Categories
Online Business

How Virtual Assistants Can Amplify Your Business Marketing

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Article Contributed by Stephanie Fish
Perhaps you’ve got a small business and it’s been thriving with your own marketing and research efforts. But if you want to boost your business marketing, consider the services of a virtual assistant.
Virtual assistants who’ve been trained and experienced in marketing research and business marketing — particularly through the Internet — can be invaluable to growing your business. It would take time for you to learn and do everything yourself, time that you could put to better use by focusing on the aspects of your business that you enjoy and are an expert at.
For example, not everyone is adept at using Web 2.0 for business marketing. Besides, it can eat up a lot of your time every day. Wouldn’t you rather use that time to develop your business in other ways or even relax and enjoy your family?
Here are a few marketing and research tasks that a virtual assistant can perform for you:
* promote your business in social networking sites, a very time-consuming task
* produce a podcast which will expand your business’ web presence
* look at competitors’ websites and report on what they’re doing – so you can analyze what your competitors’ approaches and come up with strategies to outdo them
* find information you need to grow your business, such as identify affiliate programs that are relevant to your business and could increase your market reach
* look for websites or blogs relevant to your business where it might be profitable for you to advertise your products or services
Could you do all this yourself and still live the life you want? Probably not. Yet these things could take your business to the next level and ultimately increase your income. You should certainly be familiar with these processes in order to effectively hire and supervise somebody to do them for you. However, you don’t have to do them yourself.
Let a virtual assistant declutter your mind of the minute but essential details of business marketing and research. Then you can focus on work that have greater impact on your business, such as monitoring and evaluating your marketing efforts and those of your competitors, formulating strategies, and mapping out growth directions.
About the Author
Stephanie Fish is the owner of Buckeye V.A, she works from her home office in Ohio. After completing her Associate of Applied Business Degree from KSU,she launched her own virtual assistance business. To learn how Buckeye V.A. can help your business please visit http://www.buckeyeva.com

