October 2017 – 20four7VA

The Ultimate Time Management Tips for Busy Virtual Assistants

When you started out as a virtual assistant with only a single client on your hands, you probably didn’t anticipate that there will be a time when you’ll get to be so busy. Getting more work as a VA is a blessing, but it also brings forth several challenges. The biggest challenge of all is managing your time properly when you’ve become swamped with work.

When the tasks come pouring in, you have to be prepared. To help you get ready for the challenge, check out the ultimate time management tips for busy virtual assistants below.

ultimate time management

Schedule your tasks according to priority.

When you’ve got so many jobs to do, it’s important to prioritize. Make a list of the things you need to do and arrange them from highest to lowest priority. This way you’ll know what you should tackle first, and the flow of your work will be a lot more focused. Being able to tick things of your priority to-do list will also help alleviate your stress.

Designate a place conducive to work.

Having a proper working area can work wonders for your productivity. If you have a corner at home or even just a desk where you do nothing but work, you’ll be able to manage your tasks better. A good work area inspires you to not only work harder but also to work better.

Set a time for each task.

When you set a time for each task, you can monitor your progress more closely. You will know how far behind or far ahead you are in your work by allotting hours or minutes for each task and checking if you actually managed to accomplish those tasks in the time you initially allotted to them. If you’re running late, then you will immediately know that you have to step up your game. If you’re ahead of schedule, then you can take your time to perfect your work or pace yourself more.

Make a schedule and stick to it.

Drafting a schedule is well and good, but it means nothing if you can’t abide by it. When you make your daily schedule, make sure to stay as faithful to it as you can. Sure, there will be times when sticking to your schedule is next to impossible, but the main thing to remember is to try to stick to it as best you can.

Take regularly scheduled breaks.

Taking a break between tasks is not only suggested, it’s vital to keeping your health in top form. If you overwork yourself, you won’t just feel horrible, you also run the risk of letting your productivity and the quality of your work suffer. This means you’ll end up finishing tasks more slowly and churning out poor results. Schedule 15 to 30-minute breaks every couple of hours to eat a snack, take a short walk, or take a power nap. Doing so will work wonders for your health and efficiency.

Keep a work journal.

Writing down the things that worked well for you and the things that went wrong on a daily basis can help you get a clearer picture of your strengths and weaknesses. By doing this, you can work on ways to manage your time more wisely and resolve the issues you had difficulties dealing with before.

By following the tips above, you can slowly but surely lower your stress levels and improve the way you handle your busy life as a virtual assistant. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself with plenty more time to relax and spend time doing other things you love.

Next: 5 Time Management Tips For Extremely Busy People

20Four7VA recognizes the challenge of effectively managing an online business – and we are very eager to help. Our company specializes in eCommerce VIRTUAL STAFFING SOLUTIONS, providing customizable and scalable solutions to small, medium, and large enterprise business owners so they can focus on growing their business.

Ready to have access to incredible people with incredible skills in the most cost-effective way? Contact us today!

5 Popular (and Free) Courses for Virtual Assistants

Whether you’re a virtual assistance newbie or a complete veteran, constant learning will always be a big part of your job. When you keep on learning new skills and improving the ones you currently possess, you are guaranteed to achieve greater success as a virtual assistant.

Fortunately, the world wide web is home to plenty of FREE, high-quality, and easily accessible courses and resources for those who want to further their skills. If you’re scouting for websites that can help you take your VA career to new heights, you have definitely come to the right place.

Check out these 5 popular (and free) courses for virtual assistants.

Hubspot Academy

Hubspot Academy is home to dozens of free online certification courses that can be extremely helpful for a lot of virtual assistants. They offer lots of materials such as tools and videos that will allow you to broaden your skill offerings and increase your pool of potential clients.

Some really good courses for VAs are: Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Hubspot Design, and Marketing Software training. Creating your free Hubspot Academy account allows you to take up these courses and more.

MyCopyblogger

Copyblogger has been providing copywriters with excellent content and valuable resources since 2006, and they have taken this one step further by offering a streamlined collection of eBooks that tackle everything from the basics of copywriting (Copywriting 101: How to Craft Compelling Copy) to online marketing tactics and strategies (10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing).

