Some of you may be asking what a virtual office assistant is. As futuristic as it sounds, it would not be wrong to say in this context that the future is already here. A virtual office assistant is already present for the world to make use of and this assistant is no less than any kind of a regular office assistant. But the difference in this kind of assistant is that he provides the client services from a remote office and never walks through the gates of the client or his employer. While this may sound weird to many office bearers; but a larger community makes use of his services just because of this quality.

Many business owners are now more interested to hire online virtual assistants for their official work rather than the regular office assistant. The benefits of working with the virtual assistant are many and there is no loss but profit when compared with the regular office assistant. Let’s be frank here, what duties do you expect from your assistant who walks in your office daily and performs his duties. Obviously the work you expect from him is to handle the official emails, answer queries, send a number of new emails and attend telephone calls. Rarely would your office assistant would perform any additional tasks but all the assistants who work in offices over the globe do nothing more than this and they charge heavily for it.

Apart from the wages they charge to their employers, the employers are needed to bear a lot of other expenses. When your assistant comes in and swipes his card in the attendance machine, the first thing he does is preparing a cup of coffee and then settles down for work. Now as he has clocked in, he turns on the lights and the air conditioner or the heater if it is winter. Now the electricity bill has started falling on the wallet of the employer even though he has not arrived yet. Now these kinds of overhead charges cannot be reduced as it would mean reducing the working hours and hence the work to be done by the office assistant.

Now compare the virtual office assistant in this case. No one enters the office doors hence there is no cup of coffee made on the office expense. As the virtual assistant does not walk in through the doors he does not turn on the office lights or the air conditioner or heater of his employer but does it all on his own expense in his own office. Hence the employer is saved from these overhead charges and has no concern how much electricity bill comes to his virtual assistant nor does he care about the amount of coffee cups consumed a day by the VA. This is all a win win situation for the small business owner because he cannot afford to bear such overhead charges.

Taking a business from its initial stages to the top is more than just owning an online store and adding pretty graphics to it. Maintaining your web store is the greatest task which is the only way you can take your business to greater heights. Just like any other business activity as you need maintaining the customers, answering queries and doing a lot of other important tasks to keep your office in a neat and busy condition, your website also needs to be taken care of. Unless there is someone appointed for the task, it can be the biggest disaster for your business.

We all know that the internet has taken over our lives. We search for everything on the internet. Using the online maps for guidance to our destinations and even to search for the latest movie release date or for any other kind of information we are directed towards the internet. Even the purchases are now made online and there is no secret reason behind it than just the plain reason that we are more comfortable with it than anything else now. Hence in order to keep the business on the track of growth, every business now needs to have an online virtual assistant to take care of the website.

The reason to hire an assistant online is because of the many benefits associated with it that a regular assistant in the office cannot provide. The first on the list is the cost effectiveness. A regular assistant in the office would charge a high salary for which most small businesses are not quite ready yet. As the business generates just enough money to support a single person or a family, hiring another one can put a huge stress on the budget and can derail the business’s financials. The virtual assistant can be hired in two ways. If you have enough work to keep him busy for a full day all over the month, choose him on a fixed monthly fee which obviously will be a fraction of the regular office assistant. If not, than hire him on hourly basis and pay only for the hours you take services from him.

The second benefit you get with an online virtual assistant is the low maintenance cost. Since your assistant isn’t coming to your office for work, you do not have to purchase a PC for him nor do you have to provide him office space. As you are not providing him office space you do not have to provide him a table, chair and the other items needed for work. Hence there is zero office maintenance cost from his side so you get another place to save money from even with a hired assistant. These major factors have made small businesses break free from high operational costs and get time and money to spend on expansion and growth.

Owning a business is not only a dream of some, but it is the dream of every professional who understands his industry and possesses the abilities to be a leader. It can be the sweetest dream to picture yourself as a leader of a business where people work round the clock and you get to keep all the profits. This is probably the very picture which urges the entrepreneurs to start a venture and after they have setup everything and begun working, the workload kills their personal life and instead of feeling happy about their business, they get depressed.

Since a human being is termed as a social animal, there is no way a human being can stay away from his gatherings, friends and family for a long time. Ultimately he returns only to find that either his return is too late and there aren’t enough people to welcome him like the old times, or when he returns, the business starts suffering in the backend. So, in order to have balanced life, the business owner ultimately feels the need for an assistant but if he hires one in the office, his profits would be terribly shortened and it would have an adverse effect on the business. Now what to do? The business owner is now trapped and the way out can be very difficult.