Categories
Communication Skills

Humour in the Workplace

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There seems to be a lot of information out there at the moment about the benefits of using humor in the workplace. In fact on Google there are about 363,000 results (at the time of writing), so clearly it’s quite a popular subject area. But it’s a topic that concerns me. Gravely concerns me.
Firstly, let me just say that as a humorist I’m into humour (or humor, however you choose to spell it) in a big way. And I mean a BIG way. Apart from being a practitioner (sounds a bit of a heady term for someone who has the ability to make a room full of strangers laugh), I’m big into the history of it both in the theatre and in cinema.
I’m also all for the benefits of humour being able to reduce stress and also help re-frame the serious, sometimes even tragic, moments that life can throw at us. Being able to laugh with a colleague about a angry person you’ve just dealt with on the phone is important I think.
As Steven M. Sultanoff, PhD, licensed psychologist and therapeutic humorist, wrote in an article over at Humor Matters that a “Haft International 1985 survey only 15% of workers are fired because of lack of competence. The remaining 85% are let go because of their inability to get along with fellow employees. When asked about the qualities of an effective employee, senior administrators and human relations personnel check humor as one of the choice attributes of a desired employee”.
I’m not sure what the figures would be like in 2009, but based on that old research alone I think it’s important for work colleagues to be able to get on and communicate effectively. Humour is definitely an important part of that. That’s fine with me.
What I’m against is when people go overboard with the humor in order to make the workplace a really fun place to be. The “you-don’t-have-to-be-crazy-to-work-here-but-it-helps” type of people or the “wacky, cartoon tie” brigade. These people are actually irritating. I see the spirit of trying to make work a much more interesting and fun place to be, but, personally, I don’t want to deal with, or work with, a company like that.
People at work shouldn’t take themselves too seriously, that much I can accept, but not to the extent of playing practical jokes at other people’s expence. For instance, I was working in this one job a few years ago and I was chatting to one of my colleagues and I happened to mentioned that I’d performed stand-up. She instantly said “I’m funny” – immediately a warning sign that she isn’t.
Not “Oh, I do stand-up too”, but “I’m funny”. In my experience this person usually isn’t. Not wanting to criticise what she was telling me I let her explain. I do try to be supportive where I can and just get on with people even on a temporary basis. This is what she told me, without any exaggeration from me:
“Sometimes when I’m at my mother’s I’ll hide from her. Then I’ll leap out and squirt her with a water pistol.” (She laughed, after clearly cracking herself up).
I wanted to stab her in the eye with a Biro…
People who describe themselves as being wacky, usually aren’t. They are deluded and need a “jolly good talking to”, as only the English can muster. Granted the scenario she was describing took place out of the office at home, but the seeds of (what I can only describe by neologizing) Shunny (a portmanteau of the words sh*t and funny) were clearly there.
On another day I happened to catch her crouching behind some cabinets. “Er, hi. What are you doing?” “Oh. I was going to leap out on you and scare you.” She was lucky that piece of shunny failed. If she had I can only imagine that we would’ve reenacted that scene from The Deer Hunterwith her playing the Christopher Walken role, but with a full chamber.
So should we avoid humour in the workplace at all costs then? No, I don’t believe so. Over at Science Daily there’s research on humor in the workplace by professor Chris Robert, at the University of Missouri-Columbia said: “…particularly joking around about things associated with the job – actually has a positive impact in the workplace. Occasional humor among colleagues, he said, enhances creativity, department cohesiveness and overall performance”.
See he says “occasional humor works”. Here are three ideas off the top of my head:
1) Witty Banter– a bit of banter with work colleagues about the workload that you both have, or laughing about a difficult customer. Being naturally funny helps in this situation. Alternatively, re-telling a favourite joke might be useful as along as you’re not offensive.
2) Favourite Comedy Shows– recounting favourite or classic sitcoms or sketch shows. Or discussing the previous evenings TV where you both might have seen the saem show. Quoting from shows or comedians that you both find funny works because you both remember how you laughed originally at the source material. So by repeating it you can often get a laugh of recollection.
3) Cartoon strips – One job I had I had a copy of one of my favourite panels taped to the bottom of my computer screen. Whilst it wasn’t fall of my chair funny, it served to make me smile every now and then when I wasn’t feeling my best. I have seen these photocopied and pinned up on a noticeboard.
JasonPeckPhoto.jpgJason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Consultant based in London, England. For public speaking tips and to learn how to add humor to your speeches and presentations to win over your listeners visit: Pro Humorist.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Recession – Time To Hire More Salesmen

