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  1. Smart Tips to Finding Your Virtual Assistant

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    One of the most often asked questions on the subject of virtual assistant staffing is where to find and hire the best employees from the virtual world. As those we’ve talked to since founding Big Outsource back in 2010 admit, this is one aspect they once answered deliberately and carefully.

    Picking out of millions of contractors is not only time-consuming and tedious, it also must be recognized that there is a certain amount of uncertainty when hiring someone you don’t know.

    Will the chosen staff do a good job? Will this virtual staff or team of virtual employees work and cooperate well together (knowing that conflict can easily arise between and among strangers trying to work on projects and tasks together)?

    Here are a few tips that you can follow whether you are searching for a good virtual assistants on the pages of job boards on freelance portals, social media channels and the likes.

    Freelance websites. Finding virtual assistants on freelance websites like Freelancer, oDesk and Fiverr, just to name a few, is harder than identifying which tasks to delegate to an outsourced personnel.

    What confounds the search is the fact that with millions of independent contractors signing up and posting their professional profiles, there are so much on offer. Millions of profiles is overwhelming and it thus makes pre-selecting just your best five candidates can be painfully hard.

    Fine, there are features and tools to help you check the most favorable candidates. Having been in this business for quite a long time, freelance sites have gone a long way to ensuring they give you the best candidates through the tests for languages and computer skillsets these sites give. Check out the scores and competence levels of your candidates but never rely on those tests alone.

    Look over the profile of your prospective candidates, their body of works or portfolios and read over the reviews or testimonials former colleagues or clients wrote. Best of all, you can always ask for references form their former employers.

    Going through this process is especially helpful when you want to hire professional and skilled assistants for complex and complicated tasks. However, if you need someone who’ll do data entry or simple routine tasks, you can simply test him or her and see if they can do the job you assigned them.

    LinkedIn. This popular social media website focused on the professional careerists host groups dedicated for virtual assistants. Pretty sure these groups come with lots of virtual assistants and independent contractors on lookout for job hunters and employers who might be attracted to them. One critical advantage of sites like LinkedIn is that registered members are not anonymous. Unlike with freelancer and job board sites, anonymity trumps transparency immensely.

    On LinkedIn, it is quite hard for an independent contractor to build reputation nor manufacture his own credibility. The praises and recommendations coming from colleagues or former employers the contractor has had the chance of working it are manifestation of years of fruitful work. It may also means they’re legitimate.

    But never just let these stuffs convince you just as yet. Make sure to double check every claim posted on the contractor’s account. Prepare a test to properly evaluate and assess the contractor to better make the right choice,

    Some Warning Before Hiring

    We’re not starting to be too pessimist this time. But truth be told that the Internet is a dwelling place of both legitimate and illegitimate people. On the gray side of it, there are plenty of scammers who are out to deceive people like you. There are also low-level contractors that you can spot here and there just so they can earn money from employers like you.

    Given this reality, great chances that you won’t find the right virtual employee for your company from any of those channels we’ve mentioned above is alarmingly positive.

    O.K. we get it that you’ll soon find some contractors on the web, but it’s no guarantee they’ll be around far too long to satisfy your requirements. How much if you’ve hired a couple of inefficient virtual employees that you’d use to form a team? You can just imagine the headache such might cause you.

    Faster and Easier Route Is Just Around the Corner

    We could be the answer to your quandary. Big Outsource takes a bunch of the mess out of your worries, such as negotiating virtual staffing pricing, pre-screening qualified candidates, testing contractors to determine their skill level, and finding the best employee management platform.

    All you need to worry is figure out what tasks you would like to outsource because we have more than a hundred tasks that you can outsource. Wondering about your outsourcing options? Don’t worry, our virtual assistant staffing services is one of the most flexible and affordable around.

    We’ve been around in this sector for more than three years and sure enough our experience in handling virtual assistants, keeping the motivated and morally-boosted are just a sampling of what we can help deliver to help you achieve your business objectives.

  2. Want to Keep Virtual Employees Motivated? Use These 6 Tips

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    One of the bigger challenges opened up by outsourcing is how business leaders would stay caught up with their pool of virtual employees. More than ever now, keeping employees motivated, regardless of their physical and virtual locations, is something that employers should recognize how to do.

    Ensuring that staff culture thrives remains an important facet of work environment 2.0. While it’s difficult providing the personal touch when working with a virtual staff initially as compared when managing full-time teams that work together in an office, but not a second such should disappoint nor stop you from hiring virtual employees.

    Little adjustment is required to make things work between your staff from the virtual world and from your office. As an employer, be open about changing how you deal with virtual employees. Be more understanding and adept at motivating each team member. Don’t refuse giving a “pat on the back” or dispensing good responses as well to manage virtual staff more effectively.

    Here are five ways that you can seize to motivate your virtual staff to work hard, up-to-speed and energized when dealing with workloads.

    Recognize and Respect. Let’s start with this because this is highly important. Being the respectful boss of virtual employees can spell a whole bunch of difference than treating your remote staff or virtual team as if they’re your slaves from outer space.

    Try to be nice all the time with your virtual or remote staff. Communicate calmly, be patient, and make your statements clear all the time. Even if they’re from Manila or Beijing, talk or communicate with your virtual employees as if they were merely in the same room as you.

    The sense of personal attention you give can help the entire team feel more comfortable working with each other.

    Teamwork = Team Effort. Making your pool of virtual employees genuinely feel like they belong to your team would help a lot in making them feel motivated. A team member who feels appreciated or recognized for the cooperation they render could help push the project moving forward through to its completion.

    As a result, you will achieve more when the hidden wall dividing two separate units of your employees – from the virtual world and physical location of your office – are broken. Working as one single unit could help ensure that your projects and goals are being achieved successfully.

