With the Christmas and new year period just coming to an end you want to make sure you are organised and ready to get off to a great start.

The Tasks Your Virtual Assistant Can Do For You

• Management of your Email/Filtering/Spam
• Answering Customer Service Emails / Chat Support
• Sending of Greetings eCards, Event Invitations, etc.
• Reminder Services
• Setting up Autoresponders (e.g. MailChimp)
• Creating a New List in Email Marketing Software (e.g. MailChimp)
• Adding and Removing Subscribers from Lists
• Creating and Scheduling Broadcast Emails to Promote Content
• Editing Follow-up Emails and Auto-responders
• Creating Email Newsletters
• Editing / Proofreading Emails
• Setting up appointments
• Following up with clients/customers
• Receptionist duties (answering your calls)
• Calendar Management
• File Management/organising files using Dropbox etc.
• Database building/updating email or contact lists on your CRM
• Researching certain topics for blogposts, newsletters or others
• Running Personal errands (purchasing gifts for loved ones / family members online)
• Organising Travel Arrangements and Planning/Hotel and Flight Bookings
• Transcription (transcribing voicemail, video or audio, podcasts etc.)
• Taking down minutes of meetings
• Creating basic reports (reports on weekly tasks, deliverables, sales)
• Preparing Slideshows (PowerPoint Presentations)
• Liaison between you and other team members
• Recruitment (source for other team members like writers or graphic artists)
• Set-up Social Media Accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube)
• Manage and update Social Media Accounts
• Answer inquiries and Messages on All Channel & Profiles
• Manage your Blog
• Publish posts on your Blog
• Filter and reply to comments on your blog
• Participating in discussion forums or message boards (more promotion!)
• Dropbox / Google Drive Organization
• Data Entry in Word, or Google Docs
• Creating / Managing Spreadsheets
• PDF Conversion, Splitting and Merging
• Transcription of Video and Audio Files
• Simple eBook Layout / Formatting
• Preparing Online Meeting Minutes
• Report Creation
• Forms Creation
• Document Template Creation
• Online Research
• Data Mining & Development / Lead Generation
• Receptionist Duties
• Voicemail Checking
• Sending Client Invoices
• Basic Bookkeeping
• Personal Errands (Purchasing Gifts Online, etc.)
• Project Management & Training Tasks
• Project Management Between You and Team members
• Preparation of Training Materials
• Training of New Virtual Staff
• Deadline / Deliverables Tracking

Click here to find out a little more about a Virtual Assistant than contact Profitmaster today who can help you find what you are looking for.

I have had the privilege of employing a PA for most of my career and this has enabled me to not only leverage my time through the availability of an additional resource, it has allowed me to achieve a greater balance in both my professional and personal life.

My awesome PA lives in the Philippines.

If you are wondering why your to-do list is almost always never finished, and why there is just not enough time in the day, look into hiring an Awesome Personal Assistant in the Philippines.

Only a few years ago, the idea of an offshore PA was impractical. The problems of time zones and distance were insurmountable. Nowadays, things have changed. With the availability of high speed internet, VoIP and conference communications, as well as highly educated English speaking staff who work in the same time zone, it has never been easier to achieve massive increases in productivity. With a few tweaks in your processes, working with an offshore secretary is just like working in the same building, even on the same floor.

There is almost nothing an onshore PA does that is not capable of being done by an offshore PA.

Your offshore PA is like having another you. From keeping you on schedule to delegation of tasks and a myriad of other opportunities, engaging an offshore PA allows you to keep the trains running while you focus on the big picture. Truly, an investment in yourself!

When you are looking for an offshore personal assistant (sometimes called a virtual PA, although personally I do not like that term), a perceived stumbling block is to find the right person who really fits into the job. Looking for that x-factor in a person physically located in another country can be arduous. By using an experienced and professional offshore outsourcing company like Profitmaster BPO, you can find the Awesome PA you have been looking for.

In the world of offshore business, administrative assistants are spread all over the world, mostly in Asia. In fact the Philippines is the largest provider of offshore personal assistants to Australian businesses. As a strategy, this caters for client connections across multiple time zones although most outsourcing companies in Philippines provide administrative staff working in the same time zone as their clients.

