Build your political network through your admin. That is true. Know your competitors style and techniques by making close associations with their admin. Let your admin relationship work for you. Executives need to have a close working relationship with their admin. If you continue to keep your admin from getting involved in your business then you don’t stand much chance enjoying the fruits of your labor tomorrow in a clean bill of health. Don’t over drive yourself and don’t carry out a task that your admin can do and that you can do without. Create a guideline or a template for doing it right. Make more value with your admin and develop full potential. When you do cross over and obtain the full confidence of your admin then you can expect that the relationship will work more for the success of your business. Nobody would want to work for a boss who doesn’t care nor trust his admin right? Now ask yourself: where does your admin’s loyalty lie? You should know what it is that you are supposed to do in order to have a great relationship with your admin. Know how to be effective and ask yourself: what does this role requires of me?
Archive for September, 2008
Money… money… money… that’s how it has always been and that’s how it’s going to be in your future! This time prioritized your admin and you get more money with their help. Of course it is cheaper to outsource admin. Try the Philippines or India for a change. Capture what you believe and communicate your priorities. The executive or business man’s priorities and responsibilities determine everything. Let your admin filter the key issues you want to focus on and let them handle the less important emails. You need time to develop your network resources. Let your admin help you. Your charisma and your admin’s charisma are different and unique. You got your style and your admin got his style too. Tap it. Just tap it and go with the flow. This is rather good in building up your resources, allied, key friends and key relationships. If you haven’t let your admin manage your email or read your email then let him handle it now and focus on key issues and main task. Deliver what you need to deliver and tap what your admin got. Let it become like a partnership by bridging the gap. Communicate, teach and make yourself effective by making your admin efficient!
An effective executive or entrepreneur spends time to teach admin. That is rule number one. You don’t hire an admin and then let her wait when you are going to have time to train her. You are wasting considerable organization resources doing that. Clearly your admin functions by how you drive them. How you measure time and priority and manage your admin schedule is a matter of your ability to make a large impact in the organization. Never assume anything when training your admin. Ask and train. If you’ve never been a teacher before then just be a good friend and converse. That is one technique - conversations!
In every successful businessman is a great admin, remember that. Make your admin believe in you and your mission. Let her help you achieve your goals. Don’t get her separated from your effort because she is for a fact your support! How could you ever take a support apart from your business goals? If you mean to practice this and do not know how to start then begin with a casual conversation but don’t praise and nag. My God if you want to praise then praise but don’t follow it up with a nag or you will sound plastic!
Focus on effectiveness and efficiency by taking things out and make more time becoming efficient. Let your admin do the paper works while you do the administrative task of marketing and planning. Let your admin manage your schedule while you prepare what to say to your meeting next. If you feel there is too much to do and that there is always work to be done and can’t leave out time to coach your admin then maybe it is high time you get to decide if you want to be effective or not. When you wake up and when you go to bed on same load of paper works on your desk then it is high time you stop and think over what is the role of your admin for you.
Your awareness on the importance of keywords starts with your domain name. Choose the name from the keyword if possible because it will make every click a hit! Start reading SEO books and try to conduct experiments and keyword analysis, create a keyword search strategy and implement! The important attitude any blogger or article writer needs if to believe it will for you. If at the moment you find keywords of less priority then let it go and don’t force yourself to doing anything you don’t find much taste. It takes time to realize what’s best. As long as you see little progress you will always ask around to know the next step. Then you will begin to understand SEO rules Google search by the stroke of a word.
It is a bad habit to assume and feel too confident with keywords research and update. Do not take keywords for granted. Keywords are greatly influenced by language and culture. Although we share the same types of words we always express it differently and at random but not often are influenced by news stories and latest fashion buzz. Keyword research is an ongoing process. It is of the same level of importance with forum or blog posting and link building. An hour a day spent for the combination of these task will make you an SEO expert someday.
