How to Work As a Virtual Administrative Assistant

The virtual administrative assistant is becoming a proper and popular work remotely job field. The virtual assistants have helped to take the job title of office assistants to the new and more advanced level. With the job title of virtual assistant, the office assistants can perform their duties from the comfort of their own house which allows flexibility and balance between office and home life. The typical tasks of the virtual secretary includes setting up the appointments, making transcriptions, emailing and posting correspondence mails, doing electronic filling, keeping records and word processing. So if you are already working at the post of office assistant and neglecting home then there is an opportunity for you to become a virtual assistant and work from the comfort of your own house.  Trying out these tips will help you to achieve your goal.

• Required necessary education: there are no typical educational requirements of this job. The requirements of skill, expertise and experience vary from employer to employer. It depends on the types of field or business you choose to work for. Some employers may just ask for high school certificate, others may want bachelors or higher degree for the job.

• Training: there are many sites now that are offering different virtual assistant training by charging some fee but beware of such sites as there is no nationally accredited institution or certification for the post and employers mostly do not ask for any such certification as well. They are concerned with your level of experience, expertise and skills required for the job. So it is better that you concentrate on forming an impressive resume, along with excellent referrals and testimonials that validate your work quality.

• The required equipment: it is very important for the virtual assistant to have the necessary and proper equipment to perform the duties of the job. Some of the important equipment which are necessity for virtual assistant includes;

• Computer or laptop along with efficient and high speed internet.
• Printer and scanner or copier.
• One land line phone or some may require having two.
• An office set up at home, which is without distractions having proper working environment.

• Refine your skills: it is very important for you to polish and refine your skills as virtual assistant, as it will attract more and more potential employers towards you. for a virtual assistant the necessary skills include excellent communication skills, capability to do multi tasking in clear and logical manner, having excellent typing speed and skills, extremely proficient in use of the language and knowledge about computer and Microsoft word applications such as excel, word, database etc.

For finding the right job, you can post your resume on various job and employment sites or search on the web. In addition to this, you can also market your skills in the related business industry by meeting the business owners in your locality and telling them the benefits of hiring virtual administrative assistant. You can also make professional network connections on sites such as LinkedIn to get in contact with good potential employers.

Real Estate Virtual Assistant - The Boom in Your Real Estate Business

The business industry of real estate virtual assistants has boomed in the past few years due to the time constraints the real estate business owners face during their business responsibilities. They have resort to outsourcing their extra administrative burden to the virtual assistant. The real estate virtual assistant when work in the right direction with organization and dedication, generate almost similar, in fact sometimes, better results than any other traditional coordinator or assistant. The good real estate virtual assistant generates real good business for you. They can be influential and useful to the real estate agents and to their business in three important areas; administration, marketing and sales support. They can take care of all the paper work and can look after all the contracts and other client related and financial matters. On the personal administration side, they can arrange your personal holiday bookings, reservations or even reserve the place for a birthday party of your child


The marketing of your business is vital for its growth and development in the industry. A real estate virtual assistant can formulate a strong virtual as well as physical marketing campaign for your business. If your virtual assistant has a knowledge of SEO and SEM, that would be an added plus for your business. A virtual assistant completely understands your marketing needs and formulate a marketing strategy on which you can depend on.

The third area in which real estate virtual assistants prove helpful and of worth is sales and support. They can make calls and talk to the clients. It is really difficult for the real estate agent to remain in constant contact with the clients by giving them follow up calls every now and then which keeps the deal with their company.  Virtual assistants on other hand can constantly remain in contact with the clients who want to buy or sell their properties. The virtual assistant with good communication skills keep in touch with the clients, create rapport and a relationship with them in which he makes them feel valued, important and cared for, resulting ultimately in increasing sales.

But to achieve the goals for your business, it is important to find and choose the right kind of person for the job of real estate virtual assistant. For this you have to create a proper and specific job description along with your expectations from prospective candidates. After the selection of the candidate, it is important to set up a trial period of two to three months which enable you to assess the qualities and capabilities, and understand personality of a virtual assistant. Meanwhile, your virtual assistant also comes to understand how you want the work to be done and how to handle the business. You can set the pay rate of the virtual assistant on hourly basis or contractual basis.
By taking these measures you can expect to have the real estate virtual assistant that will definitely prove beneficial to you and your company in the long run.

Achieving Success with the Virtual Office Assistant

If you want to achieve success as a virtual office assistant, then you should possess skills, expertise, contacts and ability of personal organization. You should have the capability to set and follow your own schedule for business, which is based on the needs of your client and should stick to it, ardently. You should also have the capability to produce high quality outcome to gain recognition as a reliable and efficient virtual office assistant. Some of the basic competencies that you should possess to achieve success in the industry are;

• Motivation and determination to provide success to the client.
• Capability to do work in team.
• Exceptional customers services skills.
• Comprehensive understanding of the fundamental business functions such as budgeting, creating business and marketing plans, contracts and agreements and ability of time management.
• Admitting mistakes and correcting them, willingly.
• Having regard for the intellectual property of others. Should not resort to plagiarism or piracy of software.
• Having good organizational skills.
• Having comprehensive language skills including grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and spelling.