On top of that, you’ll also be enrolled in their 20-part course on online marketing — sent directly to your inbox. All these and more free of charge!

free courses

Design School by Canva

Web design s one of the most in-demand skills from virtual assistants, and Canva is one of the best places for beginners to get started on building up this skill. Canva’s Design School comprises a wide collection of design articles and interactive tutorials all pertaining to designing for the web, for social media, and other marketing materials.

These tips are not all about using Canva either. They also provide general design tips and tricks that can help you sharpen your eye for better, more engaging designs.

Google Online Marketing Challenge

With advertising and marketing efforts turning to the online market in the recent years, it’s not surprising to see online marketing as another skill that’s high in demand. Google’s Online Marketing Challenge can help virtual assistants like you take on the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.

To take on the challenge, you’re encouraged to take their Digital Marketing Course which covers a lot of relevant topics including digital marketing basics, Adwords fundamentals, different forms of digital advertising, Analytics, Google My Business, and the different tools and best practices you need to be familiar with.

Codeacademy

For VAs who are vying for web development jobs, Codeacademy can help you build your knowledge base and sharpen your coding skills. Their courses cover a lot of languages, tools, and APIs. The topics they cover include JavaScript, jQuery, HTML & CSS, Python, Git, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and a whole lot more.

When you’re trying to learn a new skill, it’s important to be patient with yourself. In some cases, you’ll find that a particular skill set might not actually be suited for you. Don’t lose hope. If you find that you’re not cut out for web development or design, there are still plenty of other skills that you can build up on. You might be an excellent copywriter or the next top digital marketing expert.

Explore the courses above and even try finding more yourself. Who knows, your next client just might be looking for someone with your new skills.

Next: How Successful Virtual Assistants Deal With Toxic People

Ready to have access to incredible people with incredible skills in the most cost-effective way? Give us a call at our toll free number 1 (443) 856-4882 today!

7 Ways Google Analytics Can Help Grow Your Business

You’ve probably heard about Google Analytics and how it has helped a lot of businesses in various industries. It can be intimidating at the start when you are still not familiar with its features. However, if give yourself time to learn about the different reports you can generate from Google Analytics, you’ll see that the information you can get from this tool is truly powerful.

Here are seven ways that you can use Google Analytics to your advantage.

analytics

Find out who your audience is.

By knowing the people who are interested in your product or the customers who are likely to buy, you can focus your online business marketing strategies on them. This way, you can maximize your budget and reap better conversions.

Learn which pages are performing well and which ones are not working.

You can assess the pages on your website and figure out what makes a certain page perform well. If there are pages that don’t interest your visitors, you can work on improving those pages so that they provide you with the conversions you need.

Discover at what point do visitors leave your site.

When many visitors leave your site before checkout, this gives you a warning that something might be amiss with the particular page where users exit your site. This is a good opportunity to assess whether your payment options are enough or if the checkout page is user-friendly.

Pinpoint the location where most of your customers come from.

This gives you more information about the type of audience you have. Moreover, it enables you to better understand their needs and cater to them more appropriately. It gives you an idea where you are getting more demand, allowing you to focus on efforts for that specific geographic location.

Know the devices used by people when visiting your site.

Are your customers mostly using mobile? If yes, is your website mobile-responsive? By knowing the type of device commonly used by your visitors, you can make adjustments to the design of your website to ensure a satisfying and convenient experience while they are on your site. This can help increase your conversions as people will find it easier to interact and use the features of your website.

Uncover which platforms are sending your website the most traffic.

Through Google Analytics, you’ll know which platforms are creating the highest engagement for your website. You’ll know how much traffic they have brought in, and how many of these led to conversions.

Find out which marketing campaigns are bringing you traffic and conversions.

Google Analytics provides a reliable way of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. This enables you to assess and recalibrate if needed so that you can get better results. Additionally, it gives you the opportunity to launch data-driven marketing tactics.

Google offers a free online course about how Analytics works. Make the most of this to have a better understanding of the tool. If you don’t have enough time, you can get the help of virtual assistant companies to find a professional who can take charge of Google Analytics for you. They’ll assist you through the recruitment process so that you can be sure you’re hiring the right person for the job.

Next: How To Effectively Promote Your Small Business On Facebook In 7 Easy Steps

Ready to have access to incredible people with incredible skills in the most cost-effective way? Give us a call at our toll free number 1 (443) 856-4882 today!