The only possible way out is to hire an online personal assistant who would not only be cheap to hire, but will also make the life of the business owner easier and organized. Thanks to the modern technology the task to hire an assistant on the internet is easier than ever. A business owner can find hundreds of assistants over the internet who are not only available to work for him, but they are experienced professionals so that there is no lengthy trainings required and the work can commence within minutes.

Small business owners face the biggest challenges when hiring an assistant because all they have is one source of income. Hiring another person would mean to cut the share of the business owner and it would create many financial problems for the business owner’s personal and professional life. Hence the idea to hire an online personal assistant is the most suitable for him because in this way he would not only be hiring a team member, but he would also be expanding his business without any investment.

While fulfilling a lot of duties and administrative tasks, a virtual administrative assistant has many more abilities to work as a team member than a regular office secretary or a personal assistant. Modern office demands are now various and they do not revolve around just to reply some letters. Modern business techniques require a lot of work to be done online and not just on a monthly basis, but on a daily basis. If the company doesn’t get involved in many different activities, it is the job of the virtual assistant to make it look like an extremely active company without faking everything.

The work online can be crafted to be in favor of the company and since these years are called the years of social media by the gurus, the virtual assistant can create a lot of buzz on the social media pages through his internet marketing skills. It is important to have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for every business today and they also need to be updated regularly to keep the followers and fans involved and engaged. Studies reveal that especially the young generation of today finds it more appealing to get informed about the sale and other important events of a company from their social media pages.

Companies which have an active social media campaign are not only to get a huge list of fans and followers, but they are also able to boost their sales through it. The recent customer trends reveal that they are more interested to shop online rather than at the stores in the markets. This simply means that the business owners who do not own a website yet are missing a huge piece of the customer’s pie chart. The business owners should now not only seriously think about getting a website made for their business, but since they do not have enough time to handle the tasks associated with it, they should hire a virtual administrative assistant to do it for them.

Today finding a reliable and hardworking virtual assistant is easier than finding an assistant to work in the office with zeal and enthusiasm. The giant search engine Google provides all the necessary links to the service providers within an instant. And the business owners can simply choose the best person or the company they like and get started with their business campaigns over the internet and social media. The results would be pleasing and it certainly would be worth every penny spent.

Are you involved in the real estate business? Do you find enough time to manage the clients and update all the data in the systems before it gets too late? Do you find it difficult to juggle the tasks successfully and still be able to beat competition? Are you feeling the heat of the competitors and wish you had an assistant but since your office isn’t big enough you are not hiring one? All of these questions are easy to answer but finding the right solution can be a very difficult task. Being in real estate business is not easy because time is what matters and realtors are always short of time.

Hiring an assistant in the office can be a bad choice. It would not only increase your operational costs, but it will also require you to upgrade your office, rent a new one if your office is currently small and increase a lot of other expenses too. Hence realtors should always opt for a real estate virtual assistant who will do all the tasks a normal assistant in the office would do but without raising the costs. The options with a real estate virtual assistant are many and any realtor big or small can easily afford to hire one according to his budget.

If you have never used a virtual assistant for your real estate business before, it might seem like a troublesome task at first. But there are two things you should keep in mind when hiring one and things will be smoother than silk between him and your business.

Mind set
Bear in mind that your virtual assistant is a business owner who is independent and runs his own business which is none other than providing virtual assistance. Hence he is a professional and wouldn’t be treated as someone who knows nothing about the real estate business. It doesn’t matter where your business is located, your VA will handle the tasks easily. He will be your colleague or a partner, so you can be sure that your business is in safe hands and your work will always be quality work.

Communication
Since your real estate virtual assistant isn’t a regular assistant who would be reporting to your office every single day at sharp at the same time, he would be working from a remote place and you’ll be needed to communicate using email and other services which suit both of you. If you are easy to use these services then working with a virtual assistant would be a piece of cake.

As the business world continues to grow tougher, business owners should look at all the possible ways to cut operational costs in order to save more for themselves and for their business. Every business form a fortune 1000 company to even the smallest startup businesses is in search of ways to cut down operational costs and what better way to make a start at it by hiring a virtual office assistant. Admit it, you cannot run a business alone and sooner or later you will need a person to help you with the daily tasks. Soon you’ll be feeling the pressure and think of an assistant to help you deal with the burden and get the work done in time.