You need to have a latest information technology tools and gadgets to set up a virtual office at your home office. These equipments includes computer or laptop with a fast and reliable internet connection, phone with voice mail or answering machine, fax machine, printer, scanner, special business communication software and antivirus installed on your computer.

Though you work alone from your home office but you can get help from other people or groups. You can create connections with online working and business communities to expand your circle and to get good contacts for your business. You can even get online training or attend some virtual conference on the prospects and training of virtual assistants. This will help you to improve and enhance your skills and expertise in the field.

The training which you might have got by working in physical office would prove to be your valuable asset. While working as an office assistant you learn many things about the office and business responsibilities. You acquire administrative skills and get understanding of the operations of the business industry which helps you to succeed and go a long way, as a virtual office assistant.

As for new and fresh people in the field, now there are various different resources and places which offer referrals or training such as “Virtual Assistance U” which is an online training and coaching center offering 20 weeks training program at a cost of almost $ 1500. The program includes online classes, workshops, projects and individual coaching. “International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA)” is another non-profit trade association which is offering certification courses for virtual assistants and real estate support specialists. Still another organization is “International Association of Virtual Office Assistants (IAVOA)” offering a training program spanning 10 weeks designed especially for virtual assistants. The institute offers online training program for real estate virtual assistants and also provide different businesses with the services of virtual office assistants.

The Multitasking Online Virtual Assistant

The role of online virtual assistant has become diverse and manifolds due to the diversity in businesses and the business requirements. With increasingly hectic and bust lives and schedules, hiring a virtual online assistance can make you free from the many daily mundane business tasks which you do not have time to do or do not simply want to do. Virtual assistants do work for you remotely from different country or region, and communicates with you through internet, phone, and fax to complete jobs for your business such as emailing, setting appointments, answering your clients mails, marketing your business etc. the tasks which the virtual online assistant can handle now are numerous. They can also assist you with personal life schedules and routine.

Handling financial tasks
The virtual online assistants can look after your finances and can do book keeping for you. They have specialized book keeping software through which they manage your business transactions such as invoices, cash receipts, payable and received amounts etc. if your virtual assistant achieve required level of trust, you can also ask them to set up online payments and checks for you to sign and dispatch.

Managing database
Virtual online assistants can also handle and manage the client’s database. They can add the information about new clients, update existing client’s information and can remove the client’s with whom the company is no longer working. They can also make use of the database to do marketing on company’s behalf. A virtual assistant with additional knowledge of SEO and SEM can assist you in launching a powerful and influential marketing campaign.

Conducting research
The virtual assistants can also conduct variety of business related research. They can search about the preferences of the target audience and can help you to improve your products and services accordingly or can also help you to set up a marketing or advertising strategy according to the target audience. He can also search new potential customers and clients. He can maintain your company’s site by updating it’s content and if you have a blog the virtual assistant can keep it updating with new and fresh content and articles.

Events planning
The virtual online assistant can help and assist you in planning online event or some in-person event. While setting up an online event, they can arrange the video conferences, record videos and make presentations for the online meeting to share with other members. He can also record, edit and make a CD of the presentation to resell or reuse it. For arranging in-person events, virtual assistant can arrange and book the suitable venue, send out invitations to the guests and the speakers, plan out the format of the event, arrange for the equipment required at the event and communicate with the venue staff to brief them about the event.

Business communication

Virtual assistant can make your communications fast and efficient. He/she can answer emails of the clients and forward important urgent messages to you. He or she can also have an access to your account, if you give them your password, so that he can respond to the client’s questions and any problems regarding your products or services. He can also receive and answer calls on your behalf.

Organize Your Business with a VA

The good online personal assistant should possess some skills and attributes that make him vigilant, efficient and reliable. The online personal assistant or virtual assistant as it is mostly called should possess some special qualities to create his worth in the corporate world. The position of good personal online assistant is promising in terms of salary but it requires number of skills, expertise and competencies to reach the top. The hall mark of a professional and reliable online personal assistant is professionalism and confidentiality. The personal online assistants are expected to be efficient, well organized; self motivated and should have computer knowledge.

You can become a good online personal assistant if you follow these six simple steps; 

• Development of good interpersonal skills: a good online personal assistant remains cool and calm even under pressure. They can think out of the box and remain on their feet. It is very important to have the ability to work with others with ease especially with the difficult types of people such as CEO’s of different companies which demands working under pressure.