    Get in Touch Often. It helps a lot touching base with your employees as often as possible. Getting intimate with them helps ensure that everything that you’re building up is going there to where you want it smoothly.

    Promote team cohesion by holding meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly frequency to keep everyone up-to-speed. As for your virtual employees, hold one-on-one meetings. What good is this for? That’s the perfect question to ask. Well it allows you to ask specific questions about the tasks they’re working on and it also impresses that you’re as invested in they’re project as they are.

    Then see how much you’re making your employees feel more motivated.

    Reward Team and Individual Effort. Recognize great efforts by all participants within your team or your organization. When dispensing appreciation with praise or rewards, include your virtual employees.

    When employees know how their hard work pays off for the organization and you acknowledge, they’ll feel more energized and motivated. Giving gift cards or surprising your virtual worker with package delivery to reward exceptional work may be simple, but it go a long way in improving team morale and work culture.

    Be reasonable. It’s vital that you keep everyone’s workload in perspective. Ask around just how much every employee has on their plate. Doing so would help you understand and decide which tasks to assign to your full-time and virtual employees. You’d also be smarter putting realistic deadlines and setting benchmarks to follow.

    When employees feel they’re immensely understood, given realistic deadline and reasonable workloads, they’ll be more motivated to contribute and do the job assigned them.

    Employee Management Tools. There are systems that you can use to keep track of hours, project deadlines, and more of the likes to keep every member of your team on the same page. More often, it is through smart and smooth management style that keep employees motivated and virtually in synch with the rest of your workflow.

    Managing your full time employees is already difficult and the same can be said of virtual workers. Keeping a productive virtual team can prove to be a big challenge. Follow these six ways to keeping morale up and making your employees more motivated.

  3. 7 Tasks to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

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    When it comes to building your business, your time matters more than anything. So instead of becoming the all-around-boss, it pays to devote your time doing the essential side of your entrepreneurial life and leave the rest to a virtual assistant or VA to do them for you.

    It’s just simple and plain smart to find a competent and trusted virtual assistant, than try being the superhero. Not only you’ll find hiring a virtual assistant unbelievably affordable, they might prove to be a real life-saver for you too! And just to kickstart your foray in outsourcing, see what are these tasks you can outsource to a virtual staff.

    Tasks that can be outsourced to a Virtual Assistant

    Managing emails. If there is one thing that many entrepreneurs consider to be sucking a bunch of their time, it is this. Usually, emails come in unexpectedly and they know the right timing to disturb you: just when you’re too busy working hard on a particular task.

    Time wasters truly they are, emails amount to luxuries that cost entrepreneurs their focused workflow. And getting interrupted by emails is never worth it. So what’s best to do is to get somebody like a remote executive assistant to handle all your emails.

    Checking and responding to emails would be one of the things you can instruct your virtual assistant to perform. You may also tell them that you will attend to important or urgent email only.

    Schedule management. Your virtual assistant can also be your secretary. Honestly, you need someone who’ll answer calls in your behalf. Don’t discount their importance because just consider that procrastrination can still keep you stuck.

    Like a full-time secretary, you can count on your point-of-contact assistant to keep an eye on your schedule. He or she will be there to remind you if there are charity balls you need to go to and people that you need to call.

    Client and partner relationship management. Here is another task that’s still connected to secretarial workflow that your virtual assistant can do for you. You can put your virtual assistant in charge of sending out gift cards, thank you cards or even holiday cards.

    Showing gratitude or appreciation to your clients or partners is something you must pay attention to. But with your very little time, expressing your regards can take up time, some effort and dash of creativity to send a gift card to your clients on holidays and anniversaries.

    Doing this chore requires little information from you and very so easy to do. But if your hands are full, you might consider letting your virtual assistant do these things for you.

    Bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a more complex and time-consuming chore than say receiving calls for your client. If you hired a virtual staff to do this job for you, you would need to trust them take care of your bills, invoices, payments and the likes.

    The trust factor is really important since you would need to give over passwords and other personal information to a virtual assistant. With that said, this task is probably the hardest to give up to someone else, especially to an assistant who is offshore.

    Social media management. If you or your brand is present on any of the top social media webpages, you know for sure that managing the pages, and answering a few comments or questions can be very time-consuming.

    Outsourcing the task to a virtual assistant can let you leverage the time you save from handling comments and questions, including posting updates about your business. Social media management is after all a perfect task that you can delegate to your virtual assistant.

    Content creation for blogs. If there is any one component that is considered the most time consuming, it is blog writing and posting. Blog creation plays a vital role in your content marketing efforts but it also consumes a lot of time, from researching the given topic to writing and formatting the articles for your website’s blog section.

    With a professional virtual assistant, expect your blog posting quantity to shoot up, say on a weekly basis. An expert knows the trade by heart and requires minimal supervision when you let them begin.

    So just imagine how much more you can do with the four hours you saved from writing a blog and monitoring your website in order to make sure your content is updated.

    Website management and maintenance. Even if you have degree in computer science or a diploma in web design, it isn’t really wroth it doing it all. The task of managing and maintaining your website require more than a few hours to perform.

    Getting a virtual assistant for website maintenance can ease you the burden of always having to check the server or browse if your website is down. Then our outsourced virtual assistant can go over some bugs and spam messages to the inbox of your website email address.

    Of course there are other tasks you can outsource to your virtual assistant but we’ll cut it here for the meantime. The next question is where to find your virtual assistant and how to determine if you’ve found the right one you can trust.

    We’ll go over these issues in our next blog. For the meantime, share your experience about certain tasks that you specifically outsource to a virtual assistant that you find helpful in growing your business.

