Online Virtual Assistant

Business managers and owners are devoting all their time and energy these days to protecting themselves against the global economic downturn. This has an overall effect on their lifestyle because they are spending the majority of their time working towards the success of their company, resulting in no time for themselves. There should be a balance between your professional and your personal life, which could mean that business owners need a helping hand with some of their basic business activities.

A Virtual PA (also commonly known as Virtual Receptionists, Virtual Assistants or Remote Receptionists) is an excellent way forward in helping you receive that extra help in day to day business activities. Virtual PAs will meet deadlines, complete all the work in the office, arrange appointments at your convenience, or cancel appointments at your beck and call, thus leaving you at total ease knowing you can now dedicate all your time concentrating on achieving your business goals and objectives.

There are some tips that will maximize the benefits of your Virtual PA, these will be discussed shortly. You should develop an understanding – a working relationship with your Virtual PA, this way you can ensure that you extract the maximum benefits from your virtual assistant. Don’t forget that your virtual assistant will perform the majority of tasks for you on a daily basis which will cover all aspects of your business.

These tips will maximize the benefits of your Virtual PA…

Select a Virtual PA that meets your needs

It goes without saying that you will need a Virtual PA that will suit your business needs and ticks all the boxes in relation to meeting your company’s requirements. You will need to ensure that you approach a company that employ skilled PAs or receptionists from various fields.

Effective Communication

Even though your Virtual Assistant is not physically present at your office, they will still be assessable at all times. You must ensure that the communication lines between you and your Virtual PA are always open and accessible. If anything arises you must ensure you are able to contact your Virtual Assistant there and then.

Give detailed, clear instructions to your Virtual PA

In order to gain perfect results from your Virtual PA it will be a good idea to meet with them in person or over the phone once you have selected them. During this time it would be beneficial to provide your Virtual PA with clear instructions of what you expect from them, and clear instructions on completing different tasks. It is important not to assume that your Virtual Assistant will know actually what is expected from them. They can then be responsible for these duties and tasks that you have assigned to them.

A Virtual Assistant can provide a consistent means of contact for your customers which doesn’t tie you up on the telephone. They will ensure you never miss another call, they can transfer important calls straight to you based on your specification and can perform a range of tasks at your request. Your small business will look instantly bigger with a Virtual Receptionist and you will find the cost very reasonable compared to hiring your own member of staff – and less stressful too!

As a Virtual Assistant, my job is to save you time but what else would help you save a few minutes? At OnlineVA we found this article and thought you may find it useful:

“If you learn all of these, you could save yourself 60 minutes a day.”

ALT+F4? ALT+F+X? CTRL+W? CTRL+F4? What are we talking about here? Maybe it will make more sense if I said: Close Program, Exit Program, Close Window, Close File. These are all different ways to get your computer to do similar things using only your keyboard, not your mouse.

I don’t know if you remember computers back in the 80′s when computers were not as friendly as they are today. Back then if you wanted to do something, like make a word bold, you had to know the proper keystrokes because the mouse wasn’t in vogue yet (unless you were a Mac user). To make a word bold, you had to use the control key (CTRL on your keyboard) and hit the letter “B” at the same time (hence, CTRL+B).

Well guess what?!? Those keystrokes still work (most of them that is). I’m not saying you should ditch your mouse but if you want to speed up the way in which you use programs like Word, Excel, Powerpoint or virtually any Windows-based program, you should learn a few shortcut keys.

Get comfortable with the most important key: the ALT key. The ALT key is typically reserved for application level functions – like closing an entire program, switching between applications, etc. The best use of the ALT key is to hit it once and look to the menu bar of your application. Notice that the first menu item (e.g. File) is highlighted.

Now navigate the menu with your arrow keys you may see that each menu item has one letter underlined. If you type that letter on your keyboard you can activate that specific menu and see its contents. For example, hit “H” for the Help menu. Once again you should notice that each menu item has an underlined letter that you can hit to perform the action. For example, hit the letter “A” to see the “About” window for the program. You can hit the ALT key and then type any letter to quickly navigate around your program. HINT: Don’t hold down the ALT key to navigate around menus.

Now that you know the basic concepts of the ALT key and underlined letters, you’ll start to notice that most actions in a program can be performed with the keyboard, which is much faster than a mouse. But wait, there’s more. Here are the shortcut keys I use most:

ALT+TAB – switch between programs
ALT+F4 – close the current program and all related windows

CTRL+TAB – switch between windows within the active program
CTRL+F4 – close only the active window

CTRL+C – copy the selected item (this works on files, text, images, anything!)
CTRL+X – cut the selected item
CTRL+V – paste the copied or cut item

CTRL+S – save your active document (do this often!)
CTRL+Z – undo your last action
CTRL+Y – repeat your last action or redo your last undo
F4 – repeat your last action (this is the best tool in Excel when applying formats)

CTRL+ Arrow Keys – move from section to section, especially helpful in Excel
CTRL+SHIFT+ Arrow Keys – select a section, also helpful in Excel

There are lots of other shortcut keys you can learn on your own or by doing a quick search on the web. If you learn just the first one, ALT+TAB, you’ll save yourself time and effort. If you learn all of these, you could save yourself 60 minutes a day.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rich_Walker