• Development of good communication skills: the online personal assistants of any company are often at the front representing the company. They are the first ones with whom the companies and clients contact for further business contracts. So it requires you to be pleasant and should have good communication skills to communicate with them with professionalism. You should have an ability to influence other people and makes a good impression on them. Apart from verbal skills, good written communication skills are also required, as the Online personal assistants have to communicate with the clients on the behalf of their boss and to provide them with business summaries and reports about the progress of the work.

• Development of good IT and computer skills: IT and computer skills are necessary requirement to be a good personal online assistant. A good PA’s should at least possess a grasp on Microsoft Word (Advanced); Microsoft Excel (Intermediate); Microsoft PowerPoint (Advanced), a good working knowledge of an email package like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, etc. It is additional plus point to have knowledge of database management.

Development of good internet skills: online personal assistants require conducting online research off and on so you should be internet savvy. You should possess good working knowledge of the internet. In addition to this, if you have knowledge of internet marketing and behaviors of search engine such as SEO, it will add to your value and worth and you will be able to provide exceptional assistance to your employer.

• Developing interest in the office technology: a good personal online assistant requires keeping him or herself updated with the latest and up-to –date technology to meet the requirements of the fast paced corporate world. You are required to have knowledge about the latest office tools used for communication and android applications running on mobile devices.

• Developing efficient and well organized personality: the personal online assistant requires to be highly efficient, quick and well organized, as he or she requires to maintain the mail box, answer mails, prepare presentations, create meeting schedule, update websites and blogs, make and manage the budget plan, send our newsletters, correspondences, and executive summaries, type letters and documents, manage projects.

So by developing these skills you can achieve a status of a good online personal assistant.

VA – The Need of Every Business

Every business, whether large or small scale, need to have assistant. It is not only a symbol of state or rank but is also important for any management working professionals. But if we take a look on the situation, the people who can afford to hire assistants are few in number. For this reason, more and more professionals and entrepreneurs are now diverting towards hiring virtual personal assistant who help them to manage the load of work. Most of the virtual assistants, now, can help you in multi tasking. They can manage many different kinds of tasks such as keeping a track of your expenses, preparing presentations, maintaining your mail box, scheduling meetings etc. the amount they charge for all such services is just a fraction which you would pay to the onsite permanent office assistant.

But like with any other business practice, there are pros and cons of hiring the virtual personal assistants. So are the virtual assistants really worth hiring? Here are some pros and cons of having virtual assistants.

• Pro: they cost low
• Con: you get only the services you pay for.

The good thing about the services of virtual assistants is that, they are mostly based overseas. So they charge far less then you might have expected. The price and cost do vary from location to location and for services they render but you can hire some remote overseas assistants as low as just $3-$8 per hour.

Despite low cost, you have to bear up with their foreign holidays, sometimes translation issues and sometimes breakdown in communication due to their network problems or load shedding of electricity.

• Pro: you can get your work done while you are asleep.
• Con: it can be tricky to stay in contact due to time differences.

Sometimes it really gets difficult to work with a virtual personal assistant who is 6 or seven time zones away from you. If you have hired a team of virtual personal assistants this issue is less prominent but it takes time to get used to this.

The advantage you gain is that you can just email the to-do list at night before leaving your office and the things will be done the next morning when you will be back to work.

• Pro: you can have free trial periods of your virtual assistants.
• Con: there is a variation in fees and quality of services from person to person or company.

Some of the virtual personal assistant service providers offer free trial periods to check whether the virtual assistant fit your needs or not. This is a great way to check whether you will really be able to take advantage of the services of the virtual assistant or not. But you need to keep a check on the charges that they charge after the completion of the trial period as it can greatly vary.

There are many advantages and disadvantages as well, of hiring the virtual personal assistant for your business but only you can decide whether the service which you are hiring is worth it or not.

Use VA to Reduce Operational Costs

Making use of the virtual assistant services, can helps to cut down on your work load. Most of the virtual assistants offer their services as a freelancer or contract worker. They do all the administrative and office task from home just like any of your office secretary or executive assistant. There are many websites that can provide you with contract based virtual assistants and have thousands of job listings for the post.

With the growing demand and supply of virtual assistants, it has now become much easier to find the right virtual assistant for your job having the required skills and expertise. Businessmen can hire virtual office assistants for almost any type of  office work such as for marketing, sales, for sending out thank you cards to the clients, customer services etc. but the important thing for the virtual assistant is to develop trust and confidence of the employer, just like you need to build up with the physical, permanent employer.


Here are some ways in which the virtual assistant can prove beneficial to your business:

• For book keeping: you can hire a virtual assistant for keeping the record of bills and other types of book keeping matters. Many small scale businesses are now hiring the virtual assistants for the purpose of keeping a follow up of their tasks such as outstanding bills or unpaid bills. They can also keep a record of your sales and invoices.

• For doing online research: the virtual assistant can easily do all kind of research for your business. You can assign them to do search of websites related to your business, get information on other corporate sites, exploring new products and finding potential clients and businesses. It is important to provide clear instructions about the search you want them to conduct and access to the related websites. They can also help you in maintenance of your blogs and also writing blogs for your site.

• For preparing presentations: the virtual assistant services can help you with your data presentations for business meetings and briefings. You can ask them to prepare PowerPoint presentations of your business data and they can also prepare word documents, which can save you a late of time. You can keep and share data in a proper format at a business meeting.

• For managing emails: virtual assistants can manage your inboxes and keep them neat, clean and well organized. They can filter your important emails which required prompt answers. They can respond to those emails on your behalf as well. But you need to provide instructions to the assistant regarding important emails and how to answer them in proper way.

• For making schedule : virtual assistants can well maintain your daily schedule such as dealing with meeting invitations from others, preparing schedule of appointments with other clients and planning events.

In addition to these, virtual assistant services can prove beneficial to you in economical aspects as well. It cut down on your insurance, health care, and other related costs which your company has to pay if you hire a full time permanent physical office assistant.

Virtual Administrative Assistant - Virtual yet Effective

In the past few years, with a growing internet use and world becoming more a global village, a new concept of virtual administrative assistant has become popular. Virtual administrative assistants basically assist their employers from the comfort of their own home. It has taken the post of office assistant to the new level. The virtual assistants to any company typically perform the duties that any other office assistant perform physically. The job has become increasingly popular among the women because it allows them to work from home and become entrepreneurs while achieving the work and home life balance. The business trends are forecasting that there would be an increase in this trend because the start up costs is minimal while earning prospects are quite good. In one of the survey conducted by the Virtual Business Alliance, it has been found that average gross income of the full-time virtual assistant was almost $39,452, in last year.

Virtual administrative assistants are the independently working entrepreneurs, who work remotely and make use of latest technology such as laptops and internet, to provide their services to the clients on global scale. But one should bear in mind that becoming a virtual assistant is not an easy job to do and it cannot be done by just anyone. Many of the virtual assistants have to work between 12 to 18 hours each day, when they start up with the job. And even after establishing repute and gaining experience, virtual assistants often report that they have to work long hours sometimes even in holidays and on weekends.

Most of the virtual administrative assistants do work from their offices at home and receive the instructions about projects and other office work through phones, fax, e-mail or through instant messaging. They also make use of skype to remain online and get instructions. Most of the virtual assistants provide secretarial services. But the people who have more experience, skill and expertise, also provides services in specialized areas such as marketing, graphic and Web design, IT support or even translation services.

Clients mostly hire the virtual administrative assistants because it saves them money and cost because the virtual assistants suppose to pay for their equipment, taxes, training, healthcare and insurance. The industries which are now hiring more and more virtual assistants include real estate, coaching, financial services, accounting and law.
If you too are planning to start off your career as a virtual assistant, here are some tips and the questions you should ask yourself;

• The first step is to decide and analyze what is the type of services that you want to offer and do you have that background experience which ensures necessary expertise.

• Decide upon your business niche. It’s better to go for two or three services.

•  Are you willing to work full time or just part time?

• It is important to conduct the comprehensive research of the industry in which you want to offer your services.

• Develop an outline of your potential clients; who they are, where they are and how you are going to access them.

• It is important to prepare a proper and well organized business plan and to have the proper equipment which fulfills the client’s needs.

• It’s very important that you market your services 24/ 7. This way you will get the right client, easily.

• By following these tips, you can achieve the desired results.

 

Boost Your Real Estate Business with Your VA

As your real estate business grows, you definitely need someone to lend you a helping hand and getting more things done in less time. Having an assistant to look after and take care of your administrative and marketing responsibilities will definitely give you a mental relief and will share your burden. This will give you more time to concentrate on more important things and stream line your business. Here you need services of a real estate virtual assistant. They not only give a personal touch, care and regard to your clients in the way you want but will also take care of all the mundane repetitive administrative functions that often eat up your lots of valuable time.

The decision of whether you hire a virtual assistant or not, is not an easy decision to take. You have to consider many different things and from many different aspects before deciding to go for it. But when you find the right person for the job at the right cost, it will definitely be worth it. Before making the choice, here are some things to consider;

• Management of closing transactions: as your business grow you will be having lots of client details, many different tasks to handle and lots of important deadlines to meet. So it is very likely that you might miss some. At this point real estate virtual assistant can take control of documenting details and assuring the organization of tasks and meeting client’s deadlines on time. They make use of various business softwares to update and organize the data and assure client’s transactions delivery.