5 SEO Hacks to Improve Your Google Ranking

It’s a great time to start a business. With the potential that digital platforms have to offer, your brand can possibly reach new heights and succeed amid tough competition in your industry. However, before you go all out on various online business marketing tactics, make sure that you have a website that users will love to visit and find useful.

You know that your site is doing good when it is appearing on top of search results, but what do you do when you have a low website ranking in Google? Check out these hacks to help improve the odds for your site.

Choose a short and relevant domain name.

Your domain name should be simple and straightforward. It should tell users what your business is about at one glance. A short domain name also makes it easier for people to remember your site; hence, they will easily know where to go to if they want to know more about your brand.

Use titles that will help search engines understand what your page is about.

Your page title should accurately describe what that page is about. Ideally, it should be short and should include the name of your company. Apart from page titles, you should also check your meta description, headings, and the actual text on your page. These things will let the search engine know if you are relevant to what a user is searching for. Also, be consistent in using certain words and phrases. For images, make sure that it has a descriptive filename before you upload it on the web and remember to add an alternative text.

google ranking

Insert the right keywords.

To know which keywords to use on your web pages, you need to utilize Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool will show you the specific words that people are typing on Google’s search box. It can also give you an insight on how many people are searching for that keyword and how many other websites are competing to show up on the top results of that keyword.

When choosing keywords from the Keyword Planner, you should consider frequency, relevance, and competition. Long-tail keywords with less competition and lower search volume are usually the best to use.

Work on getting backlinks.

It helps a lot when other websites are linking back to your site, and this can happen if you have high-quality and relevant content. You can also try encouraging people, especially past customers, to write reviews about your business.

Localize your website.

If your business is catering to other countries or regions that use a different language, you should consider localizing your site. This makes your brand more relevant to the people who are searching from a specific location. Furthermore, this could mean that you need to manually translate your site to the local language. Using automatic translators won’t actually help when it comes to SEO because search engines only consider the default language used on your website. This is why you should ask someone to translate every page in order to really localize your site. If possible, look for a virtual assistant who can write well to do the translation for you.

Take note of these tips even when you’re still at the developing stage of your website. This way, you are able to implement SEO strategies from the get-go.

5 Tips on Creating an Effective Facebook Ad Campaign

Facebook is a great place to start if you’re new at any form of online advertising. It has a variety of useful features, data to back up your campaign, and millions of registered users all over the world.

It’s easy to start campaigns and create ads on Facebook. However, many businesses end up wasting their money and resources due to lack of strategy. That is why it is important to fully understand Facebook’s advertising system.

Apart from sufficient knowledge of how Facebook Ads works, make sure that you are aware of the best practices as well.

Check Audience Insights to know the people for whom you are creating ads.

To get the most out of your budget, your ad should be targeted to specific audiences who are likely to give you the conversions you need. Facebook’s Audience Insights will give you the big picture of who your target market is and how these people engage with your page.

Create a unique ad set for each type of audience.

On the results shown on Audience Insights, you may notice different audience segments interacting with your page. Now, instead of coming up with a generic ad that might appeal to all of these audience types, it would be better to target them individually with a specific ad. Create variations depending on the needs of each audience segment.

This will definitely take more time, but you can always get the help of a virtual assistant to get this done. Find someone who has experience in social media management as well as excellent copywriting skills so that your ads will grab even more attention.

facebook ads

Make sure that your ads lead to specific landing pages.

Your ad should lead your customers to a relevant and specific page. However, this page should be able to encourage users to take action. That is why your landing page design should have a distinct call to action. Additionally, your landing page should be able to clearly state what you are offering.

Accompany your ads with striking images.

Images are not only there to make your ad look more attractive. As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Use photos that will effectively show your audience how they can benefit from your product or service.

Ensure that you have a bid strategy in place.

As with any marketing initiative, you should be strategic when it comes to implementation. Make sure to establish a bid strategy so that you won’t spend more than you are willing to shell out. Properly allocate your budget especially if you have created different versions of ads to cater to various audience segments.

Your Facebook Ad campaign will only be successful if you understand how the different advertising features can be used to your advantage. Nevertheless, you should always be on the lookout for developments. Facebook is constantly changing its features including its advertising platform. Make sure that you are able to adapt quickly to these changes so your ads stay relevant and effective.