However with all the intricacies in the relationship between a boss and his offshore personal assistant, the requirements of the work and communications between the parties needs to be open and balanced.

So here are 10 ideas to help you leverage your Awesome PA to get back more time and massively increase your productivity:

1. Give your offshore personal assistant the complete A-Z lists of the project. Communicate appropriately, ensuring both of you fully understand not only the project lists but the project itself. If you give the right A to Z lists, you will get the precise 1-2-3’s for the completed project.
2. Freedom with wisdom. Of course, your personal assistant does not want to be baby-sat like a toddler while fulfilling their work obligations. Let them do their job with the assurance that their knowledge and skill is enough to get the job done. Spoon feeding is the last thing you want. It’s the same with your assistant.
3. Get organised. None of us wants to be called “office airhead“ but losing just one piece of information is a total wreck! Let your offshore assistant organise the to do list along with priorities based on your requirements. Help them understand brilliant ideas like “Do It”, “Diarise It” and “Delete It”.
4. Delegate your inbox to your assistant. As the boss, how much time do you spend in reviewing your emails? Reading, deleting, responding, flagging and repeat requires much of your time. Hooray! an assistant can reduce your burden of email management. Just knowing when and how to delegate email management will make a huge impact on how you and your assistant deal with your day-to-day communication.
5. They assist, you invest. Just because you have an offshore personal assistant, you still only want them for the help you need. Like in any other relationship, this is two way. You have to invest in education and training of your skilled PA. In my own case, my PA comes to Australia twice per year. Not only for training, but to meet clients, other staff, suppliers and the like. Doing this cements the relationship between my PA and I. My clients and staff get to meet my assistant. This is a most dynamic way to leverage myself to the other people I do business with.
6. Responsibility develops capability. Your assistant is your eyes and ears in the company, even offshore. Your assistant is involved in the day to day business of the company, acting on your behalf. Their roles can be demanding. Delegating responsibility is a training ground for them. As they get used to it, it will be like a walk in the park.
7. Meet. I meet regularly with my offshore personal assistant every day. We hold meetings by Skype or phone. As much as possible we meet by video link. This creates a much more personal interaction. Meetings are important for they provide real communication time. It helps you and your assistant become familiar. Work conversations become smooth and easy going.
8. Teach work attitude in your absence. Congratulations, you have finally hired your offshore Awesome PA. This journey is all about work disposition and attitude, even over long distances. When you have a great work attitude happening, you can begin to enjoy a glass of wine with family and colleagues without worrying about the office.
9. Show appreciation and feedback. Anyone can do their job knowing the end result is a salary. However, the passion and hard work stems out when being appreciated. Filipino Awesome Personal Assistants love to be appreciated. They don’t just crave for the pay cheque, like all your staff they need recognition and encouragement!
10. Last but not the least, Incentives work!. Come on, be realistic! Your offshore Personal Assistant not only needs verbal appreciation, they need something more than that. Just like an onshore assistant, maybe more so. It is another way of saying “thank you, you did a great job”.
    

No matter what your company does, improving the productivity of you and your work force ends at the bottom line. People are the most important single factor contributing to the success for your company. Engaging an offshore PA has been a great experience for me, one that has given me more time for work and other things as well as increased my productivity where I can get more things done.

The biggest secret of startups or entrepreneurs who are highly productive and successful – they don’t handle all the tasks by themselves. They hire virtual assistants for a specific role who will handle the job more efficiently and effectively.

There’s never a shortage of tasks when you’ve created a solid business plan. These tasks must be completed in a timely manner to ensure the success of your business. The most common tasks that you can outsource to a virtual assistant include online research, data entry, diary management, database creation, appointment setting, business presentations, newsletter creation, email management and data mining. Other complex tasks must be outsourced to a personal assistant who is equipped with the appropriate skills sets or specialisation. VAs are indeed fast learners and can do almost anything you ask them, but it is best that you let them handle specific tasks where they are good at.

Types of Virtual Assistants

To know more about the types of personal assistants that you can hire online, continue reading to understand what kind of virtual assistants you should be looking for who can help your business grow.

Admin / General Virtual Assistant

A general virtual assistant or virtual personal assistant is more than just a secretary. They are in charge of doing repetitive, administrative and secretarial duties such as replying to emails, organising meetings, booking travel flights, drafting email newsletter, answering phone calls, creating database, and many more.