  4. How to Use Social Media and Get Great Results

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    Today in marketing, one thing is undeniable: social media is in. That’s why for beginners, it pays to learn about the long and short routes of using social media. Better yet, answer the question: How to use social media and get great results?

    Social media, like SEO, is one of the hottest marketing trends today. Amazingly so that in less than a decade, it already landed a unique position as the marketing tactic of choice among many businesses.

    But before we give off with the tips on becoming the next social media rock star, we’ll first settle some issues of concern among marketers – effectiveness of social media in driving results or return on investments.

     

    To be or not to be in social media

     

    For marketers, one question remains: is it the best time now to dive in and embrace social media?

    Let’s consider some facts. In a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, it showed that 87% of business-to-business now run their marketing programs via social networking sites.

    Then if this is any indication, believing that social media is popular is nothing short of logical. This was also the same basis for recent claims that social media has become “the most popular marketing tactic” in recent years.

    This is not merely an exaggeration after all. By just looking around, it’s not difficult to see why.

    The impact and sweep of social media across the world of marketing and branding from every board meetings, books, blogs to Twitter conversations are overwhelming.

    According to the Social Media Examiner, there are 58% of marketers using social media for the past three years have reported sales improvement. The same report showed that 65% of B2B marketers have earned a customer through Linkedin.

    Moreover, folks at CMI, who surveyed marketers about the effectiveness of social media for marketing, further revealed that only 49% of marketers believe social media is effective.

    The CMI, in effect, represents an important reality: social media tend to be the least effective means to use as a marketing tactic.

    While popular, the effectiveness of social media remains, by and large, something to be proven. But the most important insight above all these is that social media may probably be poised to change the marketing landscape anytime in the future.

     

    Factors to Consider to Leverage Social Media

     

    To better understand and leverage social media’s use in marketing, let’s look over some factors to consider when viewing its effectiveness, ROI-wise.

     

    Know the buying behavior of your target audience

     

    Buyer preferences, behaviors, and problems they want solved are just a few things you need to understand about your customers.

    Having a clear grasp of buyer persona would help you arrive at the best solution to meet your customers’ needs and interests. To better get a pragmatic take on trends, use research.

     

    Include social media in your end-to-end marketing campaign

     

    Plan carefully and then decide whether your brand communication campaigns will do better if you have social media incorporated within your end-to-end marketing campaign.

    Buyer understanding must be matched with a grasp of your customers’ buying cycles. Your understanding of your customers’ journey through your brand will give you an idea whether or not it’s time to leverage social media. The latter part will show you whether it’s ROI-wise to consider bringing social media to the fore.

     

    Have a goal, make efforts to reach it

     

    Like anything before you start something, it is essential that you have your own set of goals and objectives when planning your social media projects. A clear mission statement can be useful when setting a benchmark to measure your progress.

     

    Offer Quality Content

     

    Content that is engaging and relevant to your audience are proven and effective when it comes to driving sales leads. In itself, social media will not drive ROI. Hence, it is vital to develop a sound content marketing strategy.

    To create a truly effective content strategy, create content that will interest your buyers and engage them to progress to the next stage of the buying process: checkout. Raise awareness as well about your brand’s trustworthiness over your rivals.

     

    Use Metrics

     

    Develop benchmarks that you can use in measuring the effectiveness and success of your sales ROI goals. It is not optional to measure results but must be obligatory. In this regard, you might choose a tool that offers social media analytics features.

    With the right tool to provide you with metrics that you need most, you can get the real numbers of the leads generated through to sales closed. The end benefit is letting you see how effective social media has delivered for your venture.

     

    Final thoughts

     

    As consumers’ reluctance to use social media are beginning to wane and regard the platform’s power in performing job search and even shopping, businesses, meanwhile should take notice.

    With carefully crafted strategies and posting of quality posts over Facebook and Twitter, businesses can incredibly increase the benefits offered by their mindful use of social media use.

    From getting huge savings for promoting and advertising their business versus advertising in radio or television they can let social media deliver profits and return on investment.

    Social media is here to stay and the best that your business can do is to enjoy it while it’s offering the best that your company can get out it. Enjoying does not necessary mean merely posting arbitrary posts or tweets, or posting only whenever you feel like it. If that’s your idea of fun, then you’re definitely waiting for negative ROI to emerge and hurt your bottom line.

    Remember, as a new field in marketing, social media is not yet mature, hence, there aren’t really some hard-and-fast rules.

    And perhaps one rule to stick by is to always ask this one important question: is social media offering my business the benefits or return on investments while saving on cost? If the answer is yes, well, you definitely must give it a go!

     

     

  5. 7 Customer Service Experience Lessons to Steal from Starbucks

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    The pressure is high to be more customer-oriented if you want to thrive in a hyper-competitive, fast-paced, mobile, global economy. With this seeming newly-found focus to customers, brands who emphasize customer service experience delivery in their menu are looking at Starbucks for model.

    Starbucks is undeniably one of the most successful coffee chain businesses not solely because of the coffee it brew or the frappuccino it blend every single day.Starbucks founder Howard Schultz one time said what his company’s is. And it’s not merely about serving coffee. His business or what Starbucks’ line is experience business.

    Retail experts point to the Starbucks customer service as the secret mix that makes people willfully spend $4-$5 for a single cup of coffee. In-store customer service –the whole experience – has something to do with the success of the coffee brand.

    Perhaps it’s about the music. Or maybe, it’s the art or the furniture and lighting. There’s also the barista, those friendly, approachable partners who writes your name on a cup, maybe. This whole experience encompass everything there is to get when you visit a store.

    But definitely this points to one thing: it’s everything that customers get or experience that compel them to return and convince them why a cup of joe at Starbucks warrants the price.

