Virtual Assistance, Productivity & So Much More

Small business ownership is a challenging yet hugely rewarding endeavor. A small business is also highly competitive and risky, with one in five small businesses folding after only a year and only 50% still trading after five years. These are humbling figures when you start your own business, but you can mitigate these risks with smart business practice.

When you have a lot of things to do it’s really common to take some notes so you don’t forget any details and that’s one of the reasons why having an agenda is so useful. Writing everything you have to do in your agenda will help you organize your ideas, however, a whole page filled with pending things from top to bottom could make you feel frustrated, stressed or even worried.

Even doing your best effort, it is almost impossible to keep in control all the activities you have in your Company with no extra help. Doing everything could be understood when there is not enough personnel at the company, in any other case, you are just wasting a couple of minutes you could use in another more important task. Delegating work to other person does not mean that you will have less responsibility but that you will have more help to take more responsibilities and increase your company’s efficiency.

In this extensive interview, our Founder and CEO Alfredo Atanacio talks about his journey as an entrepreneur, how he came up with the idea for Uassist.ME and why investing in his own country was the best option for his business.

You can read the entire interview in spanish HERE

Since online platforms/applications have taken over communication, social media must be one of the priorities for all business’ owners. Creating campaigns as a way to engage in smart public relations is not always easy, and it becomes even harder when we are not familiar with the current marketing trends.
But there is a way to keep up with all the constant changes in social media that could help us replicate the good results; the best way to know what is going on is checking on big companies, big names that will give us great ideas for successful social campaigns and valuable online marketing lessons.

We only have two months into this New Year, how are you doing? If you’re not happy with your progress, here are some great ideas for getting your profits moving fast the way you want it.

Are you looking to simplify your social media efforts? Take advantage of these 8 tools to help you with it!

Many small businesses feel overwhelmed when they begin to implement their social media marketing and sometimes they need to think every step they take very carefully.

The social media sometimes focuses on optimizing your business with their tools and you need to focus right on the points where you want to engage your costumers. This part of your business that relates to networking needs to have these 8 tools for your social media marketing.

 

1. Crowdbooster.

Croowdbooster is the best tool to manage social media activities on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to save time, this tool does many things to help you with your time and streamline activities.

For example, it auto-posts on both my Facebook page and Twitter, tracks my new fans and followers, and gives me stats on how many times my content has been shared and retweeted.

 

2. WordPress.

When we talk about small business this is by far, the best tool. WordPress for small business helps you to build very powerful dynamic websites that can form the hub of all other social media marketing.

WordPress-based blogs are easy to update and change, can directly incorporate other social media platforms and take full advantage of the benefits of blogging for business.

 

3. Google Alerts

If you want to have one of the easiest tools for business to monitor your online reputation is the great Google Alerts.

Each time Google finds a mention of your business, it will send you an email to notify the mention, daily or weekly. It's the best free tool to manage your work.

 

4. Google Reader

If you want your business to be effective with social media, you need to have relevant content to share; this is the tool you need!

This tool is fast and reliable to share current content with near a hundred sources of online content.

Google Reader works especially well as a widget within the iGoogle interface. This gives you an at-a-glance view of the most recent feeds, and the amount of accumulated content.

 

5. HootSuite Publisher

Almost every savvy social media manager uses HootSuite for some aspects of his or her social posting activities. This is the best tool if you want to manage different profiles of your business like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. HootSuite can manage your personal profile, business pages and groups.

Bonus feature: If you have to create reports to bring to your team, HootSuite makes it really easy with download links for all of the tracking sections: Summary Stats, Clicks by Region, Top Referrers and Most Popular Links. Or you can organize a custom report that is sent to you each week.

 

6. Zite

Given the fact that we are increasingly using our smart mobile devices to stay connected and active in our social networks, I’m a big fan of mobile apps that can help make this process easier. One such app that is available is the Zite App for iPhone and touchpads such as the iPad.

According to Zite, the Zite app is a “personalized magazine that gets smarter as you use it.” Not only can you plug in your social media profile credentials and pull in content that is being shared by your community, you can also connect your Google Reader account

 

7. Evernote

Use Evernote to plan blog posts. If you blog often, you may find it helpful to have a well-defined and methodical approach to your writing.

With Evernote you can:

a) Create a standard blog template to use for all future articles.

b) Create relevant components within the blog template to organize your writing.

c) Assemble various components of your blog into a logical sequence.

 

8. Disqus

Every blog should consider using the Disqus comment plugin, it's one of the best social tools available and is highly beneficial to your blog; which should be at the core of all of your marketing goals.

You can use it to give readers multiple options when signing in, and commenting with an OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Disqus account.

This tool increases the viral potential of your blog posts, because comments can be shared across social networks.

A good brand is one that has attained prime space in your target customer’s mind so that the brand is remembered as the customer’s preferred solution. There are five overarching ingredients to creating a good brand. Getting these five ingredients to work together is how you can succeed in creating a good brand.