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Article Contributed by Guy Kingston
It might seem crazy to be talking about hiring – yes, hiring – more staff in a recession. Most companies are worrying about having to lay people off.
It might seem doubly insane, in one sense at least, to be talking of hiring in the sales department of all places. After all, when you have to make cuts, you must make them first of all in the variable costs rather than the fixed costs of a business – and a properly run sales department should be the ideal example of a variable cost. It should cost more when sales are high and less when they are low. Indeed, in theory, the perfect sales department would be based entirely on commission so that it would cost nothing if there were no sales, and expenditure would rise in direct proportion with income.
The reality is that sales demand some prior investment. Even the best salesmen are reluctant to rely entirely on commission. They know their value to a business and are usually confident enough to demand a basic salary up front. The only people prepared to work for commission only are the desperate. It is therefore one of several paradoxes in sales that those who are most likely to be able to live on commission alone are the very people who are most likely to demand more than just commission.
Since you do not want your business to be represented by losers – even losers who cost nothing up front – you need to reconcile yourself to paying a basic salary to your sales staff before they sell anything.
So, in practice, the sales department is not the variable cost that it should be in theory.
Yet it is still a cost, and in a recession, one should cut costs – right?
Not necessarily. A business should always be looking for opportunities to cut surplus expenditure in order to maximise its cost effectiveness, and its competitiveness in terms of price. This should be a constant discipline and it is obviously particularly important in time of recession.
However, it should be equally obvious that it is false economy to cut expenditure that is necessary for the proper operation of the business. After all, the only business with zero expenditure is a business that is not doing business.
So simply reducing costs is not the correct response to a recession. It may be necessary in the short term, but in the longer term it can only lead to oblivion.
The alternative to decreasing costs is increasing income. In fact, a good recession strategy will contain elements of both.
Increasing income means investing more in sales. This may sound risky but it is actually more risky to do nothing. In a recession competition becomes tighter. You must fight harder for every customer. As business becomes ever more ruthless, you must fight to keep your customers and to pick up any new customers who might still have money to spend. To invest less in sales at such a time means losing customers to those who invest more.
Remember that there are new customers to be found even in a recession. When a company goes bust, its customers do not die suddenly of neglect. Most are still alive, still solvent, and still spending. They will probably be looking for a new supplier of whatever the fallen company provided. That is an opportunity for its competitors.
On the supply side, recession is also an excellent time to pick up experienced sales staff from bankrupt competitors. Such people usually bring with them address books full of former customers and other useful contacts.
Of course, spending more money on sales staff in a recession is a risk. Yet all investment in business is a risk. Recessions do not alter the rules of the game. They simply makes the odds tighter. Competitors become more competitive, and the chances of failure increase – but so do the rewards of success for those who keep their nerve.
About the Author
Guy Kingston produces and presents the Mind Your Own Business podcast, offering free business advice to entrepreneurs and business owners. As well as audio podcasts there are more articles like this, compelling videos and a must-read blog. All at www.myobpod.com or you can network and join in discussions on the MYOB Facebook group.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Ethics Is Not A Place

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Article Contributed by Guy Kingston
It seems that Ethics is a growth industry. There are even advertisements in the newspapers for “professional ethicists”.
Does this mean that we are getting more ethical? Are we at the place of which Plato dreamed, where “kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings”.
Alas, the opposite seems to be true. The fact that so-called “experts” have to be employed to say what is ethical is just one sign that many people are increasingly incapable of telling right from wrong for themselves.
Indeed, the “professional ethicists” are not really concerned with moral right and wrong. Rather they are a junior branch of the legal profession. Many sectors, especially those related to medicine and human services, now have “codes of ethics” or “codes of conduct”. A breach of these codes may have legal consequences. The purpose of the “professional ethicist” is to give a degree of protection from those legal consequences. Surely this is the very opposite of ethics.
The last century has seen an enormous expansion in the scope of the law in most jurisdictions. Activities which were previously left up to individual conscience are now regulated by the state.
This is particularly true of business.
Yet it has not made business more honest. To rely on force rather than conscience to get people to do what is right is to undermine conscience. When people are forced, rather than persuaded, they will do what they are forced to do and no more. They will feel no sense of obligation.
More and more, the business world is filled with people who are governed by the principle of “what can we get away with”, rather than by what is right.
It was not always so. We must not be so naive as to imagine that there was ever a Golden Age when everyone was always honest – but things certainly used to be better than they are today.
Previous generations were less likely to see a conflict between doing what was morally right and doing what was in their own best interests.
Partly this was due to the greater emphasis that was placed on Reputation in those days. Business communities tended to be smaller, either because they were geographically isolated or because there might be a small number of specialists in very close correspondence. If a man did anything dishonest, it would soon be known by everyone and his chances of remaining in business would be negligible. Today, the global market is so big that it is unlikely that everyone will hear if someone has a bad reputation.
Mainly, however, it was because business communities usually had shared religious values.
Max Weber described the “Protestant Work Ethic”. The same principle which encouraged people to work hard to succeed in business – a desire to please God – also imposed strict honesty on those business dealings. Protestant devotional works sometimes recommend standards that seem laughable today – like not taking advantage of information that was unknown to the other party in a deal and not charging market price where the profit is excessive. Yet the people who read those works often became very wealthy, not least because they had a reputation for fair dealing.
In the same way, Jewish bankers were able to do business, even if the face of virulent Anti-Semitism, because they built a reputation for scrupulous honesty. This only irritated the Anti-Semites even more.
Even today, an entrepreneur is better off if he deals with someone who is concerned about his reputation for honesty – and who possibly believes that there is an Accounting beyond the balance sheets of this life – than relying on any number of laws and regulations and artificial codes for protection.
About the Author
Guy Kingston produces and presents the Mind Your Own Business podcast, offering free business advice to entrepreneurs and business owners. As well as audio podcasts there are more articles like this, compelling videos and a must-read blog. All at www.myobpod.com or you can network and join in discussions on the MYOB Facebook group.