     

    What is Customer Service Experience?

     

    The focus has shifted to satisfying customers. Especially in a customer-dominated midst that we’re in, customer service or customer care services trump your price offer, product and even promotion. But what is this really about?

    Book author Micah Solomon has advised about four elements that brands must focus on when thinking of customer service experience. These are:

     

    • The perfect product
    • Timeliness
    • Caring product delivery
    • Adoption of effective problem-resolution procedure

     

    Among the four, it is important to highlight timeliness because among new generation customers, it’s a big thing that they feel in control. Solomon cited an example: the tracker technology that lets customers check on the status of their order through delivery.

    Hiring the right people and providing customer care training are also crucial steps to address.

     

    Steal Away Starbucks Customer Service Lessons

     

    Today, Starbucks enjoys a rank near other global brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and Google.All of these companies are successful brands in the United States and across the world, and for a coffee shop to land a respectable place is nothing short of amazing.

    When you put up a coffee shop, your initial thought about this business may be about the selling. But what Starbucks has done successfully well lies in the customer service experience that they provide. So here are a couple customer service lessons to steal from Starbucks:

     

    Help customers decide by asking questionsHelp customers decide by asking questions. Do you know what makes Starbucks different from other brands?They’re not just order-takers but solution-creators.

    Starbucks baristas ask questions and it’s a perfectly efficient system that guide customers successfully complete a transaction. So you’ll often hear them ask a new customer, “Do you like coffee or tea?” Hot coffee or iced?”

    By asking questions to help customers decide, you’ll let your customers back because they don’t know what they want.

     

    Know the name of your customersKnow the name of your customers.A barista at Starbucks writes your name at your cappuccino cup and calls out your name at the bar. Whoa, you might ask, “Is that really my name the barista’s just called?” Knowing the name of your customers is just the start to knowing them more deeply and retaining them in the process.

     

    Know your customers moreKnow your customers more. At Starbucks, their employees don’t just know what their customers’ names are, they also know about their lives or what their businesses are. They know if Roger is a writer or Sally is meeting her friends every Friday noon to discuss their soiree on Saturday evening.

     

     

    Dissatisfied customers want you to feel responsibleDissatisfied customers want you to feel responsible. This may seem unfair but believe me, there’s wisdom in taking responsibility to the outcome of your transaction with customers. Starbucks barista always ensures they’re creating better experience by not blaming customers who are at fault sometimes.

    Don’t prove the customer wrong or you’ll see them exit the doors with hordes of bad stories against you to spill to their friends. Resolve the conflict and not identifying who’s done right.

     

    Make your customers smileMake your customers smile. At Starbucks, smiles seem like an infectious thing and this is one thing they’re doing perfectly well most of the time. Baristas make their customer smile with witty banters, dialogues or a compliment to a new haircut.

    When you deal with your customers, make sure to brighten up their day. Cheer up your customers and you’ll see that you’ll retain them.

     

    Allow as much customization and personalization as possibleAllow as much customization and personalization as possible. It’s certainly impossible to not see customization and personalization at Starbucks from your orders.

    It’s like everything’s up to the customer’s picking whether he prefer his caramel macchiatto with less than one shot of espresso, iced or more caramel. So it has now becomes “Troy’s drink or “Amabel’s” drink rather than Starbucks’.

    Customization real-time or based from a barista’s recommendation gives a seamless experience. Be flexible, from product or service offering, to everything you deliver your customers to get and they’ll love you for that.

     

    Don’t neglect product qualityDon’t neglect product quality.There’s never a chance that quality is not a priority at Starbucks. It’s also a thing they ensure with consistency and ease, as if it’s instinctively ingrained in their DNA. Of course, Starbucks being a global brand with high regard to quality adheres to a very efficient and systematic process that ensure every drinks they give customers meet certain quality standards.

    Do we consciously ensure that we care that customers receive our products in superior quality? Are our systems capable of meeting and delivering the same, consistent quality in our products or services every time?

     

    Takeaways

     

    Starbucks is an example of a successful company whose customer service practices is worth emulating. It doesn’t only say customer care or customer service for the sake of saying. https://www.bigoutsource.com/blog/customer-service-experience-lessons-to-steal-from-starbucks/it is a goal among the partners or the employees who work for it.

    As a proof that Starbucks understands customer service experience, the company carefully places efficient system and process comprised of multiple touch points: initial greeting, ambiance, product displays, baristas and check-out experience. They make sure that customers’ satisfaction is complete, from the very beginning to the end of the visit.

     

  6. Essential and Basic Components of A Good Landing Page

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    Designing the perfect landing page is often critical to achieving higher conversion rates. Here’s why it is a must to understand the basic components of a good landing page.

    Then, I will show you some of the most important landing page basics and best practices when leveraging search marketing for your company or brand.

     

    The Psychology of Online Buying

     

    Consumers begin their buying process with search. And research shows that 93% of business-to-business buyers start their shopping process by searching the items they wish to avail using Google or any search engine that they prefer to use.

    With a landing page, the goal then for marketers is to educate buyers about their brand. This is highly critical early phase of the buying process that’s why it’s important to create the best first impression.

    It’s also of great value that prospects begin to look at you as a trusted advisor, one who can be trusted and count on to resolve issues during their buying process.

    The landing page experience must feel seamlessly tied with a particular need and the answer will be provided by you, whether that valuable offer is an e-book or whitepaper.

    No amount of careful planning and efficient execution can be wrong when you leverage your landing page. No time must be wasted making your prospects believe that you’re their trusted advisor and lifesaver from start to finish of your prospect’s web visit.

    Here for example is your chance to convince your customer to leave with their personal details to you but they must first trust you. If your landing page is effective, your visitor would become one of your most loyal advocate and supporter.