• Do you need management of listing? : You do not have enough time to enlist and arrange your client’s data then you need to take help of virtual assistant (VA). After gathering documents and information about the clients, the VA can achieve the data digitally for accessing and retrieval during the process.

• You don’t have time to pay much attention to your marketing strategy: then go for a virtual assistant who will take the burden off and will do all the marketing for your business. An assistant can design the brochures, flyers and postcards to be send to the clients and other potential customers. The experienced and professionally skilled VA besides speeding up the process will also give your business professional and better results. A virtual assistant can also give out advertisement in the local newspaper or magazines and send out newsletters. Online advertising campaign can also be handled by VA. If you have a website, a VA can keep on updating it with latest news about your business achievements and prospects.

• How much you are willing to spend? : It is important to consider at what rate you want to hire a real estate virtual assistant and how much your pocket allows you to pay. On average, real estate virtual assistants charge in between $ 30 to $70 per hour. This rate varies according to the experience and expertise of the virtual assistant. It also varies if you are hiring an assistant from overseas. They might cost you less.

The key to maximizing the output of the VA is developing a rapport and efficient communication during the time they are working for you.

VA For the Overworked Entrepreneur

Are you an over worked entrepreneur? Or are you a full time office assistant stressed under the work load office and wants to have some extra time to relax? Then the solution to your problems is virtual office assistant. By outsourcing your work load to the virtual assistants you can take out the time for your personal life. Virtual assistants can help to take burden off your shoulders while you can concentrate on more important things for your business. And if you yourself want to take up the job of a virtual office assistant, it would enable you to have power and control over your working hours, while earning more. A home based business allows you flexibility and variety in work.

 A virtual office assistant is supposed to handle almost same tasks which are handled by the regular full time office secretary or manager. But he or she handle all the office business from his or her home based office by making use of all the latest communication equipment which includes computers, internet, phone, fax machines, printers and scanners. The general responsibilities of the virtual office assistant include;

• Management of client’s contact lists and customers database.
• Maintenance of schedule calendar and setting up meetings.
• Taking transcriptions and handling correspondences.
• Arranging traveling trips.
• Handling bills, finances and accounts.
• Preparing and sending emails and newsletters to clients and customers.
• Preparation of presentations and other meeting material.
• Handling of clients and customers inquiries and answering them appropriately.

This type of work is paid at $20 to $45 per hours in the market. Some businesses may commit the services of virtual office assistant on monthly basis while others may commit them for certain number of hours in a week. This allows the virtual assistant to work for more than one business at one time. The rate is generally decided and negotiated on the basis of the complexity of the task and the time required for specific project. The project which has tight deadlines is paid more as compared to regular tasks.

The payment set up also varies from industry to industry. For example, a real estate agent may pay his virtual office assistants on commission basis by the end of the month instead of hourly rates. It also varies from location to location. A virtual office assistant based in some other state of US will charge more as compared to the virtual assistant in India.

If virtual office assistants specialize and have experience in providing particular services, they can charge much more even up to $100 per hour. The areas which pay such higher rate include;

• Translation of bilingual work or some online materials.
• Writing medical transcriptions.
• Doing research for marketing and setting up campaigns.
• Doing specialized research on internet.
• Developing and maintaining websites for better results.
• Understanding and knowledge in the technology, financial services, law or health care industry.

So if you want to earn higher, specialization in a particular field will yield more with less time and energy.

Get the Finest Service from a Modern VA

Every business requires a team to work in collaboration to boost things and most importantly efficiency. One person cannot handle all the tasks of a business but when the business is just in the initial stages (start ups), there is a lack of funds so only one person handles it usually the business owner. As soon as the business starts growing a space is created for an additional employee who is undoubtedly the assistant. Fortunately we live in a world where internet is easily accessible and this creates an opportunity to utilize it for the benefit of the business by hiring an online virtual assistant rather than the highly paid regular office assistant.

An online virtual assistant is also referred to as the virtual assistant who is a human working remotely for his employer or client. The client can hire a VA to do the administrative tasks on a daily basis from the remote place and since we now have the facility to share documents on the internet, working with the virtual assistant has become easier and more understandable. With the new trends of business the work of virtual assistants has changed from being just data entry professionals. Today a VA does a lot more tasks than just compile data into an excel sheet and send it to the client via email.

The internet receives more traffic than the huge shopping malls. This makes the internet a bigger market for the business people to sell their products. With the internet there are no boundaries and a person living in the UK can easily make purchases from vendors in the US. This elimination of the boundaries has made the internet a better place for the customers because they can get access to a bigger variety than they can actually be able to get in the real world. But the business people need a website to showcase their products and this is another place where the online virtual assistant becomes a benefit.