Keywords help consumers find your site when they start searching for your product. Optimize your websites and drive qualified leads and traffic to your site using the most common words people type into Google search on similar commodity or service. We call them as the most popular word search which gets into the mind of the browsers when they start looking for your product. These popular words are called or known as keywords. It is important to put on relevant keywords to your article without spamming that could give a perfect match to the words these consumers type when they search. Please take note that the search engine brings only the websites containing a perfect match to the words they type and not the thought or the idea. The words must be similar and matches perfectly to what they typed in the search bar. If this is clear to you then you will begin to understand why it is important to know what keywords to use for your website. Generate thousands of keywords to improve your traffic and affiliate campaigns or even Adsense. Get those clicks and earn from the traffic you get using SEO optimization!
Site customization with proper use of keywords gives any ecommerce site direction. Trust that people around the globe may be able to find your website this way faster and easier. Photos and images of the product shall be clear and easy to distinguish. Then describe your products or services by the use of correct keywords. Design and layout is another important thing to consider. I have seen one sassy site today that spent much bandwidth and disk space arranging products for viewing one at a time. I like it.
Opps it is an understatement I guess – superb is better! It kept me clicking on the images while I continually admired their products even it if it is just a bag or shirt or jewelry. Less display in a page keeps the focus and it gives the feeling of simplicity. Over crowding your page as common with ecommerce sites makes your browser’s eyes move from left to right and their mouse scroll up and down. I guess it is absolutely right to spend on web designers to get your website more traffic. This is one good way to let your site and images do the talking and the conversion of this walk-in traffic. Layout and presentation has a lot to do with consumer appeal!
Executives need to let admin do their thing their way to be effective. There is a big difference in really following out your way because each of us in matter of time discovers how to efficiently do our task to be effective. They are an extension of you doing your workload but not an extension of you as a person. They are grounded by corporate rules but not personal law.
This is not a “your wish is my command thing”! It is best to meet at least 5 minutes a day for questions and approvals, like a daily catch up. Too much time spent on coaching and getting notices is already a bore and does not sound pleasant to the ears anymore. Never overdo coaching. See the progress, give tips but never overact training. Coaching is a matter of seeing through implementation. That is the main concept of coaching!
There is no guidebook on following personality rules but there is an SOP on corporate guidelines. What keeps executives to better relationships with their admin is direct instruction and implementation of personality and what they want rather than seeing progress. Stop putting yourself as a model and begin to see your admin eye to eye and how she complete things.
Observe what she sees best and effective for her and forget your wishes for a moment. We are talking about being an effective executive and that includes giving your admin the freedom to perform her duties and tasks in a way she finds comfortable, convenient, easier and motivational. Making her a copycat restricts her from innovating work system and this could affect your effectiveness as an executive!
Email management is a completely delegatable task which majority of the executives feel is their work. Ignoring valuable admin resources makes your system less valuable. Executives doing the tasks of an admin are clear waste of time. Delegate what can be delegated then meet 15 minutes each day of your work week to discuss on important matters. You may focus on the context of the mails under the criteria of what is coming in and not who it’s coming from. You need to filter out important corporate mails from spam and personal mails. Admin can certainly do this for you. Unable to delegate the simplest email handling task erodes trust and may affect work relationship and your effectiveness. CEOs must know how valuable admin are. They must learn how to prioritize email while they are looking at your mailbox and not before that. I repeat give training while they are sitting at their chairs, at their desk, opening your mails and not standing at your table looking at your desktop. There is a big difference to that. Orientation should come with full hands on training to determine content samples.
Having a credit card gives you the leverage to choose on available options when purchasing needed items. It simply gives you the flexibility to buy on installment or straight. Credit card teaches one money management on estimated income against forecast on monthly expenses. It is pretty obvious that they keep the recording of your expenses in one statement of account. This makes everything easier to track and easier to match invoices on month end unlike paying everything in cash where you just wonder at the end of day where your dollars go.
Honestly, I pay everything using my credit card because of some remarkable benefits you get out of it and the convenience of mainly using one card for everything that you need to pay and paying in to only one company at the end of the month. This means one due date to remember and only one company or bank to pay on month end. Real hassle free!
Your credit limit is an edge to experience great vacation deals at the time you need most to reward yourself a little break from long day’s hard work. Reward yourself with good credit scores from on time payments you’ve made and maybe later you can use this to start on some projects like business plans. Credit scores are hard earned reputation brought about by wise management of funds and smart selection of your buying options using your credit cards. It is apparent then that you choose the best card and the best service that is able to give value on your money.