     

    Landing Page vs. Homepage

     

    It is worth every marketer’s time to clarify the difference between a landing page and a homepage.

    Of course with a homepage, there is the inherent idea that a visitor already knows you, have learned a couple things about your brand or name, and more of the likes.

    Meanwhile, a landing page visitor may not actually know anything about you, save for the link to your page.There is the possibility too that they’ve obtained or have received your link from a newsletter, which may even be a third party source.

    In other words,a landing page is simply a page out of your website that’s specifically designed to capture your prospects’ information.

    Since visitors are still unfamiliar with what you do or offer, they often need to be convinced, educated and made aware of your value props.

    A landing page is aimed at getting information from visitors. Much more than that, it is an effective landing page that will ensure customer engagement with your brand out of your promotion and exclusive offers.

     

    Why Landing Pages Matter?

     

    Your visitor must be your primary reason why you’re optimizing your landing page.

    Your visitor need as much information and details about whom they’re dealing with and it’s your chance to convince them that you’re that someone who can provide the answers to their needs.

    Google must be your second biggest reason why you need a high converting landing page. At least in the marketing world, nobody ever dare ignore the search giant.

    Getting the nods of Google opens a lot of opportunity for any business who view their online presence critical to driving sales. Once achieved, you’ll get better ranking and more clicks in your landing page.

    When you do not optimize landing page, there’s greater chance you’ll see your conversion rates fall off the page rankings and as a result, only get few clicks.Here’s why it’s important to invest to search marketing, and optimize landing page experience.

    Moreover, there’s competition to deal with. Unless you think you’re still living in the primitive ages, you’ll find no need for the insights of this blog.

     

    How to Achieve High Quality Landing Pages

     

    To really, really stand out, bringing out a landing page alone will not take your farther in the race. So before you plan what will generate a truly effective “landing page experience” – something that Google wants you to achieve –you must understand a couple things.

    An arsenal of relevant content, keyword, and ad that are relevant to one another are important elements to incorporate in your landing page. When you take pains to optimize a landing page, you can reap results.

     

    Essential Components of a Good Landing Page

     

    Effective landing pages are comprised of different basic components to be good. Specific design rules must be followed to ensure the maximum level of engagement from your visitors.

    Here are the essential approaches to deliver a good landing page:

     

    An offer so valuable it’s irresistible.This may seem plain and obvious but an incentive with value can go a long way in convincing your visitor to voluntarily give you his details.

    But since what is regarded as valuable may vary per visitor, it pays to carefully plan what offer you will give a particular visitor or what will appeal to your intended prospect.

    Carefully choose the incentive you will give.Is it a technical trade whitepaper? Would a content marketing case study appeal to your set of customers?

     

    Content with high superior quality. Quality is simply irreplaceable a requirement when dealing with landing page optimization. Convincing your visitor to share his personal details may be first base success, however, continued engagement is an extra challenge.

    There are certain steps to take in order to exceed customer expectations every time you send a whitepaper or e-book. But above anything else, it’s quality that matters every time you produce your resources.

    To achieve quality, make sure you use your grammar and syntax correctly, proofread your text for misspelled words or clumsy phrasing.

    There’s no way your conversion rates will be not affected or damaged if you deliver cheap and mediocre resources.Don’t make visitors feel cheated. Address this landing page basics and ensure that you’re always delivering excellent, if not the perfect, side of your business.

     

    Require minimal information from your visitors. Make sure you’re only asking minimal information. Asking so much personal information from your visitor will simply scare the hell of him.

    Let’s do the math here. Give your visitors a form that require much of their personal information and see what happens.Just like other people, you’ll definitely skip the trouble of completing such form, right?

    When you give a less desirable incentive,it’s hell of a challenge to obtain beyond your visitor’s name and email.

     

    Killer Headline and Ad Copy. Keep in mind, you need a headline to stand out. But your headline need to be a killer.

    An excellent headline always is and has always been proven effective in grabbing people’s attention, and convince them to pay attention to your proposition through leaving you with their details.

    In addition, make sure your headline and ad copy share a unified theme in order for these parts to compliment each other’s purpose. Consider also the length of your headline and your approach. Punchy and clear page headlines and ad copy often deliver.

     

    Call-to-Action Must be Strong. Once you get your visitor to visit your landing page, a strong call to action is vital to make them know what you’ll ask them to do next.

    Use words that immediately spell out what your visitor must do next. Be careful with your word choices so as to create impact and create impression that you trust your offer. “Download now – Free” is an example of an effective call to action text.

     

    Testimonials. The positive words of what other people think of you and your product can help create an image of trust and solid reputation. When you incorporate testimonials in your landing page, it helps build confidence in the eyes of your visitor.

    People share more details about themselves if they are convinced about the relevance of the incentive and offer to their lives. Plus, if you will add testimonials that they can relate to and prove themselves later on.

     

    Images and Videos that Relate to Copy. Here is why it’s critical to adopt a unified theme when you optimize landing page content. Use only videos or images that complement your crisp and engaging copy.

    Images and videos do have a big role in reinforcing your message. Include video testimonials or a guided tour to demonstrate your product using an infographics notice that visual images help push your visitor to look further into your product.

     

    Conduct Landing Page Testing. Testing is crucial when embarking on a landing page optimization. One reason is that the combination of your headline, call to action, ad copy, images and videos sometimes create a different emotional impact to your audience.

    Testing also helps you determine which of your version of an optimized landing page resonates the most to your intended visitor. Run A/B test, change copy, select images, do these things until you’re convinced that your landing page optimization is effective.