Virtual admin assistants are experts in using desktop and cloud-based applications such as Microsoft Office, Excel, Power-point, Outlook, Google Docs and other data processing related apps. Click here to know more about the benefits of having a dedicated admin assistant for your business.

Virtual Accountant/Bookkeeper Assistant

If you are looking to hire a virtual assistant who can help you with record keeping and managing accounts for your business, then you should definitely hire a certified public accountant not just a general VA. You definitely don’t want to take the risk of 0having errors with your business financial records that’s why it is always the best choice to hire a CPA with years of hands-on experience working with SME’s who have done a lot of accounting and bookkeeping transactions.

Your virtual bookkeeping assistant will be the one doing all the tax records, prepare financial statements, process accounts payable/receivable, business activity statements, year-end reports and ensure bank records are complete and accurate.

Having a virtual bookkeeper can also help you with other accounting related tasks such as budgeting, payroll, preparing general ledgers and invoices, reconciling bank and credit cards statements.

Most virtual bookkeepers who provide bookkeeping assistance are expert in the following system: QuickBooks, MYOB, XERO, FreshBooks, Saasu, Zoho Books, Reckon, Wave, OneUp, Sage One, AccountEdge Pro, and similar accounting software. You can also read our article about having good accounting system for your business.

Digital Marketer/Online Strategist

These types of virtual assistants specialises in improving businesses’ online presence to get more visitors, sales leads and potential clients. Digital marketers have broad set of skills and strategies they used to grow an online business. Strategies such as content marketing, search engine optimisation, social media , email marketing, pay per click advertising, viral campaign, etc.

The field of Digital Marketing is broad and you have the slightest chance of finding one who does it all. That’s why it would be best to only look for a personal assistant who can accomplish a specific role, as these tasks are technical in nature and would require analytic thinking as well.

Here’s a breakdown of online marketing strategies and the recommended type of personal assistant that you might want to hire for your business.

Social Media Specialist

Running a social media marketing campaign using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Google Plus is one of the most effective ways to increase your business reach, although it sounds easy, it’s not that simple.

Basically, you start by creating a dedicated page or profile for your business; then you start sharing your websites’ blog articles, announcements, promo and sharing other people’s content to grown connections and improve engagement with your target audience. Your goal is to grow the number of followers/fans that you have and increase the level of engagements for your social media accounts.

You need to dedicate a serious amount of time to see some results with this kind of online marketing strategy.  Hiring a social media marketing specialist is one of the cost-effective ways to make it work.

Tasks you can outsource to a social media specialist:

• Create individual social media accounts for your business.
• Curate and post valuable content that targets specific audience.
• Reply to comment/private messages to increase social activity/engagement.
• Grow Fans/Followers base from niche/target audience.
• Analyse and interpret Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics.
• Analyse the best time to publish content based from your targeted audience time zones.
• Manage Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter ads campaign.
• Design visually-appealing graphics for social media posting.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is an internet marketing strategy used by business owners to drive tons of free traffic to their site by gaining higher ranks on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) of Google, Bing, and Yahoo for keywords related to their products or services.

The concept behind SEO is that you need to boost your website’s authority in your particular niche/industry, by creating valuable content, that is beneficial for your audience. These could be a product, a service, or a piece of information that is worth sharing. The more websites linking to your business, the higher the authority your site will become. Search engines will recognise this and will prioritise your business in search engine results page.

Easier said than done, the whole SEO process would require talented and passionate SEO virtual assistants to make it happened. This internet marketing strategy requires a solid plan, and a dedicated team who can execute SEO marketing campaigns effectively and efficiently as the tasks required for this is really time-consuming. Patience is needed in this kind of marketing strategy as it would take several months before you can see the results of all the work done by your SEO team.

Here are some tasks that you can outsource to an SEO VA

• SEO Copywriting
• Keyword Research
• Competition Research
• On-page SEO
  • Title and meta tags optimisation
  • Improve site loading speed
  • Mobile responsive design
  • Sitemap creation
  • Fix 301 and 404 page not found errors
  • Image alt tags
  • SEO-friendly URL structure
  • SEO-friendly file naming
  • Internal linking
• Off-page SEO
  • Local directory/Business citations
  • Content marketing
  • Press Release
  • Interactions in forums and blogs
  • Partnering with other business-related sites

Search Engine Marketing

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is another form of Internet marketing strategy that shares the same objective with SEO, which is to drive traffic to a website, but this time, using paid advertisements.  Implementing paid ads to a website can be done using either Google Ads or Bing Ads.

The concept behind SEM is that you will bid for your target keyword and set a daily budget. Once the ad campaign is successfully set-up and active, Google/Bing will display it on the front page of search engine results. Position of your ad may vary depending on several factors such as the amount you bid for the keyword, quality of the ad, and quality of mobile landing page experience.

Every time your ad is clicked by a user, you will be charged for a certain amount depending on the daily budget that you have set.

Unlike SEO, SEM can deliver results immediately. As long as your campaign is active, you will see instant traffic to your website.

SEM tasks you can outsource include

• Determine business goals
• Create/Improve landing page
• Analyse and research keywords to target
• Create attractive ad copies for your campaign.
• Create irresistible attention-grabbing headline
• Bid on target keywords
• Set daily budget for PPC campaign
• A/B testing methods.

Content Writer Virtual Assistant

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to improve your brand awareness online. The problem is not all business owners have the time to write content for their site on a regular basis. That’s where the help of a content writer comes in handy.

Hiring a professional SEO copywriter or content writer is the best option to have well-written content on your website. Experienced writers can come up with engaging and informative content that will spark the interests of your customers.

Most content that were outsourced online are blog articles, product descriptions, press release and services page. Finding a virtual assistant that can meet your specific requirement will prove to be a challenge.

Web Developer / WordPress Virtual Assistant

VAs in this category are experts in setting up websites using either hard-coded/readily-available templates or the WordPress platform. They can help you build websites from scratch, buy domain names, set-up web hosting accounts, to the customisation of your site. These professionals are the ones you should be looking for if you want to start doing business online.

WordPress VAs are good at choosing the right plugins for your site. They also perform site backups, speed up website load time, schedule site maintenance, optimise databases, and even customise existing templates according to your specifications.

Graphics Designer Virtual Assistant

These types of virtual assistants create amazing graphics such as company logo, infographics, and templates that can be used for web content, social media marketing campaigns, and other promotional materials. Experienced graphics artists can easily understand brand concepts and can redesign existing ones of a client.

VAs under this category are experts in using photo editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator, CorelDraw, and almost any other software related to editing graphics or image files.

E-Commerce Virtual Assistant

Order fulfilment tasks can become overwhelming when your online store starts to get busy, as you need to process sales order and monitor inventory to avoid delay. You also need to answer questions or enquiries, because customer service is very important to have a successful business. Doing this by yourself is extremely difficult, that’s where an e-commerce virtual assistant comes in to help you manage your online business.

When you hired a virtual sales assistant for this specific role, you will be able to avoid sales order problems as inventory is regularly checked. E-Commerce assistant can process new orders, answer customer questions, create order invoices, handle returns and products exchanges, and transact with your suppliers.

More experienced e-commerce VAs run special offers/promotions, update/add products, write SEO-friendly product descriptions, and with the right training, do bookkeeping for your store.

Customer Service Virtual Assistant

These types of online assistants are very important for your business success. They can handle sales enquiries, provide technical support, provide quotations, and answer billing-related questions. Not just they are good at answering customer enquiries, but they can also help retain your existing clients by providing quality service to them.

Majority of customer services support used email and live chat for ease of communication. Other online businesses are taking phone calls, and using social media platforms to answer queries. Others have set up a help desk where customers can go to this help page, search for their concerns from their database, and scan various information where they can get answers to their questions.

Conclusion

Finding the right virtual assistant for your business can be challenging, but once you have found the right one, you will see huge improvements in your business workflow.

Let us know your requirements, and we can help you find the VA specialist that will be perfect for your company.

‘Outsourcing’ simply means shifting portions of business operations, administrative tasks, or processes to a third party provider rather than performing them internally. As a business strategy, outsourcing is proven to reduce overall costs and increase efficiency.

What’s the Real Score?

There are numerous benefits of Business Process Outsourcing circulating the world wide web to justify convenience and advantages. Here are some of the obvious factors of outsourcing that entrepreneurs and business owners can profit from.

• Cost Advantages – outsourcing reduces operating costs. Same quality workforce at a lower cost.
• Improve Focus – essential to a company’s core business ideology. Leaders and managers can focus on the main mission when they are able to hire highly skilled experts from outsourcing to cover defined processes. Companies can then use internal sources to function for other purposes.
• Efficient and Better Service – BPO companies provide expert staff ensuring excellence and outstanding quality of work as a priority goal.

To Outsource or Not?

Outsourcing sounds simple but on the other hand, it is wide, broad and complex depending on the needs of the company. Outsourcing permits organisations to be more efficient and versatile while reducing cost. Adapting to major change and improvement, presents an enormous opportunity  to see benefits of outsourcing across multiple decentralised economies. The Business Process Outsourcing industry has made a great contribution to Globalisation. It is accompanied by diversity and convergence. We see it as a huge opportunity to include new business partnerships with flexibility to deliver exceptional, world-class service. Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia once said, “My guiding principle is that prosperity can be shared. We can create wealth together. The global economy is not a zero-sum game.”

Of course, business is a risk. From a newly opened small-scale business to an emerging multinational corporation, risks are always present. It’s just a matter of determining on which one is worth the squeeze.

So if you’re planning to start or grow a business, you might want to look at the possibility of entering the Business Process Outsourcing industry.

Offshore staff can be trained and managed in the same way their Australian counterparts do. They can work the same hours, be given access to the same technology and deliver the equivalent work productivity. It has been proven to be a good cost improvement strategy and an effective way to expand one’s business.

Factors that most businesses have considered in building their offshore teams in the Philippines:

• Filipinos are highly educated and skilled.
• Filipinos speak English extremely well.
• Our cultures are very similar.
• The economy is stable and growing.
• Working hours and holidays match up as our overseas staff forfeit their Filipino holidays and follow our Australian calendar.
• There is a huge cost advantage.
• Filipinos have a very strong work ethic.
• The Philippines has better telecommunications and infrastructure than other offshoring countries.
• The Philippines has an extremely good track record in offshoring.
• The Philippines government supports offshoring and outsourcing.

Why Profitmaster BPO?

We have a detailed focus and are dedicated to improving your business efficiency. Data processing, accounting services, telemarketing, customer service, phone answering, marketing, bookkeeping and general administration are just some of our specialties. We can help staff your business remotely and effectively, whilst saving you a huge amount of time and money.

We work with you. We do not tailor your business to our needs. Instead, we tailor our solutions to your business.

We hire the right people. At Profitmaster BPO, we recruit the best candidates to ensure our clients get the right staff for the job.

We believe in teamwork. By working together to achieve success, we build lifelong relationships with both our clients and employees.

The resulting ability to reclassify skilled resources to income earning functions is an added benefit for management strategy that demands higher profits and lower costs while maintaining positive work ethics with improved resource capability.

The Philippines is an increasingly prominent provider of accounting outsourcing services and bookkeeping outsourcing services. Profitmaster is based in the Philippines.

Despite the growth of outsourced accounting services, and outsourced bookkeeping services, there are many firms who still ask: what is offshore accounting?

Once explained, the next question about the use of offshore accountants is about the quality of work. Profitmaster’s use of degree qualified, experienced CPA’s having strong skill and language proficiencies and producing high quality work is the reason given clients why outsource accounting services work for them.

And there is the question of PI insurance. If you are in public practice and considering offshore accounting to the Philippines for your firm, it is worth a call to your PI insurer to understand your policy provisions about outsourcing accounting work offshore.

Many PI providers will not provide cover unless the outsourced accountant Philippines provider can demonstrate that they have also cover for their Australian clients.

As the industry of offshoring continues to skyrocket, the range of services provided by outsourced accounting professionals also grows in intricacy and variety. Clients have shown increased preparedness to work with these professionals and are likewise significantly prepared to claim for negligence wherever offshoring financial services agreement may have been compromised or when there is a delay or incurred losses.

The issue is important because of the significant risks being faced by accounting firms in Australia. There are many cases where firms have suffered considerable liabilities as a result of the work done by poor providers. These risks must be considered no matter whether you are considering using offshore bookkeeping services or offshore accounting services.

The Australian professional bodies have provided guidance to assist accountant understand and mitigate these risks, as does the Tax Practitioners Board. The TPB states “providing adequate supervisory arrangements is critical in the offshoring tax service business model”.

APES GN 30 Outsourced Service has been issued by Accounting Professional & Ethical Standards Board Limited (“APES”). APES GN 30 provides guidance for Members in Public Practice to consider when managing the risks associated with providing or utilising Outsourced Services.

Accountants utilising outsourced accounting services are required to evaluate their ability to comply with Section 130, Professional Competence and Due Care of APES 110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants.

Basically this means that accountants are required to consider the risk of potential inability to perform an engagement due to poor performance of the outsourced accounting services provider.

Profitmaster is a professional services firm providing bookkeeping and offshore accounting. This year we celebrate our third year of operation and ensuring and our compliance with all of the requirements of the Australian accounting bodies has been an essential element of our success as an accounting bpo.

Our founder and CEO is a Chartered Accountant with more than 30 years’ experience holding a practicing certificate with CAANZ. Accounting firm are assured that our professional indemnity insurance policy complies with the requirements of CAANZ and CPA Australia.

All things considered, poor recruitment is a huge cost to the business. Lost productivity, wages, revenue, and the cost of re-hiring are just the start. Not to mention the impact on team culture and the clean-up costs required to fix things.

Recent indicators suggest a bad hire can cost an incredible 20 per cent more than the annual salary of that hire.

The effective outsourcing solution

A solution to this problem is to hire your staff through a third party who can recruit and manage the performance of staff for you.

It was not so long ago that companies were using outsourced staff solely for the cost benefits obtained. Other benefits were outside the management rationale to engage staff, especially from overseas. As the Australian labour market tightens, the reasons to engage outsourced staff are changing. Now offshore outsourcing is becoming increasingly mainstream as businesses struggle to keep up with their needs for good and capable personnel.

Benefits in outsourcing

The benefits of outsourcing are not just about cost savings. Our clients are regularly reporting their leaders’ and managers’ increased focus on the company’s core business ideology, as well as more efficient and better client service. However, whether you are recruiting onshore or offshore, one thing is certain. The cost of a mistake has an expensive impact on productivity, wages, revenue, as well as the cost of re-hiring and clean-up costs.

If you are going to look at outsourced staff, you must adopt the same mindset for offshore recruitment as you do for onshore recruitment.

Too often I find myself in conversations with potential clients discussing how ‘cheaply’ they can find their next team member. I say “team member” deliberately because my belief is that all outsourced employees should be treated just like the other members of their team…not just a bottom on a seat.

Effective outsourcing saves staffing costs

Particularly if you are strategic in how you address your staffing needs and consider the long-term growth of the company.

From my experience, when businesses recruit locally, they are clear on what a successful candidate looks like. When that ideal local candidate is found, companies are often prepared to pay a considerable amount more than originally anticipated to secure that person. This is where the two strategies of in-house staffing and outsourced staffing become diametrically opposed.

At the moment, it is easier to source and secure highly skilled and experienced staff from the Philippines compared to sourcing in the current tight labour environment here in Australia. I know this because I have been active in the Philippines labour market for the past 8 years. Companies like ours are specialists in finding and engaging suitable candidates in the Philippines for vacant roles in Australia at significantly reduced rates compared to Australia. But this does not mean we compromise on quality.

So, how does this reduce the cost of poor recruitment?

Understanding that there are substantial savings to be made by hiring through specialised offshore providers such as Profitmaster, your evaluation to engage offshore staff should be focused on; What value does this person bring? Where do I want to take my business? and, How will this person help me get there?

We are in the business of providing quality, seamless solutions for our clients. It’s not about getting the “cheapest option for now” solution. We proudly provide our staff with the highest quality working conditions and work experiences, as well as professional development and personal growth. We hire staff for our clients based on their personal traits such as loyalty, integrity, and attitude. When you combine these with capability and skill, the result is that we hire great people. There is no doubt about it. We even guarantee it.

If you are thinking about your next hire, get in touch with us and discuss how we may be able to assist you to find the next member of your team.