Service Spotlight: Accounting

Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, with the end of the financial year coming up (5th April), we’re looking at accounting.

Why do you need accounting help?

For many business owners, the worst part of running a business is managing the accounts. In a survey of 508 small business owners conducted by TD Bank, nearly half of the respondents named bookkeeping as their least favourite part of running a business.*

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Why our VAs LOVE their jobs!

Happy Valentine’s Day! Love is in the air, and we hope that you’re taking the time today to appreciate the things that are most special to you. It could be anything – a loved one, your family, your friends… or even your job!

That’s right – here at Get Ahead VA we’re celebrating this season of love by thinking about why we love our jobs. So, we asked everyone in the Get Ahead VA team to tell us what they love about being a virtual assistant, and this is what they had to say:

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Service Spotlight: Telephone Answering


Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, we’re looking at telephone answering.

Why do you need telephone answering?

Phone calls can be one of the biggest distractions in the workplace. We all know the feeling of being fully immersed in a project or piece of work, only for a phone call to break our flow and add extra tasks to our to-do list. Business calls can also happen at the most inconvenient times – when you’re travelling, in a meeting, or even (horror of horrors) when you’re at home with your feet up!

If you find yourself bombarded with calls, or you just want a break from the phone while you finish an important piece of work, then a telephone answering service could be just what you need.

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Get Ahead VA’s favourite video-making software

When you think about content marketing, video may not be the first thing that leaps to mind, but it is a hugely important marketing channel for businesses, and it’s on the rise.

A 2018 report by Cisco* has predicted that global video traffic will grow four times between 2017 and 2022, and video will make up 82% of internet traffic by 2022. Video has a very bright future, then, and the beauty of it is that it works for all businesses, of any size.

There are all sorts of video-making resources out there for business owners wanting to make greater use of video in their marketing. To help you narrow it down, we asked our VAs to tell us about their favourites. Here’s what they chose!

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Three common hashtag mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Hashtags didn’t exist more than a decade ago. Now, they’re everywhere.

Social tech expert, Chris Messina, is said to have created the very first hashtag on Twitter. He posted #barcamp in August 2007 in this Tweet:

‘How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]??’

Interestingly, Chris’ hashtag recommendation was turned down by Twitter amid claims they would never catch on…

Fast forward to today and hashtags are pretty much everywhere on social media, and not just on Twitter where they originated either.

But for all their popularity, there are still some common mistakes that often catch people out, which can impact the effectiveness of their hashtags. Here are three of them:

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How to clean out your email inbox

Email is at the heart of every business – for keeping in touch with clients, managing projects and marketing to customers – but it is so easy for your email inbox to get out of hand.

According to research,* the average office worker receives about 90 emails per day, and sends about 40. That’s a staggering number of emails zipping back and forth and taking up space in your inbox. Of course, because it’s all online, it’s tempting to let the backlog build up, but if your inbox is so overflowing that you lose track of important emails, or you just feel overwhelmed every time you open it, then it’s time to do something about it.

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Harness the power of data for your business

Do you collect data about your business? It might seem like an obvious thing to do, but for many small business owners the answer is ‘no’, even though harnessing the power of data can help you to increase your revenues, reach more customers and grow your business.

In the modern world, the most effective way to gather data is through a website. However, according to research published in 2017,* nearly two million SMEs don’t have a website, even though they stand to gain the most growth in revenue by having one. So what’s so important about gathering data, and if you don’t do it already, where should you begin?

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Service Spotlight: Administration

Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, with the aim of getting organised for the new year, we’re looking at administration.

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5 tips for getting your business blog right

Blogging for business: many of us feel like it’s something we should be doing, but does it really work?

‘Content marketing’ – the official term for marketing that involves creating and sharing content, like blog posts, with an online audience – is hugely effective. Compared with paid search, for instance, content marketing can produce three times as many leads and cost 62% less. What’s more, blogging has myriad benefits for business owners: it can drive traffic to your website, generate sales and mailing lists, and help you to establish yourself as an authority in your field. When it comes to the question “Should my business have a blog?” the answer is almost always yes.

If you’re new to blogging for business, there are a few golden rules you should follow to make your blog a success. Remember, blogging is hard work, but use these 5 tips and you’re bound to start seeing results.

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The truth about Press Releases

Press releases are a fundamental part of media relations work and one of the main ways you can share your news with journalists.

But unless you work in PR or comms, knowing how they exactly work and what they can actually achieve is somewhat of a mystery. For instance, just because you’ve issued a release to the media, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get any coverage.

In this blog, former journalist and Get Ahead VA team member, Sanina Kaur, sheds some light on the world of press releases.

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