Instead of hiring an assistant in your office whose salary will be a great burden on your business’s wallet, go online and hire a person who will be helping you without costing you a fortune. In today’s world where internet is cheaper than a bottle of milk, everyone owns an internet connection and there is no way you won’t be finding a virtual assistant for your office tasks. The internet is filled with links to teams and even individuals providing the online virtual assistant services. But if you are an organized business and cannot afford delays and mistakes, there is no way you should go for an individual but you should hire an organized team to handle your tasks.

There are many reasons for businesses to hire online teams to do their work but the main reason is to control costs. If your business is located in a region where pay rates are high (the western world), hiring staff at the office will surely present a lot of pressure on your financials. Hence you should seriously think of outsourcing your work to the workers in the other part of the world where the pay rates are lower and certainly within a scale you can afford to pay easily. With a team hired offshore you get saved from a lot of overhead costs and you’ll get enough room to expand your business by investing in it rather than on the employees.

Costs of a virtual office assistant can vary and so will the quality of work. If you decide to hire a team which works at unbelievably low prices, bear in mind that you won’t be getting a lot of quality work because it surely costs a bit of money to keep upgraded. And since your team also has needs of its own, it will be charging a bit of higher rates than the extremely low ones. So choose your VA team carefully and be sure that you don’t fall in a trap because once you’ve given your office work to some C class team, you’ll be regretting it for a very long time.

The internet is filled with bogs and articles screaming out for the undeniable need of an online virtual assistant especially for the small business owners. If you are a small business owner and have searched for a virtual assistant you might have come across these articles and blog posts. But do you even know how useful a virtual assistant could be to your business? Virtual assistants are not just about handling your regular data entry and replying formally through the official emails, they are professionals who can do a lot of work to help your business reduce operational cost without cutting down quality.

Here are some of the things a VA can assist our business with.

Website building and maintenance
It wouldn’t be news to you about the importance of having a website for your business. But do you know how much you would need to invest to hire an IT department equipped with the best website developers? Surely you can’t afford to have a team of website developers in your budget and you’ll need to have it built and maintained as well. Your VA can provide you complete technology services and even a backup when you are done with the building of the website and need it to be maintained for proper long term functionality.

Ranking and popularity
Your website is not built to be a part of the shadows. It has a purpose and should be available to every customer who wishes to reach you according to your business. Competition over the internet is tough and there is no way you can have your website ranked high in the search engines without applying the proper route popularly known as internet marketing. You’ll need to have the SEO done along with the social media for the world to know that you are an active business and it is safe to have transactions with.

Business services
Do you need a secretary to keep you updated with your weekly and daily schedule of the meetings, birthdays and anniversaries? Do you have enough to handle outdoors that your business is suffering by not being updated regularly? Let your online virtual assistant handle the stressful tasks of updating your task sheets and the invoice records as well as keep you posted with all the upcoming events important for your personal and professional life. By providing you the business services you need, you will have a back office to keep your business well maintained without even hiring a physical team.

Hiring a number of employees to handle the administrative tasks for your small business can lead you towards bankruptcy. If you own a small business and wish to have an assistant who would help you in your official tasks, then you need not to hire a person inside your office but hire an online personal assistant. Hiring a personal assistant online would certainly get the work started without your investment. If you want to know what benefits you get when hiring a virtual assistant for your small business, then here is a list worth reading.

No startup investment
If you hire an employee in your office, the first thing you would have to do is provide him office space to work and equipment too such as the computer, table, chair and other stuff. Now going online, you get an assistant without even purchasing a pencil. The VA has a complete setup already made to facilitate his client to the maximum. All you have to do is explain the tasks and the format for the reports to your virtual assistant and get the work started. Now you have not only saved yourself from a huge investment, but you also have managed to get your work started without any delays.

Efficiency and global exposure
When you’ve decided to go online with the hiring of your assistant you get a lot of variety to choose from. You can get an assistant to work during the day, evening or night without any hesitations. If you are capable to manage the day tasks on your own and need someone to look after your website during the night, do not fret and tell the VA about it. He will adjust the working time according to your desire and now you have a website which is monitored and controlled round the clock.
There are no boundaries for internet. Your VA can be from any corner of the planet. Now there is no limit to the person you can hire thus you can look for the best talent all over the world.

Affordability
The reason a business person opts for an online personal assistant is to reduce operational costs. The personal assistant working online does not charge a fee as a regular employee at the office. He charges a nominal fee for the services he provides which is affordable by any small business owner. If you’ve enough tasks to keep your virtual assistant busy for a full day on a daily basis, always choose the monthly fee package to get more quality work at the lowest possible rates.