by Amber Miller | Nov 6, 2018 | Blog, Business Development, Marketing, Virtual Assisting
“You will never feel truly satisfied by work until you are satisfied by life.” – Heather Schuck
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is a crucial element to both business success and personal happiness. For entrepreneurs, this is often easier said than done. Work time tends to spill over into personal time, and the line of separation between the two becomes blurred. Surprisingly, the key to managing both can often be boiled down into two simple words of advice…
Schedule it
As a successful business owner, you likely already plan out much of your work day in advance. Whether you maintain your own schedule or delegate projects to a virtual assistant (VA), the simple act of carving out time for necessary tasks sets you up for effective time management.
Although this seems so basic to essential business functioning, it is often lost when it comes to planning our personal lives. Grocery store trips, exercise, relaxation, or time away is not treated with the same level of priority (or may feel silly to schedule on a calendar).
We make the mistake of assuming we will find the time to handle these functions as they arise. For an already stretched-thin business owner, that time can be few and far between!
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”
– Charles Buxton
Creating time
For personal health, family, fun and relaxation is essential for a healthy work/life balance. Regardless of its appeal, this notion can feel intimidating (or impossible) to an entrepreneur who is already bogged down with more than they feel they have time to manage. They may wonder “how can I commit to scheduling personal time, when I am short on work time the way it is? What about the spontaneous challenges that are bound to arise?”
If you find there are simply not enough hours in the day, perhaps it’s time to consider hiring an assistant.
“You can do anything, but not everything” – David Allen
As a business owner, giving up (some) control of the reigns can be the most difficult – and most profitable – decision you make. By allowing yourself to focus on your strengths, you can increase growth and profitability while delegating everything else to your VA. A quality virtual assistant or team of virtual assistants can handle anything from marketing and growing your business, social media, SEO, administrative tasks, customer service, accounting, website design, and more. While you maintain control over all executive decisions, your VA acts as your right hand: keeping everything running smoothly.
By freeing up space on your calendar and scheduling times to focus on personal health, relaxation and family commitments, you are able to keep a properly balanced life – offering your best self to your clients, business, colleagues.
by Amber Miller | Jun 16, 2018 | Business Development, Marketing, Uncategorized, Virtual Assisting
We have been utilizing Simplero for some time now, and can attest to its ability to bring ease
and profitability to our clients. By packaging multiple systems into one source, Simplero
provides a software program that delivers all the Sales and Marketing functions an information-
based business needs. At Smart To Finish, we’ve assisted several of our clients to integrate this
service into their business – and we are delighted to announce that we are now officially
Simplero Certified!
What exactly is Simplero?
We think Simplero sums themselves up best when they say “Simplero gives you everything you
need and nothing you don’t”.
Some key features include:
- Comprehensive email marketing
- Tools for creating and selling infoproducts (PDF e-books, webinars, audio, video)
- Built-in member sites
- Fully customizable website (includes shop, blog, etc.)
- Create landing pages, invoicing, affiliate programs, and more
Trying to decide if Simplero is right for you? Let’s talk! As certified Simplero consultants, we can
help you determine the best options for your business!
by Amber Miller | Feb 12, 2018 | Virtual Assisting
When you’re a small business owner or solopreneur, time is of the essence. It’s easy to get yourself bogged down in technical (and other) tasks you could be delegating to others. There are so many technical virtual assistant services that you can outsource rather than do yourself.
WordPress Website Development and Maintenance
Don’t have a website, or you need yours redesigned? Dread the maintenance involved with making backups and updating plugins? Then outsource these technical virtual assistant services. Smart to Finish has designed countless websites in WordPress in our preferred theme, Divi. Here are a few examples:
If you don’t use Divi, don’t worry. Our team is well versed in manually coding websites as well as other WordPress themes and page builders.
Social Media Implementation and Management
With social media marketing literally changing every day, it would be impossible for almost any business owner to stay on top of it all. Facebook is constantly making changes to its news feed, Twitter now allows 280 characters, and that’s just to name a few. And did you know that Pinterest can drive more traffic to your website than Google? Yep.
And let’s not forget all of the scheduling and listening tools. There’s Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, and Sendible that come to mind, but there are many more. A technical virtual assistant who is trained in one or more of these platforms can help you choose which one is best suited for your needs.
CRM and Shopping Cart Automation Management (Infusionsoft, 1ShoppingCart, Ontraport, etc.)
While automation usually means set it and forget it, if you don’t know how to “set it”, you’ll just create more work for yourself. That’s why you should hire a technical virtual assistant who’s trained in any one of these applications. Our team at Smart to Finish has years of experience with Infusionsoft and can help you set up any and all of your campaigns.
Email Marketing Management (Mailchimp, AWeber)
It’s all about “the list” these days. If you don’t have an email list, you’re missing out on an extremely powerful marketing tool for your business. A technical virtual assistant can help you set up and manage your email campaigns and lists in programs such as MailChimp and AWeber so that you don’t have to worry if your email list is working or not.
