

1.Repetition is key. According to research it takes approximately 7 contacts before someone will buy from you. People buy from people they like and trust. There is the relationship factor here. That is why it is imperative to have some type of follow up system in place like an autoresponder. Follow up. This is self-explanatory. Customers need to be reminded that you are great and also what it is you offer. A lot of sales are lost because someone didn’t follow up. People get busy and they forget. People are bombarded with marketing messages galore. Repetition is key.

2.Be Consistent. Decide who it is you are in business and what you stand for and stick with it. Don’t sell t-shirts today and tools tomorrow. This just won’t work and people won’t buy from you. That is why niches are such goldmines. Niches force you to focus on one key area and then possibly move on to another.

3.Know your target market. It is essential to know who it is you are selling to and their buying behavior. It is no longer okay to just determine their age, sex, occupation. Now in order to remain competitive you have to research where and how they live, what they read, associations they are apart of, income and geography.

4.Listen to your customers. It is nothing worse than finding your target market and asking them what they need and then giving them what you want them to have. This is a total waste of money. Give your customers what they want. Believe it or not customers don’t always buy what they need but they usually always buy what they want.

5.Ask for feedback. If you need to know more about your target market then just ask. Use polls on your website, surveys, interviews as well as focus groups. A trend I’ve noticed lately is surveys by email through your opt-in list. Make sure you tell your customers why you need the information.
6.Test! Test! Test! This is the first law of Advertising . If you are not testing your advertising then you might as well as be putting your hard earned money down your garbage deposal and then shredding it. Yes, it is money gone down the drain.

7.Know Your USP. This is crucial. WIIFM is a question that should be on all of your marketing medium. Your USP should be unique, compelling and motivates the individual to take action now.

8.Never Stop Learning. While this is not easy to do especially for seasoned professionals, things are constantly changing and you have to be prepared to change with them. Continuous Learning gives you an advantage over those who refuse to learn anything new either through reading or attending seminars and the list goes on and on.

9.Relationships are crucial. We have to put the necessary time into building solid relationships. Without relationships customers will leave you high and dry over price or something very minor. Where there is a relationship there is trust, effective communication and respect. Make the Time to build relationships through networking, luncheon, meetings and whatever else it takes to seal the relationships. Be willing to give up something before you get anything in return.

10.Over deliver and Under promise. Do more than is expected. You will be known for the value you bring. Don’t make your claim or USP too over the top. People will expect you to do what you promise no matter what. You won’t get a second chance. If you mess up it will spread like wild fires. They won’t forget it.



Shonda Miles is a business consultant and business coach. Gotta Take Action provides informative articles and advice to women-owned businesses who are ready to skyrocket their profits. Learn more about how to catapult your business success by visiting http://www.gottatakeaction.com for more information. If you enjoyed this article, join our newsletter Hot Marketing Tips today.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Evaluating the Performance of Your Virtual Assistant Website

Question: What is the one thing you want your visitors to do when they arrive at your Virtual Assistant website?

If you don't know the answer, most likely your visitors are doing nothing. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, your site is only an online announcement that you are in business.

The success or failure of your website depends greatly on how specifically you define the goals you have for your website. Do you want them to contact you? Purchase your product? Subscribe to your newsletter?

Before you can evaluate your website’s performance, decide what it is you most want visitors to do. Once you know that, keep reading to find out how well you’re meeting that goal and to learn steps you can take to ensure your website is functioning at peak efficiency.

To determine your website’s success rate, you should first take a baseline measurement of your site’s traffic. Find out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

It’s important to remember that, even if you have thousands of visitors landing on your pages, this does not necessarily mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something while they’re there.

This leads to next step: Monitoring the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase, subscribed to your newsletter, etc. Officially called the “site conversion rate,” this is an essential measurement in evaluating your website’s success.

To find your site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action you intended them to (i.e. buy a product, subscribe, fill out a form). For example, if you had 2 000 unique visitors to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.

If you decide your site could be doing better, and you want to crank up your conversions and your traffic, here are some suggestions to get you started.

Do You Need More Traffic?

If traffic to your site is extremely low, you may want to implement some additional marketing strategies. Consider launching a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

An SEO campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier.

You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or contract an SEO company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Is Your Site Easy to Use?

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is designed for. Let’s say your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form. Is this form easily accessible or does the visitor have to go through four levels to find it? If it's difficult to get to, the customer may just give up in frustration and click to another site.

Here’s an easy way to find out how usable your site is: Have a friend or family member visit your site and attempt to order a product or fill out your form. Watch them closely and see if they follow the path you intended, or if they find it confusing.

How Well Do Your Words Sell?

Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign, not cut and pasted from your company brochure. There are many articles and books that can teach you how to write web copy that sells.

It’s also a good idea to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. A professional evaluation doesn’t need to be expensive. Many online Virtual Assistant forums offer threads for website critiques, where experienced online business owners will look at your site and pass on their feedback.

If You Remember Nothing Else...

And finally, here’s the most important thing to remember if you want to improve the performance of your website. Use what you learn and make changes to your website accordingly. Research, testing and feedback won’t do you or your business any good if you don’t use them.

Analyzing Web Traffic to Your Virtual Assistant Website

Knowing how to analyzing your web traffic statistics can be invaluable knowledge for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use this information, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will give you basic web traffic information you can to interpret and use. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't understand how to apply it to your particular business and website.

Let's begin by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better your website is doing, but this not so. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to gauge accurately the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is truly qualified, quality traffic to your site. “Hits” simply refers to the number of information requests received by the server. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an
underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

Possibly your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website. Maybe your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing visitors to leave too quickly.

Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are
exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could
improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

Statistics can reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Very likely, your website has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so your statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page.

In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you should closely examine that particular page to find out what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your
site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is. However, if you find a large number of visitors are being wrongly directed to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment.

Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations.