Business Plans for Virtual Assistants

June 25, 2009

Every business needs a business plan. It can be a fairly daunting task to sit down with a blank piece of paper and start drawing one up for your business. It’s something that is very important for you to do though, and as a Virtual Assistant you will probably find that you don’t need to do too much, as it’s unlikely that you’ll need much funding for your initial start up. I would encourage every start up business, Virtual Assistant or not, to sit down and go through the process of writing a business plan. The very act of putting your ideas onto paper helps you to focus and clarify your ideas. There are plenty of templates out there to help you, and I suggest your first port of call would be to look through the ones on the Microsoft website.

Initially, you should start with a very simple document that covers the following items:

1. Your Elevator Pitch – A thirty second description of your company and the services you provide which you can use when networking to introduce yourself in 30 seconds or less.

2. Market Analysis/Market Research – Is the research that you have undertaken to identify your market, the target market for your service, your competitors and your service offering. You’ll need to provide a description of the different groups of targeted customers included in your market analysis, and explain why you are selecting these as targets. You may also want to describe the Virtual Assistant market by summarising the market growth over recent years and some trend analysis of where the market is likely to be headed.

3. Marketing and Sales – You need to have strategies in place to market your product and to close sales. Your marketing strategy is going to include how you’re going to focus on your target market, what media you’re going to use to build awareness of your business and how you’re going to position your business in the marketplace; this will involve identifying your unique selling position. Your sales strategy on the other hand will deal with how you’re going to close the deal and get the client on board; this will include pricing, delivery, terms and conditions.

4. Operations – You need to describe how your business is going to be set up, including premises and equipment, you may also want to include how you see this changing as your business grows.

5. Management and People – This section should include an overview of how the company is set up, what support staff you use now, or may want to use in the future.

6. Finance – This is the part that generally scares people to death, but there is really no need to panic. You need to do this to make sure that your business is viable, and so that you have a set of goals and targets to work toward. You can download spreadsheet templates from the internet if you use Microsoft Office. I personally suggest you get them from their site as they have a very comprehensive range of free templates. This will comprise of :

* A personal budget so that you know what outgoings you need to cover from your income.

* A worksheet showing how you’re going to fund any start up costs you might have.

* A Sales Budget – You will probably want to use value based pricing for this. You can reasonably estimate your sales by working out your billable hours per month at the rate you expect to charge.

* A Costs Budget – You will need to identify your fixed costs and your variable costs. There is no need to work out a cost of sales because as a Virtual Assistant you are only providing a service.

* An Operating Budget/Profit and Loss – This is a plan for your trading operations which includes the sales and expenditure budgets in one document.

* Break Even Analysis – This will show you how many hours of work you need to bill in order to break even, and then anything above that is profit. To complete this type of analysis you need to know your variable costs/unit, sales price/unit and fixed costs.

* Cashflow Forecast – This is going to be the most important document to you. It’s the lifeblood of your business. Managing cash badly is one of the main reasons for business failure. This will help you monitor the cash coming in and going out of your business, and it will help you identity when you will have cash available to make capital expenditures, or when you might not have enough cash and need to make arrangements with your bank before the problem happens.

That’s all you really need to get started. This should even be perfectly adequate to set up a business bank account. You can add things like an executive summary at the start of the document, which is a section designed to give a brief overview of your business together with highlights from sections 2 -6 above. If you wish, you could add appendices to include your CV and so on.

Remember, your business plan is a living document and you should use it to measure whether or not you’re meeting the goals and targets that you have set for yourself. It needs to be reviewed at least monthly from when you start your business, but this can be extended as your business matures, although it’s always good practice to keep on top of the financial section at regular, short term intervals.

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Motivate**, **VMF**, **eBusiness**, Development | Comments

How to Unleash Your Small Business Potential with a Website.

June 16, 2009

As a Virtual Assistant, I specialise not only in web design applications, but also in online business development and a variety of administrative services. I have found many people with small businesses often wondering as to whether a website would really benefit them.

Here is the answer to the question all small business owners ask.

Do I really need a website? Answer: YES! Here is why…

1. Introduce your products and services: These are the days of “Enquiry Marketing”. Make your business available 24 hours a day and allow your customers to be in control.