The virtual assistant can easily manage the website for his client by keeping it free from any misuse and by updating the products and by updating the data base to keep a record of the items that are sold or are available to be sold. The next big thing that the VA does is your website’s SEO to keep it appearing in the high searches. When a person enters a query for the product which is available on your website, the SEO helps your product to come forth so the customer is yours. Selling items on the internet has proven to be more profitable than in the showrooms.

Why It Is Always Better To Hire an Online Personal Assistant

If you are feeling the pressure of your business push you down, congratulations your business is growing. When you feel that the business is putting more pressure on your shoulders than you can handle, it is a clear indication that the business is not what it used to be some time ago and now it has grown a bit. This is the first step towards growth and this is the exact moment when you feel that you are in need of an assistant. Assistants are hired to help the business owner in sharing some responsibilities and to help the business owner manage the business in a better way.

Now that you are thinking that you need an assistant to share your responsibilities with, do not forget to consider the option of hiring an online personal assistant. If you’ve never heard the term before, now is a good time to get familiar with because he might be of a great help to you.

The online personal assistant is also referred as a virtual assistant, abbreviated to VA. These are professionals who handle the administrative tasks of any business with perfection. They are the perfect replacement of an office secretary who is not cheap to hire as per the state laws. Any person hiring an assistant is bound to pay at least the minimum hourly rate which has been defined by the law. No one can pay lesser than that, but there is no limit to how high you can go with the salary.

Since your business is in the growing stages, you are not in the position to spend extra on salaries. You need to save every penny to keep operational costs under control and to build up a bank backup for future investments. By hiring the VA you automatically add an assistant to your business and at the same time you get the chance to save a lot of money. Here is how you get to save the money even though you have added a person to your business.

• You don’t spend anything to get the work started. You don’t buy furniture or a PC; you just hand out the job and work starts progressing.

• Your online personal assistant doesn’t charge as much as the office assistant. He charges a fraction of it and you can hire an entire team of VA for the hourly rate of an office assistant.

• Now that you haven’t spend anything on your VA and you didn’t need to expand your office space, you have saved instantly on the bigger rent and the electricity charges that would have increased with the addition of a new person.

Some Questions about a VA

If a business has been newly setup, how do you measure a business which has started growing? The answer to this is very simple; we may assume that a business has started growing when the business owner feels the need of a virtual personal assistant because he can no longer handle the stress and the responsibilities alone. A business has many needs of its own and most of the time, a single person cannot handle them all unless the business is dealing only a single client. A business owner clearly puts his heart and soul in the business and it is his right to have an assistant as soon as the business starts spreading its wings and the pressure starts building up.

The question often rises, when a business person, who has started a business recently (about a year or two ago) and it has started to grow, can he hire a virtual assistant? If so then how and where can he find the best virtual assistant? These questions are asked very often by the people who have never worked with a VA before and it will be the first time they work with a VA. Below are some answers to these questions.

How good is a VA?

A virtual assistant is a professional to the core unlike any assistant and is capable to handle all the tasks a normal assistant would do. The only difference between a VA and any other assistant is that the VA works remotely; he fulfills all the tasks in the same manner but without coming to the office.

Is it worth hiring the virtual assistant?

When it comes to professionalism and performing the duties in the right way, there is no discrimination between the VA and the assistant you hire to come daily to your office. When the business is in the growing stages and has not yet expanded to its full capacity, it is better to keep operational costs to the lowest possible level and the VA costs a lot cheaper than the in-house assistant. Hiring a VA would not only ensure that your work gets done on time, but it would ensure that you do not drain your entire savings on a salary.

Where to find one?

This is an interesting question because the biggest problem faced by an employer is to find the right candidates. Since the VA’s are spread all over the internet, searching them on the giant search engine Google is easy. Just enter the phrase virtual personal assistant and you will get the links to a variety of such service providers. From these links you can choose the one which seems suitable both in terms of money and the services.

Virtual Assistant Services Are the Need of Today

The use of virtual assistant services for every kind of business is one its peak. These services have not only helped the business community to achieve many objectives, but it has also provided an option to the business people to hire teams huge and small ones without pressurizing their budgets to the extreme. If a business person had the capacity to hire ten in-house employees, through the services of virtual assistants he became able to hire the double amount of assistants all within the budget he could easily afford. For some of the business people out there, the term virtual assistant is relatively new. This is because they have never used these assistants before.

Virtual assistants have been in service for more than a decade now. It all began when the internet entered the advanced age and people began to know about it more than before. At first when the internet became to be known to the public, people were mostly unaware of the power it held. The commonest use at the beginning was nothing more than to create emails as a replacement of the snail mail and then took a further step to download songs and movies although the speed at that time was painfully slow, but it was a new form of entertainment and people were eager to use it.

There were only a handful of websites then and they were mostly community meeting websites with chat rooms and a place to learn about new jokes or meet new people. This is the age when the business community learnt about the power of the internet and how could it be used as a catalyst for their business. This is when the e-commerce was introduced and business people became keen to have an e-commerce website built for them. Today all these terms seem childish and even a two year old can use the internet because of the plethora of devices around us running the internet 24/7.