Categories
Communication Skills

Speakers – Embrace your Inner Actor!

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Here’s something that’s been floating around in the back of my head for a number of months. When you get up and present are you acting? You might think that you’re not. But I’d suggest that if you’re not using acting and theatre techniques when you present, then you’re seriously missing out on taking your presentation skills to the next level.
This has been lingering with me since I entered the International Speech contest back in March 2008. In that speech, a version of which is viewable here, I briefly mention my background as an actor. For some reason this was an issue for some of the Toastmasters who were watching and it has continued to be an issue for Toastmasters who have seen it since.
Some peeps have said they feel that me being an actor is cheating somehow. That somehow, because I have tonnes of stage time earned elsewhere away from Toasties and the speaking platform that I’m somehow unworthy, or I have short-circuited the system because I wasn’t lacking in confidence when I did my Ice Breaker speech. Others have suggested that actors are dishonest and should be bracketed with lawyers and accountants. Nice. Good to know they’re supportive.
Once upon a time actors were branded as being rogues and vagabonds. But that was in the 1660s. These days actors are looked upon a bit better than that… But only a little.
There’s nothing to be afraid of. We don’t bite… often.
The thing is a lot of the really great presenters and speakers tap into the world of acting. They easily harness the techniques and bring in an element of theatricality, whether consciously or unconsciously, when they speak. People like Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Darren LaCroix, Barack Obama… and that’s just of the top of my head.
The danger is when speakers think that they’re actors. There is a difference. You can’t just attend some acting classes and call yourself an actor. It’s a whole other outlook entirely. I feel that the best acting involves you pretending to be someone else. Whereas, the best speaking involves you becoming the best version of you.
Here’s what I mean – we don’t want to see the real you. The pauses for thought, the hesitations, the reiterations, the slurred or stumbled word. We want all that edited out. So you’re presenting an edited and slightly heightened version of yourself. You’re performing.
You plus a bunch of people watching you is theatre, no matter how much you want to get away from that. The same as watching a sporting event like football (soccer to my American readers) has an element of ancient Greek Theatre to it.
So how do you embrace theatricality in your next presentation? Well, it depends upon when it is, if you have more time then you can do more. But…
1. A Class. You can take a basic acting or improvisation class in your area. This will get you loosened up and thinking about what you do in a different way. Plus, it will give you another stage time opportunity.
2. The Internet. You can surf YouTube for clips of some of the speakers I mentioned above and make notes of what they do differently to you. Is there anyway that you can incorporate any of those elements?
3. Storytelling. We’re often told that we should muse more stories in our presentations. If you think about it what do we do when we recount a story to a friend? We often act it out don’t we? We take on the persona, or voice or mannerism of one of the characters in the story (boss, partner, etc) and re-enact the joke or incident. So that’s something that we need to think about for our presentations. Those little moments are real and interesting and certainly something that we should bear in mind.
4. Technical. What about other areas such as using a piece of music to open your presentation (making sure that it relates to your topic would be preferable)? Or is there anyway that you might be able to adjust the lighting and add a gel to get a different colour effect in there? Or even just using audience music, that the audience listens to as they come in and take their seats.
Next time you have a presentation to do, have you considered the acting elements?
JasonPeckPhoto.jpgJason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Consultant based in London, England. For public speaking tips and to learn how to add humor to your speeches and presentations to win over your listeners visit: Pro Humorist.