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Keeping your business event entertainment clean, not obscene: Amusing Without Abusing
When John Hakel decided to hire a comedian for one of his company's events, he knew that hiring the right comic would be no laughing matter. As the Director of the Association of General Contractors of California, Hakel plans dozens of events each...
Managing the Sales Negotiation Process
How many times have you heard:
"You've got to drop your price by 10% or we will have no choice but to go with your competition."
"You will have to make an exception to your policy if you want our business."
"I know that you...
Narcissism in the Boardroom
The perpetrators of the recent spate of financial frauds in the USA acted with callous disregard for both their employees and shareholders - not to mention other stakeholders. Psychologists have often remote-diagnosed them as "malignant,...
Present Your Message with Power and Pizzazz
If you’re ready to kick your career or business up to the next level, then make it a goal to become a powerful presenter. People view savvy communicators as being more capable, intelligent, and knowledgeable than those individuals who have...
The Top Twelve E-Mail Mistakes That Can Sabotage Your Career
You return to your office from an afternoon meeting and decide to check e-mail. An hour later, having downloaded your messages, selecting those you should read, deleting the ones that look like junk, crafting replies to the most important ones,...
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Hire a Virtual Assistant
So, the decision has been made to hire a virtual assistant...
Knowing your business needs and clearly defining them will be the first step in the process. A good virtual assistant (or VA) will be asking you these questions and having the answers ready will get your project moving in the right direction faster.
Truly assess your needs. You may find that your current needs and future needs are different. An honest evaluation of these needs will lead you in the right direction as some virtual assistants can offer services that are specific to your current needs, but may not have the skills for further demands. This is not a negative thing, however, you should keep this in mind when interviewing your perspective VA. If that VA can not provide, do they belong to a network of virtual assistants, or associations that they could pull help from?
Translating Budget Goals...
Most of the time you will not be pleased with the answers to questions like “How long is SEO going to take?” and then the answer... “we charge $x.xx for that service.” WHY SO MUCH?! These answers can be the wrong answer to you and your perceptions of the VA could be distorted unless you know your budget. The business owner usually thinks in terms of total costs, the VA usually thinks in terms of hourly rates. Set your budget, then take a look at the hourly rate: $25 an hour translates into $1000 at 40 work hours. How many hours will your job take to do? Add in the extras and you can determine how much you are ready to spend. Is the service an ongoing service, or a “one-off”? What is the industry standard for the work you need done? The more prepared you are with your budget and how the budget relates to an hourly rate, the better your search for a VA will be.
Learn the Lingo…
Excuse me? What are you talking about? What is a SOHO and do I need one of those in my home office? Trade jargon can confuse you or even be intimidating. Being in a position to make an
uninformed decision is not where a businessman needs to be. You can loose the pace of your interview when having to ask what an acronym means, or why you might need whatever it is the VA is talking about.
You can do a simple term search on Google or any search engine, start with the type of work you need ( i.e. “search engine optimization”) and then look for unfamiliar words or phrases. Look these new terms up and you will be a more informed and prepared to contact a VA. Most of the time you will find other useful tidbits like standard rates and how much competition there is for the service.
Sometimes it would be nice to just to dump the project onto the VA and forget it, hoping the work is in competent hands, but that can lead to disaster. You could be charged for services you don’t need or are too complicated and difficult to maintain if your relationship with that VA ends (for what ever reason). Your VA may not even be able to provide the service needed. For this reason it is wise to at least get familiar with the technical details and language.
Word-of-Mouth Referrals
What can be said about word-of-mouth referrals, other than they can not always be trusted but are better than a blind pick out of a directory. Having said that, you can trust a referral if you have done your research, set your budget and feel prepared to discuss your project needs. I am including this information because a referred VA might still not be the right virtual assistant for you or your business.
Armed with this information, your search for a virtual assistant will be easier and in the end, the match you make with be a better fit for your needs.
2004 World Wide Virtual (http://www.world-wide-virtual.us)
About the Author
Damian Hons is World Wide Virtual, a virtual assistant practice that offers a wide variety of services from Word Processing to Search Engine Optimization. His web site can be found here - http://www.world-wide-virtual.us
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| Language Tools |
| Translation of text and web pages between English and several European languages. |
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| Language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
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| yourDictionary.com • Comprehensive and Authoritative Language Portal |
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| AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation |
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| Online Dictionaries and Translators |
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| MARC Code List for Languages |
| MARC Code List for Languages prepared by the Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office. |
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| Python Programming Language -- Official Website |
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| SYSTRAN Language Translation Technology |
| Machine translation products. Free online translation available (the engine used by Altavista's Web translator) - English to French, German, Italian, ... |
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| Project MUSE - Language |
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| PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor |
| PHP is a server-side HTML embedded scripting language. It provides web developers with a full suite of tools for building dynamic websites: native APIs to ... |
| www.php.net |
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| Ethnologue, Languages of the World |
| Home page of ethnologue.com, a searchable database of language resources. |
| www.ethnologue.com |
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| Language Log |
| Weblog run by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman, with multiple guest linguists. |
| itre.cis.upenn.edu |
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