Now we are past the age when the internet was just a source for the black market to circulate pirated movies and songs, the internet runs a major part of the global business and this is the reason why there is a huge need of the virtual assistant services. Although these assistants charge a fee for their services but they are so minor as compared to a permanent employee but the quality of services are equal to any other professional. These service providers are not just available in some specific country but are spread all over the globe so a business person is free to choose the assistants he feels are good for his business.

You Never Lose Anything with a VA

The stress of the business workload calls for the need of a virtual administrative assistant to help you manage the business tasks and responsibilities effectively on a daily basis. By delegating the administrative tasks to your virtual assistant you will have enough time to concentrate on the important issues regarding your business. Marketing is known as the backbone of every business. We know that the huge companies have armies of marketers and they run marketing campaigns on T.V, newspaper, radio and many other ways. Hence you need to be focusing on marketing your business more than being stuck in front of a computer or a laptop filling all the data in an excel sheet or some other software.

A virtual assistant is an accomplished professional with a deep knowledge of handling all the tasks that can be done on or through the internet. He can be a very useful assistant who would ensure that your tasks are well looked after and there is nothing else that would become a hurdle to your business as long as it is data. Let him handle all the purchase invoices and the expenses you make. Your virtual personal accountant is also another name for the virtual assistant managing your administrative tasks. There is no limit to what a virtual assistant can’t do, give him a ton of work and you’ll get it done correctly and in time. There can be exceptions of a delay but that is not a permanent thing or the delay is also not very long.

Working with a VA gives you one benefit among all others and that is confidentiality. It is the law of this trade to keep the identity of the client safe and concealed. This means that your competitors never know who is working for you nor can they ever get access to your official private data. In many cases the competitors have bribed assistants who are working inside the companies to get their hand on the private official data. This has been a serious blow to these businesses and even though the assistants were fired later on, the damage had been done.

Your virtual administrative assistant cannot sell your data to anyone because of the following reasons.

1.    A contract is signed ensuring anonymity of the client.
2.    The VA can be miles away from your location thus he does not know who your competitors are or which competitor is interested to let you down badly.
3.    A virtual assistant is never interested in indulging in evil deeds with the client. He works on the rates fixed between both of you and everything is done through proper email.

3 Top Reasons to Hire a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

For many business people who have not yet worked with a real estate virtual assistant, the term may seem odd and even strange to them. Most of the people are unsure how it all works and how can a person living miles apart and working from a remote place can be of any help to a business. Well, the system is very simple and the virtual assistant can be one of the best employees, colleague you can get to work with. You can learn a lot from him than you would ever have learnt from a person working right next to you on a daily basis.

The virtual assistant can handle the smallest administrative tasks of your real estate business such as responding to emails, updating the data on excel or any other software you might be using to the biggest tasks also such as running your email campaign, managing your website, handle accounts, search engine optimization and also internet marketing. There is nothing a virtual assistant can’t do that a normal assistant can do except come to your office. Since he works from a remote place, why would you ask him to come to your office? And this is one main reason why you have chosen to work with him because when he does not come to your office, you get to save on a lot of things. Here are some areas where you save massively with a VA.

• Office space: renting a bigger office can increase your expenses a lot, or they can even double them. With a bigger office you need to pay more rent. And when you hire an assistant, you need to provide him a working space and thus you’ll need a bigger office.
• Furniture & equipment: if you think a table and a chair is all you need to place your assistant, think again, you’ll be needing more than that because you also will have to provide him a PC or a laptop to work on. We all know that a PC or a laptop doesn’t cost cheap and you’ll be draining a lot of money on these items.
• Lighting: how much do you spend on the electricity bill now? You and only one or two other people are in the office and you can easily do with a small consumption of electricity. The other people are your customers who are present for a short time. But when you hire an assistant too, you’ll need permanent lighting for the entire day and this is only one thing we are discussing about. And with a real estate virtual assistant, you get exempted from all such hassles.

Tension Free Life with the Help of a VA

Managing a business can be a hectic job and when you are a business owner, there is no way you can outsource this job completely but you’ll have to keep yourself involved for the best results. Obviously there are teams for handling the different tasks a business would require, and you cannot do all the tasks by yourself. Even if you are not in the position to hire a complete team for your business, you still need an assistant to help you manage the tasks or to share some of the tasks so that you do not become a machine or a slave of your own business.

Hiring an assistant in your office is not an easy task because you know the salary will drain out your resources and though you’ll have a helping hand available, but you’ll soon get your wallet exhausted and you’ll be back to square one. Yet you need an assistant and the best option to choose from is to hire a virtual office assistant. We all are restricted to work within the 24 hours a day and nothing anyone can do will make it change. It is the rule of nature and there is nothing we can do about it. So in order to clear up the work within the 24 hours of a day you need to team up with the virtual assistant so that you can manage both your official work and your personal work.