     

    Minimize the Links. Always remember that you’re doing a landing page and not a homepage, which means the experience must be focused to one thing – getting your visitor’s personal details before they leave your page.

     

    In a landing page, your visitor must pay attention to your offer and if you place couple links, chances that he’ll get distracted are great. Always strive for simplicity when creating your landing page.

    The last thing to remember about completing the basic components of a good landing page: no visitor should feel deceived, betrayed once they leave their information to you. Make them realize that it’s risk-free to share personal details to you.

  7. How to Provide Good Customer Service

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    Good customer service is good business.Whether it’s selling a product or offering services, no business can deny that they deal with customers even with today’s automated world.

    In a fast-paced world, the bigger challenge though is to not disappoint even a single customer.To bring new customers return and become loyal to your brand, pay attention to ensuring good customer service experience.

    Merely launching promotions or slashing your products’ prices are definitely not enough, especially if your customers are not satisfied with your offerings. Worst, they can spread fury and vitriol against you, which can snowball into a disaster.

     

     

    What is Good Customer Service?

     

    There’s definitely a lot of definitions to use when talking about customer service. But after distilling the messages, it all boils down to the actual practice of fulfilling your customers’ needs in a professional, helpful, superior service and assistance in all levels of transactions until your customers’ needs are met.

    From the start to the completion of a transaction, it’s inevitable that a customer neither feel neglected nor abandoned. Every single moment with you should feel special. That’s why delivering a good customer service is relevant in order to survive.

    And to offer outstanding customer service, money as well as time and effort are important. Keep in mind that your work’s not done until your customers are satisfied. It also helps if customers are passing their positive experience because a customer care specialist was present and helpful.

    Customer service is, by essence, the effort of establishing a relationship with your customers. Or the kind that is worth pursuing for a long-term. And to truly create a good, lasting customer service, this blog shares some key pointers:

     

     

    The Customer Service Debate: Cost vs. Result

     

     

    Cost vs Result

     

    Sometimes, for lack of understanding, experience or misguided notion about customer care, newbie entrepreneurs’ notion of the practice all about cost, cost, cost with no return.

    This is then tendency among startup bosses who hold back hiring a frontdesk receptionist or help center staff with good customer service skills.Thus, they thought of customer service as a useless aspect of business that’s not worth pursuing.

    Here are some additional signposts to detect mediocre practices and help you question your own customer service practice if you’re doing it all wrong.

    Customer Service is not viewed as part of marketing.When it’s not considered vital by your marketing department, management rarely push or pursue customer service investments. But what’s forgotten is that customers can do a couple of things much better than you are.

    Positive word-of-mouth exposure, for instance, can bring tremendous support to your marketing effort. It can eventually draw more sales out of new customers who’ll line up to order your new product offering, even help you outperform the competition.

    When there are few complaints, the service is great. Don’t instantly assume you’re a genius if people don’t lodge a complaint about your poor services. Believe it or not, only a fraction of your disgruntled customers might visit your website and write a complaint or call you to report an injustice.

    When you’re viewed as small or a startup, customers rarely give time to report a problem or alert you that you messed up big time. Because why would they waste time composing emails when simply looking for a replacement can be a smarter move.

    But to get the whole picture, seek out from your customers feedback that will help you improve your service delivery. Generate a survey form and offer some incentives to those who will respond and give their genuine no holds barred feedback.

    Thinking that acquiring new customer is much important than retention.While it’s already a struggle to invite prospective customers to pay attention and be convinced that you’re worth checking out, but the stake’s even bigger with customer retention.

    When your customer service fail your customer, you’re a sinking ship, weighing down your business with huge amount of cost.

    Just consider losing a powerful customer who share a very bad experience before his social media audience, you not only lose that person but a couple of supposed customer.

    Too bad, all these misconceptions are hurting them so bad that these businesses are losing all important opportunities to succeed. And while customer service might be present, worst, theirs just plain sucks. And it’s important that you worry.

     

    Keys to Outstanding Customer Service

     

    After we’ve discussed that customer service experience is really important in propelling long-term business gains, focus on these steps constantly to deliver professional customer care with ease:

     

    Answer Your PhoneAnswer your Phone. If you can’t handle frequent phone calls from customers inquiring and seeking response from inquiries, hire an outsourced staff with good customer service skills. Read carefully, not an answering machine.

     

     

    Listen to Your CustomersListen to Your Customers.When customers call you, let them talk. Your customers should feel like you’re actually listening by making the necessary responses. When you keep asking your customers to repeat, that’s a sure sign your focus is somewhere and customers are sensitive to instantly notice your inattention to the latter’s concerns.

     

     

    Be HelpfulBe Helpful. When you offer some help to your customers and declare that you’re not charging him for a fee, that story will surely go a long way. When such story of yours, event if there’s not immediate profit that you’ll get out of going the extra mile, can bring more benefits that you’d otherwise imagine.

     

     

    Be ProfessionalBe Professional. This pretty envelops almost all good qualities of customer service work: keeping your promises to your customers, being knowledgeable, courteous, patient, and willing to take the extra mile in order to satisfy your customers.

     

     

    Train and Empower StaffTrain and Empower Staff. Whether it’s your in-house staff or outsourced call center agents, provide the necessary training either by doing it yourself or hiring someone to conduct the training. Give your staff enough information and motivation when dealing even with the smallest of customer-pleasing transactions.

     

     

     

    Final Words

     

    Today’s customers are more and more challenging to deal with, especially so, they’re very demanding and easily-distracted. The price of competition and a hyper-connected and informed society that we have.

    Here is why good customer service is important and vital to gain positive words from your customers about your products and services. You can just imagine when these good words about you gets passed around, you benefit profitably in the short to long-term, right?

