Virtual Assistance For Healthcare ProfessionalsWritten by Rita Ballard
Administrative and clerical tasks are bane of every industry. No matter how small or large your business is, you will eventually find yourself with stacks of paperwork that need your attention. And when will you find time? If you are busy seeing your clients during day, then paperwork waits until evenings and weekends. This can make for some very long days and total exhaustion. Hiring a virtual assistant is becoming best option for many professionals.Virtual assistants are administrative professionals who, for a variety of reasons, have chosen to work from home offices. Virtual assistance is an industry that is swiftly nudging its way into outsourcing arena. There are currently about 2,000 virtual assistants worldwide, and this number is growing daily. There are virtual assistance accreditation schools, chat groups, professional organizations, and annual conferences. As a virtual assistant, these administrative professionals are independent contractors who provide office support remotely, using current computer technology and Internet. Let’s look at differences between hiring staff and working with a virtual assistant: When you hire support staff, you will need to provide some amount of training. You also will provide a space for that person, and supplies needed to do job. In addition, your staff expenses will include taxes, insurance, vacation and sick pay, raises, overtime pay, and usually a pension or some type of retirement plan. You will also be paying that person for idle and non-productive time; you will be expected to do annual performance reviews; and you are expected to manage and supervise.
| | Search Engine Publicity - The Free Ride is OverWritten by Neil Street
For years, almost anyone involved with promotion of their website, be it for commercial or other purposes, has come to either love, or hate, search engines. Whether it is Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, or one of literally thousands of smaller search engines and directories, website owners have known that by “optimizing” their site for search engines, they could hope to rise to top ranks of a leading search engine when an applicable keyword or phrase was entered in search engine by a user.Back in 1997, when I started a small retail website that sells antique maps, http://www.vintagemaps.com , all it took to get indexed in Yahoo directory was a free submission. My site was dutifully submitted, and within four weeks it was #1 for its most important keyword phrase, and it remained in Yahoo’s top 10 for at least a year. Today, by contrast, it would cost $299 to even submit a commerical site to Yahoo directory, and there is no guarantee that it will even be indexed! The world has changed. For observers of search engine phenomenon, it was only a matter of time before free ride was over. How could it be otherwise? For years, website owners such as myself had been enjoying vast, and free publicity, courtesy of various search engines and directories. It could not last forever. First came search engine optimization, whereby savvy website owners hired specialists to “tweak” their sites to get better placement on search engines. As soon as search engines saw dollars being pumped into search, they began setting up their own payment models, including “pay-per-click” methods that allow an advertiser to display a small ad, adjacent to free search results, tied to specific keywords.
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