Whether you need help with one or all of these technical virtual assistant services, the Smart to Finish team is ready to take these tasks off of your plate. Why not give us a shout out today?
by Amber Miller | Dec 13, 2017 | Virtual Assisting
As a virtual assistant service (emphasis on virtual here!), we know our way around tools and apps for running an online business that allow us to work with clients near and far. You might even wonder what tools we use. Well, we’ve put together a list of the back-end systems we use and have used in the past to help our clients run their businesses successfully.
GSuite
We use this amazing suite of services powered by Google to power our email, our internal file storage and management, and team calendar. For a reasonable price, we have a secure network where we can have multiple people working on the same document, get a decent amount of storage space, and easily share documents.
Glip by RingCentral
We used to use Skype to communicate with our internal team in real time, but since we found Glip, we haven’t looked back! ! It allows us to have different chat rooms for different aspects of our business and have video calls. Plus it runs in your web browser, so it doesn’t bog down your system with yet another app running in the background. There’s even an app for your smartphone to be able to communicate on the go.
Teamwork
Teamwork is our main task management tool. Tasks are assigned to our various team members, and they track their progress through comments. Tasks appear in each team member’s task dashboard, showing them tasks due today, upcoming tasks, and late tasks (we hate late tasks, but they do happen!).
Hootsuite
Tired of manually scheduling your social media messages? Then we suggest using Hootsuite. They have a “freemium” plan that allows you to schedule up to 3 social profiles, get basic analytics, and schedule up to 30 messages. Paid plans start at $19 per month.
Canva
If you are in need of an amazing service to design logos, banners, flyers, and social media images, but you aren’t a designer, then we recommend Canva. It has a highly intuitive interface and a ton of ready-made templates to help you get your creative juices Create your own logos, banners, flyers and much more with their intuitive interface.
Graphicstock
Now that you know about Canva, you’re probably in need of some amazing stock photos. We use GraphicStock for most of our photo needs and recommend it because it is has high-quality photos at an affordable price.
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a one-stop CRM, marketing automation, lead capture, and e-commerce software that is used by a number of online businesses to streamline the customer life-cycle. We use it for our own business needs, and we also offer expert Infusionsoft management services.
Honorable Mentions
These are also services we recommend if you need some additional resources to compare:
- Buffer: Another social media scheduling service with a free option.
- 1ShoppingCart: This is a good option if you are just starting out in ecommerce and email marketing.
- Easy Webinar: Create and automate evergreen webinars with this application.
- Mailchimp and AWeber: Need email marketing software? Check these two out.
Need additional resources? We found an excellent list of 30 App Ideas for Your Small Business here.
If you have any questions about how we can help you set up our favorite tools and apps and work behind the scenes running them for you, just check out what we do and give us a holler.
by Amber Miller | Apr 16, 2017 | Delegating, Virtual Assisting
Utilizing the services of a virtual assistant can save you hours of time a week to focus on the more exciting aspects of your business. But what do you even give your VA to work on? Depending on who you’re working with, virtual assistants can handle tasks as simple as updating spreadsheets to basically running your whole business for you online.
If you’re looking for ways to cut down on your workload and utilize the talents of your assistants, here are 5 things to outsource to a virtual assistant.
Social Media Updates
Why spend your precious time writing and updating all of your social media accounts when you can have someone do it for you? Spend that extra free time making connections face to face.
Email Management
Virtual assistants can be white labeled, which can be super handy if you need someone to manage your email customer service accounts. Have your VA connect with your customers for you.
Scheduling
Sick of trying to manage your company calendar? Your personal calendar? Most virtual assistants can handle this tedious task for you.
Online Research
Need to gather some information for a new product, new competitor, new laws in your industry?? Send your virtual assistant on the hunt for you.
Data Entry
We know you hate tedious tasks that take up your precious time. Data Entry is one of those things. There’s no reason for you to focus on adding information when you should be focusing on how to reach more clients. Hand the tedious tasks off!!
Our team of virtual assistants can accomplish a lot more than what’s on this list. If you’re interested to see how we can help grow your business and save you time in the long run, give us a shout out. Have some other ideas on what you can give to a virtual assistant?? Please share with us in the comments below!
by Amber Miller | Jan 5, 2017 | Blog, Virtual Assisting
Feeling “time poor” lately? Don’t worry… You’re not the only one. In fact, the majority of us feel the stress of going too fast on a daily basis. So many things, yet so little TIME. That’s why we offer virtual assistant reselling services.
:sigh: It’s a lot to handle when you’re trying to run a business and keep a personal life as well. Luckily, we can help you achieve that with our white label VA services. No more costly employees, HR headaches, or risks. We can pretty much run your business for you virtually. The best part? All of our reselling services can be completely white labeled.
Our team of highly trained virtual assistants can help complete a variety of tasks ranging from; processing documents, webinar management and sign up, email marketing management, blog management and posting, website management and posting, administrative duties, and so much more.
Sounds too good to be true right? It’s not. Each of our web divas is incredibly experienced and trained to follow a strict set of quality assurance guidelines to ensure all tasks are completed to each of our customers specific needs and wants.
If you’re ready to free up your hands to focus on more important parts of your business, then give us a shout out. We’re ready to give you time back in your day!
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