2. Become Recognised: Make yourself stand apart from your competitors with clear, recognisable branding while displaying your products and services to the entire world.

3. Boost Sales: Explain benefits, compare products, and publish testimonials from happy customers.

4. Earn More: Subsidise income and demonstrate knowledge by selling e-books for people to learn from.

5. Professionalism: A letter from “you@yourbusiness.com” will open more doors than an email from a hotmail account.

6. Be Found: People use locally defined keywords in the search engines, “Craft Shops in Cornwall”, for example. This will lead them to your place of business, opening times, contact information, location and more.

7. Collate Valuable Information: An enquiry form on a website will often provide you with quite a bit of very valuable information from customers and other interested individuals.

8. Marketing & Advertising: Newspapers and Magazines have 2 significant disadvantages when advertising. 1) Once printed updating them is time consuming and expensive 2) The information you can print is limited. A web site can be updated instantly with little or no cost involved.

9. Promote: Do you promote your business at workshops or tradeshows? Increase awareness and advertise the event on your website.

10. People Buy People: A well-developed website displays a viable business, conveying trust and credibility while gaining loyal customers through good customer service.

When choosing to invest in a website, using a virtual assistant will give you a great deal more for your money and also the option of taking your website several steps further once it has gone live on the Web.

So what are the advantages of working with an excellent Virtual Assistant?

More than simply a Web Designer: When investing in a VA website package you’ll get a top notch professional designer that offers exceptional marketing and business advice, including usability consulting and search engine optimisation techniques. Your website will not only look great, it will be easy to find and user friendly.

- Diverse: A VA can design and deliver other marketing materials such as business cards, brochures, flyers and more.

- Professional: Most VA’s will have a large repertoire of business experience, skills and knowledge enabling them to be a valuable asset in assisting you to achieve your business goals.

- Efficient: The services of a VA are delivered when you need them with completions to tight deadlines.

- Convenient: As the vast majority of Virtual Assistants work from home, they can be available as and when you require their services.

- Affordable: There is always a VA to suit all budgets, and many offer package deals which include support and administration services to compliment your website.

- Independent: As an independent service provider a VA is able to negotiate project work, hours and rates and many offer a free no obligation consultation.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Executive Virtual Assistant who assists businesses and individuals with achieving their professional goals. Want to find out more about online business building success strategies? Support the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance today!

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments

Death by PowerPoint – How To Keep Your Presentations ALIVE

June 11, 2009

I’ve always had a bit of a love and hate relationship with PowerPoint presentations. Despite their effectiveness, many people still perceive them to be cumbersome and old fashioned. I recently read a book by Cliff Atkinson, author of ‘Beyond Bullet Points’ who says that PowerPoint is the software tool associated more with boredom than brilliance. Yet they seem like such a necessary part of education and learning. So, in order to avoid death by PowerPoint, let’s take a look at a few things you can do to keep your presentations fresh, vibrant and above all alive!

Think of each of your presentations as if it was a website.

Shape the structure of your PowerPoint presentation like a website. We all take a great deal of care with the branding on our website – your presentation should be the same. Design is key and your presentation should be professional looking and pleasing to the eye. Use a theme going throughout and avoid the use of bright contrasting colours, as they will distract your audience from what you’re trying to convey.

Abandon the ClipArt!

Use high quality graphics from popular stock photography sites to create the feeling that there is life in your slides. There are several sites where you can buy photos for as little as $1 – a sound investment! Some personal favourites of mine include Stockxpert, Shutterstock and iStockPhoto, however there are lots more out there, so if you are curious, do a search on Google for “Royalty Free Stock Photography”.

Less is More

Don’t crowd your slides with irrelevant text – make them very clean and very simple. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. With PowerPoint, your primary goals is to convey these actions through your images. Your presentation is a visual representation of what you are talking about – not an alternative to the presenter. Even if it’s a simple line or quote, less is often more.

Use 3D

Give your diagrams added interest by making them 3D, and they will visually hold the viewers attention far more than flat, uninteresting diagrams. This works really well with pyramids, and it will make your objects leap off the page, instead of being static and boring.

