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A PR Surprise for Managers
For those business, non-profit and association managers committed to PR tactics like radio and newspaper plugs, it can come as a surprise to discover where public relations value REALLY lies. Truth is, your PR budget can deliver results far...
I Just Lost My Job: How Am I Going To Tell My Kids?
One of the responsibilities of a human resources professional is to let employees know that their job has been eliminated. It is seldom easy to do and often painful for the person who is hearing the news.
Just recently, I was involved in...
No-Holds-Barred Conversations with Dan Lok - Part 2
Question: How to deal with ultra skeptical offline or be it Internet surfers in order to reassure them and get them to happily open up their wallets?
I like that “happily open up their wallets”! Your customer should be happy to open his/her...
Real Estate Marketing -- The Importance of Listing Language
Mr. and Mrs. Buyer have just seen a listing photo of a house
that's right up their alley. It seems to have the features they
want, and it's within their price range. Now, continuing in the
process, they read the details. They read what you've...
The Small Business Success Summit (October 10, 2003 to October 12, 2003)
Copyright 2005 Black Butterfly Press
By Maxine Thompson (http://www.maxinethompson.com)
While at the Pacific Ocean the other day, penning this article, I watched a homeless man dig inside a garbage can and ferret out a thrown away bag of fast...
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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. |
| www.google.com |
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| Language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Gestures are a part of human language too. Some invented human languages have ... In human languages, the symbols are sometimes known as lexemes and the ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| English language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Estimates about second language speakers of English vary greatly between 150 million ... Distribution of first-language native English speakers by country ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| Free Translation and Professional Translation Services from SDL ... |
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| www.freetranslation.com |
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| AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation |
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| babelfish.altavista.com |
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| yourDictionary.com • Comprehensive and Authoritative Language Portal |
| Comprehensive index of on-line dictionaries in more than 200 different languages. Includes an index of on-line grammars, word of the day by email, ... |
| www.yourdictionary.com |
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| iLoveLanguages - Your Guide to Languages on the Web |
| The Human-Languages Page is a comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. The over 1900 links in the HLP database have been hand-reviewed ... |
| www.ilovelanguages.com |
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| AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation |
| AltaVista Babel Fish provides the online text and web page language translation! ... Select from and to languages, Chinese-simp to English, Chinese-trad to ... |
| world.altavista.com |
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| BBC - Languages - Homepage |
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| www.bbc.co.uk |
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| Online Dictionaries and Translators |
| online dictionaries that assist in the conversion from one language to ... If the dictionary only translates from one language to another you will see this ... |
| www.word2word.com |
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| The Klingon Language Institute |
| Nonprofit organization offers language tutorials, related merchandise, mailing list and membership information. |
| www.kli.org |
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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. |
| www.loc.gov |
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| Python Programming Language -- Official Website |
| Home page for Python, an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language. It provides an extraordinary combination of clarity and ... |
| www.python.org |
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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, ... |
| www.systransoft.com |
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| Project MUSE - Language |
| Language, the official journal for the Linguistic Society of America, ... Edited by Brian Joseph , Language serves a readership of over 7000 and has been ... |
| muse.jhu.edu |
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| Learn a Language :: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French ... |
| English language courses online: e-learning, learn English online, ... English language learning events,news, conferences, workshops and seminars ... |
| www.edufind.com |
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| Parlo - Welcome to Parlo - learn to speak a new language. |
| Parlo helps you learn English, French, Spanish and other languages with free online courses, music, a magazine, flash cards, chat rooms, message boards and ... |
| www.parlo.com |
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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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