    Where does this leads us? It’s high time that you pay attention to the relevance of providing and ensuring good customer service. It’s because taking care of the ones you have is one vital side of your marketing effort that’s going to generate you more revenue and then acquire more customers for you.

     

  8. Is Guest Blogging Bad For Your Site?

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    There’s nothing more interesting for us working in the digital marketing space than getting a heap of assurance about what we‘re doing, to be specific guest blogging. Is it a good thing for business or is guest blogging bad for your site?

    Earlier this year, Matt Cutts stirred the entire web with his odd decree that guest blogging is dead, done, decaying. The online community was resentful, of course. Who wouldn’t be when it’s Google’s head of search who’s giving the talk, albeit a mere personal blog post?

    To give you a sense of Matt Cutts’ controversial statement, “stick a fork on it, guest blogging is done,” he decried that guest blogging is fast turning into a zombie, just kidding! He decried that many low-quality blogs are latching on guest blogging to get free links for the purpose of getting higher ranking over search engines.

    Instantly, many fought back with rants using social media and tweets that a mistake has been committed. Sure the declaration bugged and divided the hell out of search engine marketers, until finally compelling Matt to issue some clarifications.

    This time around, he clarified the type of guest blogging that’s the subject of his critical post – the ones aimed at earning links to get higher spot in search engines. In other words, for search engine optimization purposes.

    As if really needing to get his reputation back, Matt offered a counter, with an elaboration on the good reasons guest blogging become a sound practice.His examples include what it can offer highly-opinionated bloggers: exposure, increased reach and popularity in any niche community.

    Matt differentiated high-quality multi-author blogs with low-quality or spam sites. He said he favored the former, whose likes include BoingBoing, which can be pretty compelling, useful and relevant. The latter type, he said, are only existing because they need guest blogging for SEO purposes.

     

    Benefits of Guest Blogging

    Benefits of Guest Blogging

     

    Blogging as a guest on another site or guest blogging has some obvious advantages to get found. If you’re serious about building your reputation online, this practice shouldn’t be left out among your arsenal of digital marketing tactics.

    While some of the cool reasons why to guest blog were already cited by Matt Cutts, in this section, I will try to elaborate on some and add a few more reasons to convince your boss about spending quality time writing blogs for another site.

     

    Building Your Network

     

    Like meeting new people from attending a networking conference or charity ball, guest blogging functions in pretty similar fashion, albeit getting your acquaintance or new audience from a different blog page.

    With guest blogging, you get to introduced with new audience since your bio and social links are attached. Meanwhile, the publications or blogs you write for will obviously get to share some traffic when you promote your post to your own constituents.

    What happens after this is more important – connecting and building relationships with a new audience.

     

    Increasing Your Credibility and Authority

     

    When people Google your name and find you on various third party sites or blogs, you create a reputation of being trustworthy or an authority in your field. Perceptions that you are credible because of your multiple writing gigs help a lot in drawing more invitations from other publications and blogs for you to write for.

    A bonus benefit that comes along is that you get branded as an expert in your chosen topic or endeavor. There’s a big opportunity that awaits you – being an expert of a specific topic to various audiences.

     

    Giving You New Traffic

     

    Consider this a bonus you derive out of guest blogging. Every time your work gets published somewhere, you receive a little link back to your website, and that bring along new traffic.

     

    The Disadvantages of Guest Blogging

    Time-Consuming

     

    Writing great, quality content is not done in a haste. Often, the amount of time required to produce engaging content takes time only because you need to do your homework, particularly research. There will also be a great need to edit and proofread your work.

    And if the publication requires that you submit your own artwork or images, it will be another aspect to consider. So you will have to weigh the amount of time you consumed with the benefits you and your organization will benefit before pursuing any guest blogging gigs.

     

    Get Easily Abused

     

    Guest blogging, like writing, has started great and positive reason. However, as marketers and SEO practitioners get hungry for inbound links and traffic from the community, the practice get abused and exploited, as in other marketing tactics that preceded these efforts.

    Guest blogging for the sole purpose of manipulating their search results, after marketers found the loopholes to exploit, are perfect way to get penalized by Google.

     

    Write Quality Guest Blog, No Matter What

     

    There’s no denying what your brand or your organization can achieve by guest blogging – exposure, credibility, added traffic, and new audience, among many opportunities. And if you’re doing that, you’ll prove Matt Cutts wrong.

    Guest blogging is not dead. And while there may be some serious disadvantages like being time-consuming and the vulnerability of the practice to be exploited, this SEO practice is absolutely an important effort to increase your reach and grow your social media exposure.

    If ever people complain about guest blogging as either illegal or crappy, these flaws only exist because of the very ones who are greedy to manipulate search results. So look at it this way, you’re only screwed if you screw the hell out of guest blogging.

    What’s nice is that there are very few golden rules or SEO tips to keep in your heart: focus on quality and resist the temptation to be writing crappy posts. https://www.bigoutsource.com/blog/is-guest-blogging-bad-for-your-site/Adhere to quality standards and do ethical blogging to win new audience and loyal followers in the long run, until they pay attention to your brand and your business.

    When you regard your writing or blogging with high regard, you benefit out of the incredible value you offer to your readers and the publications you are writing for.

    So to our question if guest blogging is bad for your site, the answer really depends upon you. The side you choose in employing guest blogging as an authentic way to reach people will determine the consequences for your site.

     

  9. Top 15 Tasks You Can Give to Your Virtual Assistant

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    Outsourcing is simply one of the best cost-saving options you can get these days from a third party remote staff. As well as the quality and cost to account for, there’s the range of virtual assistant tasks that your remote personal assistant can do in your behalf.