And Finally… Don’t Over Animate

Going animation happy and overdoing the movement on your template is a definite no no. Having things zooming in from all directions and flying out, rotating around and jumping up and down – will only confuse people. If you do want to use animation in your presentations, stick to simple, no fuss, elegant fading in and out. Leave the zooming around to the road runner!

Follow these simple steps and your presentation should be a pleasure to watch, rather than an uncomfortable coffee break, and if you decide that all of this sounds like too much hassle – hire a virtual assistant to do it for you!

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Blogs**, **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Media**, **VMF**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments

Maximise Your Results with Optimal KEYWORD Research

June 2, 2009

Keyword research is an absolutely necessary tool. It gives you the ability to find and research specific search terms which people individually enter into the search engines when performing any sort of search for information, products or services. This is incredibly helpful for optimising websites, because if you can see what people are searching for, then you can quickly set up your site and its content so that the search engines index these specifically chosen keywords. This will tip the scales in your favour when it comes to driving targeted traffic toward your website. It’s not overly complex, and there are several really easy to use applications available to help you pursue this sort of research.

As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own in-house websites, and it’s also quite possible that many of your clients will ask you to look into this sort of research for them as well. If you discover that you’re performing keyword search often, then you might consider investing in a program that will take care of some of the time consuming steps for you. However, keep in mind that you should always understand how to do it without additional software assistance, as these programmes certainly aren’t foolproof, and it’s always a responsible practice to occasionally verify the results too.

Here’s a quick guide on how to do a keyword search with Google:

1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.

2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for – in this case I am using “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.

3. You will be presented with a detailed list of potential keywords and similar keywords from the initial keyword that you inserted.

4. As you can see, the tool has returned a list which I have sorted by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We’re looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we view this list, a good target is to locate a word with at least 100 searches per day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.

5. So, let’s do a search on “Virtual Assistant Services”, and make sure you use the quotations marks or you’ll get results returned for any combination of those words.

At this point, as you can clearly see, this page shows us that there are (at the time this article was written) 57,700 pages ranked for this particular combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.

I’m not saying that this is the ideal term for you to attempt to rank your Virtual Assistant business. This is just an example of what you may want to check out. Be creative and ‘think outside the box’ with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Enter the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance as soon as possible!

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments

How Entrepreneur Assist Provides Beneficial Business Support

June 1, 2009

As a young entrepreneur just starting out, you might not have the finances just yet to take on the salary of an assistant to help with writing various documents, scheduling and planning. As an alternative, you can receive free services and tools that can help you better manage your business by registering with Entrepreneur Assist.

Once you open your account, Entrepreneur Assist creates a homepage, complete with your business planner at a glance, that’s easy to navigate. You can access your documents, daily planner, business forms, or daily meeting schedule.

The Bookmarks tool is a particular time saver. You can save all of your favourite young entrepreneur articles, web pages and blog posts with just a click of a button and set up a filing system for searching or accessing them quickly.

The Documents tool enables you to create, save and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other essential business documents. You can also upload files so they can be edited off-site or published online. You even have the ability to export your files in a wide variety of formats.

The most useful tool in organizing your day is the Planner, which you can access from anywhere. It provides great functionality in managing your tasks, tracking a project’s progress and scheduling appointments. You can even take notes with it. You can also send yourself email reminders about a project deadline or the next young entrepreneur meeting.

For business matters, Entrepreneur Assist has a Forms and Templates tool so you don’t have to spend time creating typical forms, like invoices or fax cover sheets. This section also provides a template for writing a business plan for young entrepreneurs in the beginning stages of launching a business.

As with many businesses started by young entrepreneurs, your clients might be locally situated or spread out throughout the region or the entire world. The Online Meetings tool provided on Entrepreneur Assist makes it possible for you to hold a live meeting, give a live web presentation of your products or service to potential customers, or hold a networking meeting with other young entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneur Assist also has a Library where you have free access to a wide selection of books geared towards young entrepreneurs.

Whether you’re a young entrepreneur just starting out or someone that’s been in business for quite a few years, Entrepreneur Assist is the ideal resource to manage your business more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Blogs**, **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Media**, **Motivate**, **VMF**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments