Tips to steer your small business with an e-book

An intelligent marketer strives to create awareness, educate and aid in the decision making of his customers. These days, marketers lure their target segment using an array of nifty digital tools. An important one amongst them is the E-book. An e-book augments a small business’s entry into the market and reinforces its identity from the very beginning. Every small-business marketer will benefit if he/she uses E-books prudently to further the business. An e-book has benefits for both, the customers as well as the marketers. It is the source of maximum information for customers at minimum cost for marketers. So, e-books are value marketing in the true sense. So, your E-book must be designed strategically to appeal to a large number of visitors and close your business with a majority of them. Before embarking on the design of your E-book, you should reflect upon the objectives of your marketing and relate them to your e-book. This will further decide the content of the e-book, the tone and style of the content and the like. Such prudence in the making of an e-book will reinforce your marketing strategies and align them with the same. So, if you are a small business marketer and you are going to launch an e-book, take a look at the following tips on e-book marketing. They will enhance the benefits you harvest from your e-book. Tailor your e-book for your right audience: Your e-book should meet the expectation of your target audience. They should get the exact information they are seeking and further it should entice them to choose your products or services over your competitor’s. Get good book-reviews for your e-book: Good book reviews increase the merit of your book. They corroborate the faith of your readers in your book and entice them to read it. Get reviews from reputed personalities and industry experts. It will establish and affirm your expertise in your business. Delight your readers by gifting: Delight your readers by gifting your e-book as a prize. You may decide the winner by holding an engaging contest or any other pull strategy like e-mail sweepstake. It’s a good bait. Send e-mail scripts of your e-book to relevant customers: Send best liners and e-mails to the relevant customers and prospects. By doing this, you will make your e-book an attractive portal which invites qualified prospects. Get links from reputed link sharing social websites: Getting your link shared by a reputed social network is useful to trigger the word of mouse. But be mindful to respect the rules of such reputed social sites. Take care to state a few key insights from your book briefly without being over promotional. Address the buyers from the perspective of their journey: Your e-book should help close sales with your buyers. So, it should be linked to your landing pages. You e-book’s content should address the whole journey of your buyers. It should be informative, differentiating your business from your competitors by stating facts and figures, helping your buyer to make the decision by giving details of the buying procedure. The above tips of e-book marketing will add value to your marketing efforts and help you reap good results. So if you are a passionate digital marketer, you must steer your business to success by the right usage of an e-book. In fact, there are no hurdles for e-book marketing. If you are losing out on time for e-book marketing, you have a smart option to outsource the same. Or if you want an expert’s advice on e-book marketing, the same might be availed through outsourcing. Right from sending e-mail scripts to content writing, there are virtual experts to handle everything about e-book marketing. One stop Virtual Assistance service providers like GetFriday are one of your best bets in this regard. So, get started with your e-book marketing from today!

Tips to steer your small business with an e-book Read More »

An intelligent marketer strives to create awareness, educate and aid in the decision making of his customers. These days, marketers lure their target segment using an array of nifty digital tools. An important one amongst them is the E-book. An e-book augments a small business’s entry into the market and reinforces its identity from the very beginning. Every small-business marketer will benefit if he/she uses E-books prudently to further the business. An e-book has benefits for both, the customers as well as the marketers. It is the source of maximum information for customers at minimum cost for marketers. So, e-books are value marketing in the true sense. So, your E-book must be designed strategically to appeal to a large number of visitors and close your business with a majority of them. Before embarking on the design of your E-book, you should reflect upon the objectives of your marketing and relate them to your e-book. This will further decide the content of the e-book, the tone and style of the content and the like. Such prudence in the making of an e-book will reinforce your marketing strategies and align them with the same. So, if you are a small business marketer and you are going to launch an e-book, take a look at the following tips on e-book marketing. They will enhance the benefits you harvest from your e-book. Tailor your e-book for your right audience: Your e-book should meet the expectation of your target audience. They should get the exact information they are seeking and further it should entice them to choose your products or services over your competitor’s. Get good book-reviews for your e-book: Good book reviews increase the merit of your book. They corroborate the faith of your readers in your book and entice them to read it. Get reviews from reputed personalities and industry experts. It will establish and affirm your expertise in your business. Delight your readers by gifting: Delight your readers by gifting your e-book as a prize. You may decide the winner by holding an engaging contest or any other pull strategy like e-mail sweepstake. It’s a good bait. Send e-mail scripts of your e-book to relevant customers: Send best liners and e-mails to the relevant customers and prospects. By doing this, you will make your e-book an attractive portal which invites qualified prospects. Get links from reputed link sharing social websites: Getting your link shared by a reputed social network is useful to trigger the word of mouse. But be mindful to respect the rules of such reputed social sites. Take care to state a few key insights from your book briefly without being over promotional. Address the buyers from the perspective of their journey: Your e-book should help close sales with your buyers. So, it should be linked to your landing pages. You e-book’s content should address the whole journey of your buyers. It should be informative, differentiating your business from your competitors by stating facts and figures, helping your buyer to make the decision by giving details of the buying procedure. The above tips of e-book marketing will add value to your marketing efforts and help you reap good results. So if you are a passionate digital marketer, you must steer your business to success by the right usage of an e-book. In fact, there are no hurdles for e-book marketing. If you are losing out on time for e-book marketing, you have a smart option to outsource the same. Or if you want an expert’s advice on e-book marketing, the same might be availed through outsourcing. Right from sending e-mail scripts to content writing, there are virtual experts to handle everything about e-book marketing. One stop Virtual Assistance service providers like GetFriday are one of your best bets in this regard. So, get started with your e-book marketing from today!

How you can get Your VA to help manage your blog while you start business

The marketing of your business is comprised of a number of different activities and blogging is indisputably one of them. If you are a perfectionist or used to doing everything on your own, you might find it difficult to outsource activities. But doing every little task yourself dilutes your focus and leaves you with little time for core activities. First, one needs to prioritize all the activities and decide which of these need your personal attention and which can be delegated or outsourced. The key to driving a successful business lies in allocating the right amount of time and efforts towards the activities that are strategic to the business. You must give the lion’s share of your focus to those tasks. At the same time, you must maintain the quality of other activities such as blogging, book keeping and such other activities. Now you might be wondering why blogs matter so much. Blogs help in generating interest among the target audiences and thereby increase the traffic to your business. Your blog educates your potential customers about the services and products you offer and their value proposition. Now blogging consists of many sub-tasks like content creation, SEO i.e. hyperlinking, keyword usage etc., using the right blog format and the like. In addition to the informational aspect of your blog, its format should be easy to browse and well connected to the relevant pages of your business website. It thus requires a range of professional inputs. Compromising on these aspects might lower the quality of your blog and result in a loss of traffic. Such insights might be best filled in by a professional blogger but at times hiring a full time professional blogger might be expensive. That’s where Virtual Assistant providers like GetFriday come into the picture. They lend the services of professional bloggers at pocket-friendly rates. If you look for a list of best tasks to outsource to Virtual Assistants, blogging and the sub-tasks related to blogging will definitely find a mention in it. But to reap the benefits from outsourcing blogging to a Virtual Assistant, proper planning is required. When you choose your assistant, you must be careful that he/she is the right person to perform your task. Moreover it?s best to have all facets of your blog looked into by your Virtual Assistants. Blogging is a special task which involves content writing, graphic/web designing and developing. So your blog will be better managed by a team of Virtual Assistants who handle different aspects of the blog. While outsourcing your blog, do not miss out on these tips. Make the most of the designers: An attractive blog design gives a sharp edge to your competitiveness. So, you must make sure you have professional designers in your team and they understand the purpose of your blog. Get backlinks to your blog: Submit your blog to directories so that you get backlinks from relevant sources. This is a highly time demanding task and it’s wise to outsource it. Your Virtual Assistant must know the right platforms to submit your content because the quality of backlinks impact your SEO. Let your Virtual Assistant update your blog post: When you outsource blogging to a Virtual Assistant, give him/her a clear idea about the agenda of blogging. Let him know about the monthly or weekly schedule for updating your blog. You don’t need a specialist for that activity but it consumes a lot of time. Let it be handled by your Virtual Assistant. Integrate SEO to your blogging: Make sure your Virtual Assistant takes care of SEO for the blog. The content must also be created accordingly. It should have the right keyword density and variation. An SEO specialist can enrich you blog with expert inputs. Make the content writer familiar with your business: You content speaks for you. So, your content writer should have a deep understanding of your business; its brand goals and most importantly the purpose of your blog. Only then will your content serve its intended purpose. Once you outsource these activities of blogging, you can give your valuable time to the core activities of your business. So get started with these tips to outsource blogging today!

How you can get Your VA to help manage your blog while you start business Read More »

The marketing of your business is comprised of a number of different activities and blogging is indisputably one of them. If you are a perfectionist or used to doing everything on your own, you might find it difficult to outsource activities. But doing every little task yourself dilutes your focus and leaves you with little time for core activities. First, one needs to prioritize all the activities and decide which of these need your personal attention and which can be delegated or outsourced. The key to driving a successful business lies in allocating the right amount of time and efforts towards the activities that are strategic to the business. You must give the lion’s share of your focus to those tasks. At the same time, you must maintain the quality of other activities such as blogging, book keeping and such other activities. Now you might be wondering why blogs matter so much. Blogs help in generating interest among the target audiences and thereby increase the traffic to your business. Your blog educates your potential customers about the services and products you offer and their value proposition. Now blogging consists of many sub-tasks like content creation, SEO i.e. hyperlinking, keyword usage etc., using the right blog format and the like. In addition to the informational aspect of your blog, its format should be easy to browse and well connected to the relevant pages of your business website. It thus requires a range of professional inputs. Compromising on these aspects might lower the quality of your blog and result in a loss of traffic. Such insights might be best filled in by a professional blogger but at times hiring a full time professional blogger might be expensive. That’s where Virtual Assistant providers like GetFriday come into the picture. They lend the services of professional bloggers at pocket-friendly rates. If you look for a list of best tasks to outsource to Virtual Assistants, blogging and the sub-tasks related to blogging will definitely find a mention in it. But to reap the benefits from outsourcing blogging to a Virtual Assistant, proper planning is required. When you choose your assistant, you must be careful that he/she is the right person to perform your task. Moreover it?s best to have all facets of your blog looked into by your Virtual Assistants. Blogging is a special task which involves content writing, graphic/web designing and developing. So your blog will be better managed by a team of Virtual Assistants who handle different aspects of the blog. While outsourcing your blog, do not miss out on these tips. Make the most of the designers: An attractive blog design gives a sharp edge to your competitiveness. So, you must make sure you have professional designers in your team and they understand the purpose of your blog. Get backlinks to your blog: Submit your blog to directories so that you get backlinks from relevant sources. This is a highly time demanding task and it’s wise to outsource it. Your Virtual Assistant must know the right platforms to submit your content because the quality of backlinks impact your SEO. Let your Virtual Assistant update your blog post: When you outsource blogging to a Virtual Assistant, give him/her a clear idea about the agenda of blogging. Let him know about the monthly or weekly schedule for updating your blog. You don’t need a specialist for that activity but it consumes a lot of time. Let it be handled by your Virtual Assistant. Integrate SEO to your blogging: Make sure your Virtual Assistant takes care of SEO for the blog. The content must also be created accordingly. It should have the right keyword density and variation. An SEO specialist can enrich you blog with expert inputs. Make the content writer familiar with your business: You content speaks for you. So, your content writer should have a deep understanding of your business; its brand goals and most importantly the purpose of your blog. Only then will your content serve its intended purpose. Once you outsource these activities of blogging, you can give your valuable time to the core activities of your business. So get started with these tips to outsource blogging today!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow Read More »

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

Top tips to build your online business brand with your Virtual Assistant

When you build your online brand, you create your business signature in terms of your company name, the product or service you offer, your brand logo, the jingle, the tagline etc. Your online brand bolsters your business identity and thus your business becomes more worthwhile in the market. The otherwise naive crowd then starts to visit your website, clicks through your pages, likes and reacts to your social media promotions, and start engaging with your content present online. Gradually your brand buzz turns on. This is how doing right the online branding earns you wonder. However, online branding in itself is a challenging process. Before going to build your business brand, you need to realize the essence of your brand and the risks associated with it. Your online brand speaks for your business. So, before building it, get into the crux of your business, understand it, and determine what impression you want to create for your business. Since your online brand is going to create your business impression in the market, you must ascertain that your brand is strongly likable. The brand elements like logo, name, jingle and tagline should be relevant to your business and attractive enough to make your customers and prospects feel happy whenever they approach your brand. Your brand is going to build the trust amongst your clients; your brand is a promise of the value offered to your clients. In long run it determines whether your clients will like to avail services from you. So, the strength of your online brand determines your revenues and profits. Your brand helps you to stand out of the competition. It convinces your prospects that your service/product is the best out of all the options they can choose from. Though building a strong brand fetches you brownies, it’s not an easy process. You, as a small business owner or an entrepreneur are tied in the limit of resources, whether it is money, people or time. In addition, you are overwhelmed with too many responsibilities to handle. You need to manage somehow everything on your own. Hiring full time experts to help you with branding is too expensive. Despite of all these limitations you need expert inputs to fetch expected returns on your marketing investments. So the best solution is to hire an expert virtual assistant and involve him or her in the brand building process. There are Virtual Assistant service providers that have the knack of marketing and drive your marketing efforts with rich inputs. They will help you to reap the expected returns on your marketing investments. Before hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you in your marketing efforts, you should have some nifty tips to avail the best results of hiring a Virtual assistant. Here are some tips to avail the best out of Virtual Assistance for your brand building. Let your Virtual Assistant be a part of your business: Your Virtual Assistant is your remote assistant, who will serve you without his/ her physical presence in your organization. Your brand is the reflection of your business, its culture and objectives. So your Virtual Assistant should be familiar to these very important elements. Make him a part your business, instead of treating him like a third party agency or part-time worker. Let your Virtual assistant have the full knowledge about your business. Let him have a deep insight about your objective, the purpose of your brand, the culture of the organization. Content Creation: Your brand is closely related to the value offered by you with your products and services. It creates an identity of your business to increase the reputation in the market. Content chosen by you for your brand communication is going to create that identity for your brand. People like to invest in less risky products and services. Your brand identity is going to offset the risks for your prospects. Avail your Virtual Assistant’s help in creating communication message and content for your brand. Content helps you in growing fans for your business and shapes the identity of your brand. Hiring a content expert team in the form of Virtual Assistants is very critical step towards your brand building exercise. Educate the customers through your blogs and other online content: You have to prove the differentiated value your business offers to your customers. Your prospect have lots of other known brands to choose from; to win amongst all, you need to prove that your brand is better and stronger than the rest. Get your Virtual Assistant to create blogs and other informational content for your target audience, where you highlight your unique value proposition. Make your brand relatable: Build social value for your customers. Get the help of your Virtual Assistant to do a proper study of your target segment and understand their self image and social identity that they seek. You may hire a Virtual Assistant with market research skills and build your brand persona to diligently match the social need of your customers. Make an active presence in social media: An active presence in social media requires a lot of time and persistence. A Virtual Assistant offers you the best help in this field. Giving prompt responses to consumer queries, creating engaging content, posts and activities to increase the involvement of your consumers, and increasing the frequency of posts in social media will strengthen the identity of your brand and improve your Social Media Engagement. It’s time to come out of your worries of ‘Brand Building’. Build your online business brand through Internet marketing experts of GetFriday and Relax!

Top tips to build your online business brand with your Virtual Assistant Read More »

When you build your online brand, you create your business signature in terms of your company name, the product or service you offer, your brand logo, the jingle, the tagline etc. Your online brand bolsters your business identity and thus your business becomes more worthwhile in the market. The otherwise naive crowd then starts to visit your website, clicks through your pages, likes and reacts to your social media promotions, and start engaging with your content present online. Gradually your brand buzz turns on. This is how doing right the online branding earns you wonder. However, online branding in itself is a challenging process. Before going to build your business brand, you need to realize the essence of your brand and the risks associated with it. Your online brand speaks for your business. So, before building it, get into the crux of your business, understand it, and determine what impression you want to create for your business. Since your online brand is going to create your business impression in the market, you must ascertain that your brand is strongly likable. The brand elements like logo, name, jingle and tagline should be relevant to your business and attractive enough to make your customers and prospects feel happy whenever they approach your brand. Your brand is going to build the trust amongst your clients; your brand is a promise of the value offered to your clients. In long run it determines whether your clients will like to avail services from you. So, the strength of your online brand determines your revenues and profits. Your brand helps you to stand out of the competition. It convinces your prospects that your service/product is the best out of all the options they can choose from. Though building a strong brand fetches you brownies, it’s not an easy process. You, as a small business owner or an entrepreneur are tied in the limit of resources, whether it is money, people or time. In addition, you are overwhelmed with too many responsibilities to handle. You need to manage somehow everything on your own. Hiring full time experts to help you with branding is too expensive. Despite of all these limitations you need expert inputs to fetch expected returns on your marketing investments. So the best solution is to hire an expert virtual assistant and involve him or her in the brand building process. There are Virtual Assistant service providers that have the knack of marketing and drive your marketing efforts with rich inputs. They will help you to reap the expected returns on your marketing investments. Before hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you in your marketing efforts, you should have some nifty tips to avail the best results of hiring a Virtual assistant. Here are some tips to avail the best out of Virtual Assistance for your brand building. Let your Virtual Assistant be a part of your business: Your Virtual Assistant is your remote assistant, who will serve you without his/ her physical presence in your organization. Your brand is the reflection of your business, its culture and objectives. So your Virtual Assistant should be familiar to these very important elements. Make him a part your business, instead of treating him like a third party agency or part-time worker. Let your Virtual assistant have the full knowledge about your business. Let him have a deep insight about your objective, the purpose of your brand, the culture of the organization. Content Creation: Your brand is closely related to the value offered by you with your products and services. It creates an identity of your business to increase the reputation in the market. Content chosen by you for your brand communication is going to create that identity for your brand. People like to invest in less risky products and services. Your brand identity is going to offset the risks for your prospects. Avail your Virtual Assistant’s help in creating communication message and content for your brand. Content helps you in growing fans for your business and shapes the identity of your brand. Hiring a content expert team in the form of Virtual Assistants is very critical step towards your brand building exercise. Educate the customers through your blogs and other online content: You have to prove the differentiated value your business offers to your customers. Your prospect have lots of other known brands to choose from; to win amongst all, you need to prove that your brand is better and stronger than the rest. Get your Virtual Assistant to create blogs and other informational content for your target audience, where you highlight your unique value proposition. Make your brand relatable: Build social value for your customers. Get the help of your Virtual Assistant to do a proper study of your target segment and understand their self image and social identity that they seek. You may hire a Virtual Assistant with market research skills and build your brand persona to diligently match the social need of your customers. Make an active presence in social media: An active presence in social media requires a lot of time and persistence. A Virtual Assistant offers you the best help in this field. Giving prompt responses to consumer queries, creating engaging content, posts and activities to increase the involvement of your consumers, and increasing the frequency of posts in social media will strengthen the identity of your brand and improve your Social Media Engagement. It’s time to come out of your worries of ‘Brand Building’. Build your online business brand through Internet marketing experts of GetFriday and Relax!

The Top Five Work-related Reasons For Stress And How To Bust Them

When we feel threatened, our nervous systems release two main stress hormones- adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones cause our blood pressures to raise, hearts to beat faster and breaths to quicken. Stress is our bodies’ evolutionary way of preparing for stressful situations. Chronic day-to-day work-related stress can be a real killer. Let us take a look at the top 5 reasons for stress and some possible solution. 1. Too Many Responsibilities We all want more responsibility and the authority that comes with it. This is especially applicable to busy individuals, entrepreneurs and business owners. However, when one person has way too much responsibility, the sheer overwork can lead to very high stress levels. The stress, though work-related, doesn’t take much time to creep into one’s personal life as well. Stress is called a silent killer, and with good reason. One doesn’t think of stress as a possible cause for various inexplicable health disorders, but stress is the culprit nevertheless. What can be done to avert this situation? 2. Too Little Time To Manage Tasks Any entrepreneur or small business owner will understand the nature of the stress that occurs when there’s just not enough time to manage everything. Managing a business on one’s own or with minimal staff leaves literally no time for a personal life. When a person suffers continual stress while trying to make every minute stretch, the body is constantly thrown into overdrive. All vital organs are forced to work harder just to cope with the stress. It doesn’t have to be this way. 3. Limited Resources Preventing Effective Job Execution A small business owner or individual entrepreneur has to manage a great deal with limited infrastructure and manpower. For a business person, limited resources can spell the end of creative entrepreneurship. Borrowing more capital is not the only way to resolve resource limitations, as it leads only to greater debt. Trying to manage stringent deadlines while struggling with limited resources can spell doom for small businesses. 4. Worry Regarding Capital Financial worries can be a real killer; they can creep up on individual entrepreneurs and small business owners and plague them for the longest time. One strong reason for financial worries is overstretched capital. Small business owners and individual entrepreneurs take on too much and then struggle to complete pending projects. Needless to say, this only leads to loss of credibility and more financial worry. 5. Lack of a Positive Work-life Balance Tired and overworked employees don’t make great assets. In order to ensure better employee performance, employers must learn to distribute workloads better. One should aim to strike the ideal balance between work and life; a fixed number of hours at work and plenty of time devoted to family, relaxation and hobbies. Good employers implement various strategies to ensure that their employees get plenty of challenge at work while maintaining good health and enjoying a hearty personal life. Possible Solutions To Alleviate Work-related Stress Various solutions are available to alleviate work-related stress. One can develop hobbies, take more breaks, do yoga, meditate, commune with nature and spend time with family. While these solutions are proven to reduce stress, some issues require a deeper look. Resource and manpower restrictions won’t go away through holistic solutions. Outsourcing is a great solution, freeing up resources, improving stress levels and positively impacting business bottom-lines. One can outsource time-consuming tasks such as customer management, administration, database management, marketing and more. Outsourcing can help alleviate work-related stress, streamline business processes and free up time to focus on what’s really important ? the business bottom line. Busy individuals and small business owners can now confidently outsource their time-consuming activities, from administration, operation, marketing, HR and more to GetFriday. There’s no need to suffer continual stress when GetFriday offers access to a pool of multi-faceted expertise and service.

The Top Five Work-related Reasons For Stress And How To Bust Them Read More »

When we feel threatened, our nervous systems release two main stress hormones- adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones cause our blood pressures to raise, hearts to beat faster and breaths to quicken. Stress is our bodies’ evolutionary way of preparing for stressful situations. Chronic day-to-day work-related stress can be a real killer. Let us take a look at the top 5 reasons for stress and some possible solution. 1. Too Many Responsibilities We all want more responsibility and the authority that comes with it. This is especially applicable to busy individuals, entrepreneurs and business owners. However, when one person has way too much responsibility, the sheer overwork can lead to very high stress levels. The stress, though work-related, doesn’t take much time to creep into one’s personal life as well. Stress is called a silent killer, and with good reason. One doesn’t think of stress as a possible cause for various inexplicable health disorders, but stress is the culprit nevertheless. What can be done to avert this situation? 2. Too Little Time To Manage Tasks Any entrepreneur or small business owner will understand the nature of the stress that occurs when there’s just not enough time to manage everything. Managing a business on one’s own or with minimal staff leaves literally no time for a personal life. When a person suffers continual stress while trying to make every minute stretch, the body is constantly thrown into overdrive. All vital organs are forced to work harder just to cope with the stress. It doesn’t have to be this way. 3. Limited Resources Preventing Effective Job Execution A small business owner or individual entrepreneur has to manage a great deal with limited infrastructure and manpower. For a business person, limited resources can spell the end of creative entrepreneurship. Borrowing more capital is not the only way to resolve resource limitations, as it leads only to greater debt. Trying to manage stringent deadlines while struggling with limited resources can spell doom for small businesses. 4. Worry Regarding Capital Financial worries can be a real killer; they can creep up on individual entrepreneurs and small business owners and plague them for the longest time. One strong reason for financial worries is overstretched capital. Small business owners and individual entrepreneurs take on too much and then struggle to complete pending projects. Needless to say, this only leads to loss of credibility and more financial worry. 5. Lack of a Positive Work-life Balance Tired and overworked employees don’t make great assets. In order to ensure better employee performance, employers must learn to distribute workloads better. One should aim to strike the ideal balance between work and life; a fixed number of hours at work and plenty of time devoted to family, relaxation and hobbies. Good employers implement various strategies to ensure that their employees get plenty of challenge at work while maintaining good health and enjoying a hearty personal life. Possible Solutions To Alleviate Work-related Stress Various solutions are available to alleviate work-related stress. One can develop hobbies, take more breaks, do yoga, meditate, commune with nature and spend time with family. While these solutions are proven to reduce stress, some issues require a deeper look. Resource and manpower restrictions won’t go away through holistic solutions. Outsourcing is a great solution, freeing up resources, improving stress levels and positively impacting business bottom-lines. One can outsource time-consuming tasks such as customer management, administration, database management, marketing and more. Outsourcing can help alleviate work-related stress, streamline business processes and free up time to focus on what’s really important ? the business bottom line. Busy individuals and small business owners can now confidently outsource their time-consuming activities, from administration, operation, marketing, HR and more to GetFriday. There’s no need to suffer continual stress when GetFriday offers access to a pool of multi-faceted expertise and service.

Taking a Vacation? Try these tips to make a tiptop trip!

Don’t you beam with happiness while narrating the tales of your exotic trips to your friends? You may be a globetrotter who doesn’t want to leave any corner of the world unseen or you may be a busy sales person who drives business outside from office or out of the city you live in. Be it for leisure or work, trips, no matter how small or big, are an inevitable part our lives. By now you would have gotten accustomed to the pros and cons of travelling and your trip diaries are a rich reservoir of your memories. It’s a fact that vacationing, though glamorous on the outside, can be quite tricky. Before reaping the sweet pleasures of a trip, you need to run a long list of dull errands like doing online research for flights, booking cheap flight tickets, reserving rooms in a hotel of your choice and within your budget, arranging commutation in the destination and the like. If you are a busy professional, these odd jobs can be stressful. For instance, you need to meet your clients in Tokyo tomorrow and you have simply not found the time to make the necessary travel arrangements. Making travel arrangements can take a huge chunk of your precious time if you want to get the best of your travel itinerary By focusing on these errands, you may forget to focus on other activities that are important i.e. working on that important presentation, making the necessary arrangements to have your inboxes filtered and checked, getting all the pre-travel shopping done for your spouse and kids or making sure that all your work has been duly handed over to a back-up employee. In simple words, making the arrangements for a trip should not soil the excitement of actually going on the trip and getting to the destination. Here’s what you can do to get all your pre-trip planning sorted. 1. Define and understand the purpose of your trip: Every trip has a strong purpose behind it. If you are a business-owner and you are travelling for business, make sure you are prepped and focused on nailing that important business pitch with your clients and business partners. Focus on the core tasks i.e. making a convincing presentation, charting out new business ideas, etc. If you are planning a family trip, focus on selecting the perfect family-friendly destinations and channel your energies towards doing some research for sightseeing, leisure, shopping, travel etc. 2. Make A List Of What You Want To Do During Your Trip: Once you have understood the purpose of your trip, take the next step and list out the activities you would like to do to make the trip a memorable one. For example if you seek adventure list out the activities that you will love to partake in. Start preparing for the trip accordingly. Get your suitcases packed with the clothes or gear that you will require for a leisure or business trip. Gather as much information as you can about the local adventure sports, the best guides, places to eat, shop and much more! The same applies for a business trip too. You need to jot down what you want to get done during the trip and plan accordingly. 3. Make The Arrangements: Now that you have decided what you want to do on the trip, where you want to go and the purpose behind it, get down to actually booking your travel and sorting out the itinerary. Out of all the steps, arranging for flight/train tickets, accommodation and booking tours will take the longest time. 4. Or.. HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT TO DO IT FOR YOU! If you don’t have the time and expertise to do this, you have a choice to take help from an expert who can get all of it done for you in half the time. A Virtual Assistant, perhaps? There are Virtual Assistant service providers like GetFriday who can help you offload mundane travel arrangement tasks such as these and give you more time to focus on all the other aspects that actually matter. Why break your head planning for the trip, when you should be enjoying it? Remember, going on a trip doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make all the arrangements on your own. As mentioned above, stick to focusing on the purpose of your trip and what you need to do when you get there. . Don’t take the stress of planning or preparing arrangements for a trip.There are Virtual Assistant experts to serve you at every step of your trip, be it booking tickets or picking a romantic restaurant for a candle light dinner during your honeymoon. With reliable Virtual Assistants, you should outsource all trip planning and arrangement tasks. Free up your time, focus just on business in the meanwhile, or just get into the holiday mode before boarding that flight. What use is it if you are going to burden yourself with all the pre-trip hassle? Outsource, sit back and enjoy a fruitful trip!

Taking a Vacation? Try these tips to make a tiptop trip! Read More »

Don’t you beam with happiness while narrating the tales of your exotic trips to your friends? You may be a globetrotter who doesn’t want to leave any corner of the world unseen or you may be a busy sales person who drives business outside from office or out of the city you live in. Be it for leisure or work, trips, no matter how small or big, are an inevitable part our lives. By now you would have gotten accustomed to the pros and cons of travelling and your trip diaries are a rich reservoir of your memories. It’s a fact that vacationing, though glamorous on the outside, can be quite tricky. Before reaping the sweet pleasures of a trip, you need to run a long list of dull errands like doing online research for flights, booking cheap flight tickets, reserving rooms in a hotel of your choice and within your budget, arranging commutation in the destination and the like. If you are a busy professional, these odd jobs can be stressful. For instance, you need to meet your clients in Tokyo tomorrow and you have simply not found the time to make the necessary travel arrangements. Making travel arrangements can take a huge chunk of your precious time if you want to get the best of your travel itinerary By focusing on these errands, you may forget to focus on other activities that are important i.e. working on that important presentation, making the necessary arrangements to have your inboxes filtered and checked, getting all the pre-travel shopping done for your spouse and kids or making sure that all your work has been duly handed over to a back-up employee. In simple words, making the arrangements for a trip should not soil the excitement of actually going on the trip and getting to the destination. Here’s what you can do to get all your pre-trip planning sorted. 1. Define and understand the purpose of your trip: Every trip has a strong purpose behind it. If you are a business-owner and you are travelling for business, make sure you are prepped and focused on nailing that important business pitch with your clients and business partners. Focus on the core tasks i.e. making a convincing presentation, charting out new business ideas, etc. If you are planning a family trip, focus on selecting the perfect family-friendly destinations and channel your energies towards doing some research for sightseeing, leisure, shopping, travel etc. 2. Make A List Of What You Want To Do During Your Trip: Once you have understood the purpose of your trip, take the next step and list out the activities you would like to do to make the trip a memorable one. For example if you seek adventure list out the activities that you will love to partake in. Start preparing for the trip accordingly. Get your suitcases packed with the clothes or gear that you will require for a leisure or business trip. Gather as much information as you can about the local adventure sports, the best guides, places to eat, shop and much more! The same applies for a business trip too. You need to jot down what you want to get done during the trip and plan accordingly. 3. Make The Arrangements: Now that you have decided what you want to do on the trip, where you want to go and the purpose behind it, get down to actually booking your travel and sorting out the itinerary. Out of all the steps, arranging for flight/train tickets, accommodation and booking tours will take the longest time. 4. Or.. HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT TO DO IT FOR YOU! If you don’t have the time and expertise to do this, you have a choice to take help from an expert who can get all of it done for you in half the time. A Virtual Assistant, perhaps? There are Virtual Assistant service providers like GetFriday who can help you offload mundane travel arrangement tasks such as these and give you more time to focus on all the other aspects that actually matter. Why break your head planning for the trip, when you should be enjoying it? Remember, going on a trip doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make all the arrangements on your own. As mentioned above, stick to focusing on the purpose of your trip and what you need to do when you get there. . Don’t take the stress of planning or preparing arrangements for a trip.There are Virtual Assistant experts to serve you at every step of your trip, be it booking tickets or picking a romantic restaurant for a candle light dinner during your honeymoon. With reliable Virtual Assistants, you should outsource all trip planning and arrangement tasks. Free up your time, focus just on business in the meanwhile, or just get into the holiday mode before boarding that flight. What use is it if you are going to burden yourself with all the pre-trip hassle? Outsource, sit back and enjoy a fruitful trip!

How You Can Leverage Social Listening To Boost Business Growth- What It Is & What You Can Do

So, you are familiar with blogging and make sporadic appearances on message boards, commenting forums and your blog page. You are active on all social media accounts and as a result have an enviable digital presence. Does this make you feel like you have an advantage and can outdo your competitors? Don’t be too sure just yet. While forums, social media and blogging are essential for survival in a competitive business landscape, social listening is a crucial tool and can help you scale your business. Social listening is the act of monitoring or tracking various social media accounts, blogs, wiki pages, message boards and the like, to gauge the level of sentiments that people have towards a business and what they are saying about it. For instance, if you are following industry influencers, other well-known personalities who operate in the industry you work for and have a strong following by potential clients, there’s a very good chance that you will be followed or at least noticed too. Imagine what earning a blog link or a mention from an established personality can do for your following, brand and business growth. Social Listening Tips For Business Effective social listening can help boost sales for your business and more specifically, give you a competitive edge over your competitors. The question you need to be asking yourself is, how to leverage social media monitoring for better business. 1.By Tracking Your Competitors’ Activities If you are active on social media accounts, you should ideally be tracking what your competitors are doing too. Check for their success stories and make a note of their slipups. By monitoring your competitors across social media platforms, you will also be able to keep a close eye on any new, development from their side be it improved product/services offerings, policies or other prominent changes that could positively impact their businesses. 2.By Monitoring Your Online Reputation It is imperative to learn what the world thinks about your business. Monitor all the social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online review sites, blogs, forums and other platform for mentions of your company or brand. If you want to boost credibility (and also visibility!) ensure that you always respond to your clients on time, with thoughtful replies, apologies or other appropriate comments for every mention you get on the World Wide Web. Fail to do this and you might risk your reputation. 3.By Discovering New Ideas & Trends Set up social alerts to identify the emerging trends and fresh ideas that may be relevant to your industry. In doing so, you will be able to update your products or services and keep them up-to-the-minute. What You Should Do Now, that you know why it is important, it is crucial to understand ‘what’ you should ideally be doing to get started with social listening. Social listening is a fairly simple practice and can be done easily with the use of platforms such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Topsy, Hootsuite and Icerocket. Platforms like these can help collect aggregate data, track keywords and mentions across important social media channels. All you have to do is set up your alerts and monitor your social conversations on a day-to-day basis. Remember that social listening is not a quick process. It requires a thorough understanding and dedicated commitment of at least half an hour everyday, apart from working on other activities. You will additionally need to schedule alerts, manage your inbox and maintain commitment with the other work you do on a daily basis for your business. If you are just starting out with social listening and you have a lot on your platter, you might end up making mistakes, losing out on time and patience. If you want to save on time and still get your social listening right, why not outsource and hand over this responsibility to a reliable, social media virtual assistant from a virtual assistance provider like GetFriday? Talk to your social media virtual assistant about what you are expecting, what is relevant to the industry you operate in, map out your competitors, etc. You can also monitor your virtual assistant’s work along the way and ask for regular reports, alerts or other notifications for the social listening activities. Why should you compromise on your productivity and do complex, specialist work when you can have a professional do it for you in half the time? Think about it. Wouldn’t it be better for you if someone else could take care of your social media accounts while you focused on growing your business or doing other activities that interested you? In order to stay competitive, it is essential to learn about your clients, competitors and what the Internet has to say about your brand at large. If you partake in social listening activities, you will be able to take online conversations from being a one-way street to interactive and thus, boost business growth.

How You Can Leverage Social Listening To Boost Business Growth- What It Is & What You Can Do Read More »

So, you are familiar with blogging and make sporadic appearances on message boards, commenting forums and your blog page. You are active on all social media accounts and as a result have an enviable digital presence. Does this make you feel like you have an advantage and can outdo your competitors? Don’t be too sure just yet. While forums, social media and blogging are essential for survival in a competitive business landscape, social listening is a crucial tool and can help you scale your business. Social listening is the act of monitoring or tracking various social media accounts, blogs, wiki pages, message boards and the like, to gauge the level of sentiments that people have towards a business and what they are saying about it. For instance, if you are following industry influencers, other well-known personalities who operate in the industry you work for and have a strong following by potential clients, there’s a very good chance that you will be followed or at least noticed too. Imagine what earning a blog link or a mention from an established personality can do for your following, brand and business growth. Social Listening Tips For Business Effective social listening can help boost sales for your business and more specifically, give you a competitive edge over your competitors. The question you need to be asking yourself is, how to leverage social media monitoring for better business. 1.By Tracking Your Competitors’ Activities If you are active on social media accounts, you should ideally be tracking what your competitors are doing too. Check for their success stories and make a note of their slipups. By monitoring your competitors across social media platforms, you will also be able to keep a close eye on any new, development from their side be it improved product/services offerings, policies or other prominent changes that could positively impact their businesses. 2.By Monitoring Your Online Reputation It is imperative to learn what the world thinks about your business. Monitor all the social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online review sites, blogs, forums and other platform for mentions of your company or brand. If you want to boost credibility (and also visibility!) ensure that you always respond to your clients on time, with thoughtful replies, apologies or other appropriate comments for every mention you get on the World Wide Web. Fail to do this and you might risk your reputation. 3.By Discovering New Ideas & Trends Set up social alerts to identify the emerging trends and fresh ideas that may be relevant to your industry. In doing so, you will be able to update your products or services and keep them up-to-the-minute. What You Should Do Now, that you know why it is important, it is crucial to understand ‘what’ you should ideally be doing to get started with social listening. Social listening is a fairly simple practice and can be done easily with the use of platforms such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Topsy, Hootsuite and Icerocket. Platforms like these can help collect aggregate data, track keywords and mentions across important social media channels. All you have to do is set up your alerts and monitor your social conversations on a day-to-day basis. Remember that social listening is not a quick process. It requires a thorough understanding and dedicated commitment of at least half an hour everyday, apart from working on other activities. You will additionally need to schedule alerts, manage your inbox and maintain commitment with the other work you do on a daily basis for your business. If you are just starting out with social listening and you have a lot on your platter, you might end up making mistakes, losing out on time and patience. If you want to save on time and still get your social listening right, why not outsource and hand over this responsibility to a reliable, social media virtual assistant from a virtual assistance provider like GetFriday? Talk to your social media virtual assistant about what you are expecting, what is relevant to the industry you operate in, map out your competitors, etc. You can also monitor your virtual assistant’s work along the way and ask for regular reports, alerts or other notifications for the social listening activities. Why should you compromise on your productivity and do complex, specialist work when you can have a professional do it for you in half the time? Think about it. Wouldn’t it be better for you if someone else could take care of your social media accounts while you focused on growing your business or doing other activities that interested you? In order to stay competitive, it is essential to learn about your clients, competitors and what the Internet has to say about your brand at large. If you partake in social listening activities, you will be able to take online conversations from being a one-way street to interactive and thus, boost business growth.

AJ Jacobs Talks About His Experiences With Life Outsourcing Company, GetFriday

GetFriday’s Virtual Assistance Services has won the hearts of many around the globe, due to their timely, professional personal and business support services. A fitting example of a happy client is the editor of Esquire Magazine, AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist who has been on a long and fruitful journey with GetFriday for the past ten years. In the quest to improve his life, AJ Jacobs experimented with outsourcing and chose to work with GetFriday. In his testimonial video, AJ Jacobs recounts his experiences and throws light on how quickly and efficiently GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants responded to his needs and enquiries. In a light-hearted moment in the video, AJ Jacobs mentions that if he had outsourced the making of the video testimonial to Team GetFriday, they would have done a ‘quicker and a much more efficient’ job. He also talks about a gamut of services offered by GetFriday. From carrying out online purchases on his behalf to managing his e-mails, AJ Jacobs had a helping hand at every step of the way, with GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants.See how GetFriday’s Virtual Assistant can help you. It is a matter of great pride and honor for GetFriday, to have worked with AJ Jacobs. Just like AJ Jacobs, GetFriday has successfully served clients from different parts of the world across multiple domains and industries. GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants have proved that they are capable of multi-tasking and handling work, no matter how simple or complex. On a closing note, GetFriday eagerly looks forward to serving hundreds others and making a small difference to their lives in every possible way. Because, Life gets better with GetFriday! New to outsourcing? – Six Things You MUST outsource to a Virtual Assistant

AJ Jacobs Talks About His Experiences With Life Outsourcing Company, GetFriday Read More »

GetFriday’s Virtual Assistance Services has won the hearts of many around the globe, due to their timely, professional personal and business support services. A fitting example of a happy client is the editor of Esquire Magazine, AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist who has been on a long and fruitful journey with GetFriday for the past ten years. In the quest to improve his life, AJ Jacobs experimented with outsourcing and chose to work with GetFriday. In his testimonial video, AJ Jacobs recounts his experiences and throws light on how quickly and efficiently GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants responded to his needs and enquiries. In a light-hearted moment in the video, AJ Jacobs mentions that if he had outsourced the making of the video testimonial to Team GetFriday, they would have done a ‘quicker and a much more efficient’ job. He also talks about a gamut of services offered by GetFriday. From carrying out online purchases on his behalf to managing his e-mails, AJ Jacobs had a helping hand at every step of the way, with GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants.See how GetFriday’s Virtual Assistant can help you. It is a matter of great pride and honor for GetFriday, to have worked with AJ Jacobs. Just like AJ Jacobs, GetFriday has successfully served clients from different parts of the world across multiple domains and industries. GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants have proved that they are capable of multi-tasking and handling work, no matter how simple or complex. On a closing note, GetFriday eagerly looks forward to serving hundreds others and making a small difference to their lives in every possible way. Because, Life gets better with GetFriday! New to outsourcing? – Six Things You MUST outsource to a Virtual Assistant

WHERE DID ALL MY TIME GO? – A Beginner’s Guide To Simplifying Life & Work

It is said that time is money but money can be redeemed when lost, while the same cannot be said for time. Do you often find yourself asking this question? “Where did all my time go?” Don’t hesitate, admit it. If this question pinches your heart every night when you go to bed, you know that there’s something drastically wrong with what you are doing with your life. But, do not fret. You are not an alien. Just like you, there are many others around the world who feel the pinch, when they think of where their time went. Let’s take for example, the life of an average, hard-working Joe – ‘Ben’. Ben’s Dilemma – A Story Ben lives in New York. He has a loving wife and a four-year old son. Ben is a small business owner and though he was proud of himself for starting his dream venture, he very quickly grew unhappy with his business, because he always seemed to be busy. This also impacted his relationship with his wife and son, who were always complaining about him not being around. Everyday, he had too much to handle on his platter. It was the same old charade, with e-mails, juggling bank accounts, attending meetings for investments and so on and so forth. Ben worked hard to meet both ends – his work and his family. But the harder he tried, the more he failed. But why did that happen? Ben dreamt of taking his business international , but his hopes were crushed when he started to notice that his clients and his profits began to fall because of the erratic schedules that Ben had to work with as a small business owner and also because he also had other responsibilities as a family man. Ben?s world started to fall apart. One fine evening, Ben returned to find his wife upset. She accused him and threw a fit because he had conveniently forgotten their anniversary. “How could you forget our anniversary?”, she yelled. Ben slowly started to realize that he desperately needed a quick solution to balance both, his work and life, otherwise he risked losing both. To make matters worse, Ben didn’t find time to play with his son either. Suddenly 24 hours in the day were not enough for Ben. He wished he had just one more hour in the day to sort his life out and get his business back in order. That’s when reality struck him. He had let his business and personal life slip out of control because he believed he could handle everything by himself. He slapped his head in embarrassment and asked himself, “Where did all my time go?” If this story rings a bell and feels extremely familiar, you should ask yourself one more question, “Why did all my time go?” But, there’s nothing to worry about just yet. Ben can bring back the balance and happiness in his life and so can you. It’s true that time can’t come back but the bigger truth is you can compensate for all the lost time by making the best use of time you already have in your hands. It is really not that hard to be happy! By making a few quick but drastic changes to your life, not only will your life become more manageable, but you’ll begin to believe that you have more hours in the day. 1. Strike out the things you hate to do! Maybe you love to walk your dog, go for a swim, do the dishes or sing to your plants in your kitchen garden. But unfortunately, you are stuck with paying electricity bills, calling vendors for your business, arranging data or responding to ceaseless e-mails. If this sounds like something you don’t like to do, then why do it in the first place? Start by making a list of all the activities that you don’t like doing. Once you have done that you will be able to identify the areas that take away a lot of your time unnecessarily and you will be able to channel your energies and time better to other activities that actually need your attention. 2. Make A List Of Everything You Did In The Past Now that you have eliminated the things you don’t like to do, you are already one step ahead to living a happier and a more productive life. To make it easier for you, also write down the list of activities that you indulged in before your life started to spiral out of control and you started to feel helpless. Think of all those activities that brought a smile to your face and de-stressed you rather than burden you mentally. Your goal now should be to allot at least 2-3 hours to pursue these activities that you love to do, every single day. In doing so, you’ll find that you are more relaxed and charged to take on the world. Sure, business is important, but not more important than you are. Give yourself a break once in a while. You deserve it. 3. Make Time For The Activities That Don’t Interest You Now that you have gotten back to doing the things you love, you can finally look at squeezing in the other activities that once took up a lot of your time and you ‘thought’ required your attention. Be it making calls to clients, sifting through complicated bookkeeping work, handling administrative tasks for your business or just paying the regular bills for your house, slot at least 4-5 hours in the day for these activities. With 2-3 hours devoted towards doing what you love and 4-5 hours channeled towards other activities, you’ll slowly start to regain the lost work-life balance and still have a few more hours at your disposal at the end of the day! 4. Or… Explore Other Options! If you find that you are still not able to strike the perfect work-life balance, even after making amends to your life,

WHERE DID ALL MY TIME GO? – A Beginner’s Guide To Simplifying Life & Work Read More »

It is said that time is money but money can be redeemed when lost, while the same cannot be said for time. Do you often find yourself asking this question? “Where did all my time go?” Don’t hesitate, admit it. If this question pinches your heart every night when you go to bed, you know that there’s something drastically wrong with what you are doing with your life. But, do not fret. You are not an alien. Just like you, there are many others around the world who feel the pinch, when they think of where their time went. Let’s take for example, the life of an average, hard-working Joe – ‘Ben’. Ben’s Dilemma – A Story Ben lives in New York. He has a loving wife and a four-year old son. Ben is a small business owner and though he was proud of himself for starting his dream venture, he very quickly grew unhappy with his business, because he always seemed to be busy. This also impacted his relationship with his wife and son, who were always complaining about him not being around. Everyday, he had too much to handle on his platter. It was the same old charade, with e-mails, juggling bank accounts, attending meetings for investments and so on and so forth. Ben worked hard to meet both ends – his work and his family. But the harder he tried, the more he failed. But why did that happen? Ben dreamt of taking his business international , but his hopes were crushed when he started to notice that his clients and his profits began to fall because of the erratic schedules that Ben had to work with as a small business owner and also because he also had other responsibilities as a family man. Ben?s world started to fall apart. One fine evening, Ben returned to find his wife upset. She accused him and threw a fit because he had conveniently forgotten their anniversary. “How could you forget our anniversary?”, she yelled. Ben slowly started to realize that he desperately needed a quick solution to balance both, his work and life, otherwise he risked losing both. To make matters worse, Ben didn’t find time to play with his son either. Suddenly 24 hours in the day were not enough for Ben. He wished he had just one more hour in the day to sort his life out and get his business back in order. That’s when reality struck him. He had let his business and personal life slip out of control because he believed he could handle everything by himself. He slapped his head in embarrassment and asked himself, “Where did all my time go?” If this story rings a bell and feels extremely familiar, you should ask yourself one more question, “Why did all my time go?” But, there’s nothing to worry about just yet. Ben can bring back the balance and happiness in his life and so can you. It’s true that time can’t come back but the bigger truth is you can compensate for all the lost time by making the best use of time you already have in your hands. It is really not that hard to be happy! By making a few quick but drastic changes to your life, not only will your life become more manageable, but you’ll begin to believe that you have more hours in the day. 1. Strike out the things you hate to do! Maybe you love to walk your dog, go for a swim, do the dishes or sing to your plants in your kitchen garden. But unfortunately, you are stuck with paying electricity bills, calling vendors for your business, arranging data or responding to ceaseless e-mails. If this sounds like something you don’t like to do, then why do it in the first place? Start by making a list of all the activities that you don’t like doing. Once you have done that you will be able to identify the areas that take away a lot of your time unnecessarily and you will be able to channel your energies and time better to other activities that actually need your attention. 2. Make A List Of Everything You Did In The Past Now that you have eliminated the things you don’t like to do, you are already one step ahead to living a happier and a more productive life. To make it easier for you, also write down the list of activities that you indulged in before your life started to spiral out of control and you started to feel helpless. Think of all those activities that brought a smile to your face and de-stressed you rather than burden you mentally. Your goal now should be to allot at least 2-3 hours to pursue these activities that you love to do, every single day. In doing so, you’ll find that you are more relaxed and charged to take on the world. Sure, business is important, but not more important than you are. Give yourself a break once in a while. You deserve it. 3. Make Time For The Activities That Don’t Interest You Now that you have gotten back to doing the things you love, you can finally look at squeezing in the other activities that once took up a lot of your time and you ‘thought’ required your attention. Be it making calls to clients, sifting through complicated bookkeeping work, handling administrative tasks for your business or just paying the regular bills for your house, slot at least 4-5 hours in the day for these activities. With 2-3 hours devoted towards doing what you love and 4-5 hours channeled towards other activities, you’ll slowly start to regain the lost work-life balance and still have a few more hours at your disposal at the end of the day! 4. Or… Explore Other Options! If you find that you are still not able to strike the perfect work-life balance, even after making amends to your life,