    But it’s a very tricky affair which tasks to offload, whether you’re a start up or a growing business.So before I introduce you to the more popular admin assistant works that you can outsource, what follows shortly are some factors to consider once you’re decided at hiring a virtual assistant.

     

    Virtual Assistant vs.Freelancer

     

    While a virtual assistant is technically a freelancer, but not all virtual assistants accept works on a freelance basis. I personally hire both freelancers and virtual assistants, each with tasks different from each other.

    Here’s how they’re different. In our organization, we regard virtual assistants in almost the same way that we regard a regular employee – minus their physical presence of course. Our VA work either on a full-time (40 hours) or as a part-timer (20 hours a week) basis.

    Due to this, we pay virtual assistants according to the amount of time they performed their VA jobs. On the other hand, we give payout to freelancers based on a per project basis and accomplishments.

    Another difference is that a remote staff can perform multiple VA tasks during the time they’re paid to perform the VA tasks that you assign. A freelancer is often task to do a repetitive tasks and is often just a single job.

    Hence, knowing the difference what a freelancer and a virtual assistant can do for you is important when going over your budget plans in view of your outsourcing binge.

     

    Popular Virtual Assistant Tasks (1-5)

     

    popular virtual assistant tasks

     

    As the number of virtual assistants offering their services are growing, it should be a lot easier these days to find someone who fits your business organization or needs. With contract remote workers, you can use them perform plenty of VA tasks or VA jobs, including making customer service calls to sending sales emails to clients.

    Hence, it’s important to establish trust and confidence with your virtual assistants in the same way you would with a full-time employee of your organization. So if you’re still not sure where to start – but already decided that a VA is right for you – we’ll first introduce you to the general virtual assistant tasks that you can outsource:

     

    General Virtual Assistant – It’s the most common type of VA, with no special skills, but can do almost everything for you. Think of this kind as your virtual admin assistant or virtual office assistant in your organization. By doing a little bit of anything, they help you get the job done, especially the crucial business processes.

     

    Content Writer Virtual Assistant – These are virtual assistants with specialized skills like content writing. As a virtual assistant, this writer can help provide you the content or blog you need all day long. This is especially the kind of personnel you need if you need intensive article writing jobs.

     

    Web Developer Virtual Assistant – A virtual assistant who develops a website is not rare only plenty of options to find. These VA are skilled in building web presence and maintaining websites for you. There are also virtual assistantswho are knowledgeable of any advanced development frameworks, such as WordPress. Just ask and they may also be skilled in mounting system configurations, design and SEO.

     

    Search Engine Optimization Virtual Assistant –There’s definitely no scarcity of virtual assistants whose specialty is search engine marketing or internet marketing. Their expertise involves ensuring that your website is search engine-friendly and optimized to rank in search engines.

     

    Graphic Designer Virtual Assistant – If you need graphic design works for your marketing collaterals, websites or advertising banners, don’t worry, there’s a graphic designer virtual assistant to hire around. Depending on your needs, it is always best to get a virtual assistant to perform the VA tasks than a freelancer if what you need is not a one-time graphic design work.

     

    Other Tasks to Outsource to Your Virtual Assistant (6-10)

     

    Beside the above-mentioned most common virtual office assistant jobs that you can outsource, you’ll find a lot more tasks that you can offload to a remote admin assistant. These are the other common VA jobs around:

     

    Bookkeeping – You can count on virtual assistants who are skilled in bookkeeping to take care of your bills and other payroll matters. With a trusted virtual admin assistant, you can share your bookkeeping systems and follow up on outstanding invoices and unpaid bills. https://www.bigoutsource.com/blog/top-tasks-for-virtual-assistants/You can hand over some control and access to your accounts as well, including password.

     

    Online Research – Some menial tasks such as researching over the web for items you need for your project can now be outsourced through a virtual assistant. You can also request to research for corporate legal frameworks, business contacts and potential employees.

     

    Data Entry – To focus on your more strategic jobs, delegating some data entry works will absolutely come as not only smart but a feasible decision in the long run. Among the most common data entry tasks include migrating contact addresses or updating of your directory to keep it current.

     

    Presentation Creation – When you need someone to summarize data or research findings that you will later need to be converted into a Powerpoint presentation, hiring a virtual assistant might come as a very reliable alternative. Preparing your presentations on your own is time-consuming simply because you need to be familiar with certain formats and quality standards, not to mention the grasp of data research.

     

    Managing Emails – Hiring a virtual assistant who can help you manage and respond to emails can really be a time-saver. With a virtual admin assistant, you are freed the hassle of going over a hundreds or thousands of emails when what you actually need to respond to are less than 20 emails.

     

    Even More Tasks for Virtual Assistants to Delegate (11-15)

     

    Tasks for Virtual Assistants

     

    Other things you can ask your virtual admin assistant do are as follows:

     

    Social Media Management – Virtual assistants can handle and take care of all your social media brand pages. Whether it’s composing messages or creating photo quotes of inspiration to your followers in Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you can bet your VA to perform all these VA jobs with gusto.

     

    Calendaring and Scheduling – With your very busy schedule, you’ll find virtual assistant your reliable assistant to manage your calendar.

     

    Event Planning –Planning an event can really be tough and time-consuming. Leverage your admin assistant’s event planning prowess and see your next party or corporate launch come to fruition.

     

    Managing of Comments – As your website or blog grows, there’s a lot of comments to deal with. A virtual assistant who will be in charge of moderating comment can be vital in ensuring your reputation is properly managed.

     

    Travel and Tours Research – Delegate the task of researching travel bookings, finding hotels and preparing trip itineraries when you are planning on a business trip or for pleasure.

     

    If you’re already outsourcing your organization’s menial jobs, what kind of virtual assistant tasks do you delegate?

     

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