CreditBreak.com gives you the basic features you need to look for when choosing a credit card. We look at the offers like savings and know that some cash are being credited back to us as a reward. Important features are free annual fee, 0% balance transfer, cash back rewards, airline rewards, gasoline rewards, hotel rewards, free concierge services and bonus points for every $1 spent. You can easily get this by using just one credit card for all of your grocery and utility bills. They are must do daily and monthly expenses which your credit card covers complete with a little reward for your loyalty. When you receive your salary, you pay them all so it won’t grow and you won’t be paying interest too. That is the secret. The ability to keep the distance between can do and won’t do.
It is best to call CreditBreak and ask for the card that could give you the most benefit as a reward conscious consumer. Lead them to the card of your choice – the card that will help you save money and earn reward points while you spend what is necessary. The company has given you on their website’s homepage the best offer you can take which is free annual fee and 0% balance transfer. This means continuous savings on the life of the credit card as long as you get to use their best value card offers. CreditBreak has even offered hotel rewards to get you the chance to experience your holiday breaks without breaking your purses. The company offers the lowest monthly interest rate.
What attracted me to their site is the simplicity of their website layout and upfront display of general product features and rewards I’ve been looking for in a credit card. I can guarantee you won’t get lost and confuse clicking and reading a lot of promos. All you need to do is simply call and give your preferences and they offer what’s best!
There is one thing I can say to this: If you can’t delegate then there is no reason having an admin.
People don’t feel comfortable exposing their selves to their admin. Their work, their emails and communications and personal notes shall be seen and read by their admin. There is no point hiring an admin when one does not feel safe and sees admin as risks to profession, business or career. Admin is a resource given by the organization to make you more effective in your task. I guess you need to separate personal emails from corporate emails this time.
Create another ID for your personal email. Gmail is best but Yahoo is also free. There are other email providers you may purchase an email account too or purchase one at Godaddy and then use the domain for your free online photo filer or photo storage while you make use of the free email that comes with the package for the price of $7 to $10 a year depending on your promo code. This is cheap considering your privacy right?
There is nothing wrong in driving yourself to be a better executive or business entrepreneur. Try to ignore the combination of things you usually do and leave it to your admin or virtual assistants to manage. There is no management guidebook when handling delegation. It is all up to you but you should not be spending 90% of your time reading on mails. Let your virtual assistant filter it for you!
Getting caught up in the traffic of your present tasks and your upcoming work load? Just give it up. Know that outsourcing has been going around in the net for sometime and there are several tools that you can use to be effective with them. There is no use doing it all for you on your own. Find what your money can buy and leverage the service that you can find online.
Outsourcing has been helping a lot of business entrepreneurs complete their task 24/7. Why is this so? Because of your different time zones, when you are done and is ready to go to sleep, she wakes up and continue to work for you. The question is: How much of what you can do can be done by your virtual admin assistant?
This is rather a quick decision making process of how much, how long and what extension of yourselves are you able to share with your admin. If you have given it a thought then call me because I am a Virtual Assistant who loves to help you when you get to define your goals lol.
Relationship management within the corporate structure focuses on two things for the executive: your admin or virtual assistant and your important people list. You are to maintain the right relationship for the right people. And this could happen only if you were specifically clear on your admin’s role for you. Do you want to continue managing your calendar and emails instead of your marketing strategy? This is a kind of a crossover role, a kind of a turnover of that little extension of you. Relationship management is about relating to others and you don’t need to handle your calendars and your emails personally.
The trick is to let your admin know the importance of each of your contacts. Let your admin know how to handle your calendar. And let your admin know what the organization’s priorities are. You belong to the corporate world, your time within the company clock is one of admin’s key deliverables to effectiveness. Anything admin can do to improve efficiency is effective. In short, trust your admin can do more if you are confident in delegating tasks. Just ask yourself how much of what you can do can be done by admin or your virtual assistant.
Then transfer duties to admin and make it your responsibility to find a way or establish a system to monitor on things so your admin could be more effective. I had a client before who is only giving this much information for a work assignment that needs that much information. If you do things that way, your admin would never be effective. You and your admin will have a failing relationship. Working with insufficient information and tools could never make your admin effective.