In many cases we have seen business owners get drowned in their work that they lost track of what was happening around them or in their inner circles. If you are a married person then it is very important for you to lead a balanced life. In case you miss any of the anniversaries, birthdays or other important meetings and gatherings within your family, you are bound to lose a lot of precious relationships and then all your earnings become meaningless. Leading a good life doesn’t mean that we get to spend all the money freely on materialistic things, but there are moments when it becomes necessary to spend on your family, friends and relatives.

Now that you’ve got a virtual office assistant to help you with the chores, you can get enough free time to enjoy family time too. Your virtual assistant is effective, punctual and affordable too. This combination makes him one of the most valuable assets to your company and indirectly to your personal life as well. Get the work completed by him on a regular basis and you can never miss any of the important moments of your life and also give a boost to your business because a well managed business is a sure to grow business.

The Top Reason to Hire an Online Virtual Assistant

Are you feeling the pinch of the hard work you are putting in your business and still not getting as much productivity as you hope for? Well it’s time to bring in an online virtual assistant in your business to boost productivity and shrug off the work load from your shoulders. An experienced virtual assistant can do wonders for your business. By handling the administrative tasks professionally he would be able to make things organized and smoother in flow. When you get free from these works, you get all the time you need to focus on improving your business and hunt for better opportunities to invest and reap more rewards.

A virtual administrative assistant is an expert in handling all the administrative tasks. He can handle your emails and can also communicate with your clients over the live chat on your website or even the Skype chat. He can easily help you in getting more than one things every day and you’ll be thankful to him for taking off more than half of your business responsibilities from your shoulder and giving you the opportunity to concentrate on the bigger games that can be played being a business owner. Your website also needs to be handled by a professional who can dedicate time to make it better and drive in more customers.

Your website has a purpose and it should be serving it perfectly. If you’ve managed to gain access to clients through direct marketing, your website can double the number easily through search engine optimization (SEO) and you’ll be praising the virtual assistant for giving your business a boost that you’ve been dreaming about. The process of search engine optimization is a continuous process and requires daily updating. While you are a business owner and have to handle much more important matters on a daily basis, you cannot give the internet marketing your complete attention and when it suffers, your business volume declines.

Let your online virtual assistant handle the internet marketing tasks giving you daily reports on the tasks completed and even weekly and monthly analysis reports. This way you can learn about the places your customers are coming from and this will be the defining moment of your business because with the website you not only gain access to the local customers, but you also get access to the international customers and there is a huge chance that you will soon be dealing with customers from all over the world rather than just locally. This is the perfect way to expand your business boundaries without spending a fortune on travelling, making face to face meetings and yet getting less than what you’ve invested in doing everything manually.

Online Personal Assistant – Professional and Economical

There are many activities in a business that does not require the complete attention of the business owner and can be easily done by an assistant. These are normally the administrative tasks such as record entry (data entry) and some of the other similar tasks. Now there is no need to hire a costly assistant to do these tasks for you and you can easily delegate these tasks to an online personal assistant. The benefits of outsourcing these routine and laborious tasks are vast and topping the list is the cost factor which is a huge benefit to the business.

When you do not need the tasks to e done under your supervision, it can be done by anyone and anywhere. All you need to make sure is that you get them done within time and in the exact pattern you have asked for. A virtual assistant is a person who works remotely, he can be anywhere on this planet or any other planet but he is useful as long as he is connected to the internet and we can have access to him virtually. Today finding a VA is not a difficult task at all, one can easily connect to thousands of virtual assistants either individuals (freelancers) or even organized groups (service providers). By searching for them on the internet search engines one can easily get links to them or the websites from where you can establish a communication channel.

Normally there are two types of virtual assistants as mentioned above. Both are effective and good for business but it depends upon the workload mainly to choose the type of assistant you would like to hire. If you have a small workload to be handled then you don’t need a team and rather a single assistant would be able to perform it for you. So it would be better to go for a freelancer as it would be enough and also economical. But the quality of work would obviously not be as great as that handled by a team because we all know that when a team performs the work, there is a process and it gets better.

If you have enough work to keep multiple virtual assistants busy then you obviously need to go for a team. This way you would get the work done in a better way and it would be more organized and economical to hand the tasks to a team rather than a bunch of VA’s. Handing out to different VA’s would not reduce you work but it will increase because you will have to run after each and every one of them to get the tasks completed. You will have to keep track of every one of them, establish communication with each of the online personal assistant. But when working with a team, you are relieved of these tensions and just communicate with the team lead and get all the tasks handled professionally and economically.