I think this could not be helped. Some managers and entrepreneurs still do not know how to effectively tap their admin or virtual assistant’s skills. Trust could be one factor but confidence on your virtual assistant’s capability to do what you have in mind is another thing. Delegation then is a matter of giving it a go or continue doing the things you want to do which does not justify your 6 figure pay. Well one thing for sure, you would never choose them if you think they are not capable completing what you plan to be their duties or functions. Maybe one needs to stop for awhile and think if they are already clear on the direction of their admin or virtual assistants. Directions are important. Limitation on the accounts of responsibility are reflected from there. Relationships with Admin and virtual assistants can only be improved if the manager or the entrepreneur itself knows his direction.
Most Virtual Assistants have problems looking for software that converts any file to PDF. Well for MsWord documents you can just click on print then choose the printer you want to use. Software I know that is an open source is CutePDF. It easily converts word documents to PDf files. Another software that I have stumbled on the net is the Primo PDF. You can also download this for free from their website.
There are plenty of open source software you can make use. Research is important and reading a lot of forums and blogs at least half an hour a day is most helpful. Bookmarking is good if you feel the topic is of value and you don’t see the need at the moment. At least it is already stored in your browser bookmarks and is readily available as the need arises.
Need to set up additional revenue for your site? Try submitting at homepagesfriends.com so you can get your own free homepage or browser search box. The idea is like Google search only this is personalized and provided with a free homepage. This service is completely free and the revenue generated from the page is split 50/50. If you feel you need this additional money making scheme then sign up and start linking your homepage to get the ball rolling.
Observing today’s record high gas prices, riding a scooter may seem to be the most viable alternative and the smartest move you can make to save on expenses. Scooters will spend only about $50 for every 900 miles of travel. Insurance is cheaper also. But I say you need to be more careful driving around with this because there is always the tendency that you find fun driving at max speed. You can always get ahead with traffic riding a scooter because it is smaller and you can easily find your way round those bumper to bumper cars parked out there. Lol let’s put it this way knowing that you very well take your life and health for granted at times, take care of your new scooter will you!
That’s it! You strive to write more relevant topics in your blog and it will keep your traffic coming. This means more clicks and good leads for your site. Have you been putting on ads and banners in strategic places? The best placement is above the fold. So if you need to earn more from a certain ad, put it always above the fold. For me nothing beats Adsense. But it will take you more patience to get a slice of market to click through your site. So blog more and see if it interest your readers. If it works then you are off to making a good earning out of your time and money investments building up your site.
Many have been using skype for conference calls on their outsource workers in India, Philippines and other parts of the world. But Yahoo Messenger is still best for leaving text and offline messages. The way I see it, the best way to get off with high call rates is to purchase plan for a phone in number with either Yahoo or Skype so you may be able to call your virtual assistants at cheaper rates that’s almost equivalent to your local calls. Although you can call them cheaper this way it doesn’t exempt you from paying higher cost if you don’t have a voip phone plan and they need to call you from time to time. Well Skype has just resolved this issue. Skype has offered an unlimited calling plan to any phones within selected countries like Canada and US. As we all know Skype is the leading internet voice calling solution in North America. As part of their fair usage policy you only get up to 10,000 free minutes per month. Subscribe and enjoy almost unlimited calling to any mobile and landline phone in US and Canada for only $2.95/month with Skype.
I understand there are plenty of internet marketers accepting mass email assignments using ordinary webmails. Most of these email account providers allow you to send bulk mails using browser interface or a SMTP connection. Rate limits for sending emails allowed by your service provider is therefore critical for your email blast marketing.
Gmail send limit is no more than 500 recipients per message. This is allowed if you use the Gmail web interface. Restriction automatically expires after 24 hours you reach the set limit. Yahoo and MSN hotmail are set to 100 recipients per day only. Lycos is set to max 250 emails per day for only 25 recipients per message while Aol allows max of 100 recipients per message.
So if you are thinking of using your ordinary mails please consider which one will give you the most value for the kind of work you have. This valuable information applies to individual contractors email marketers only.