Small businesses make up 98 % of the nations business industry. Outsourcing to virtual assistants known as a VA is gaining ground every day and becoming even more lucrative for small business owners. In order to understand why this is happening, let’s first look at what a Virtual Assistant is and what services they may offer a small business owner.

Virtual assistants provide various services to small business owners to help with the tasks that are needed. Each Virtual assistant should be able to provide some basic services for their clients. These basic services would include tasks like: email management, customer service duties, organizing files and typing documents, data entry, making appointments, and customer follow-ups. Some well-trained and more experienced VA’s may offer specialized skills like: Website Designing/Updating, Accounting/Bookkeeping, Desktop Publishing, Power Point Presentations, or Writing & Editing. The list of services an experienced VA may offer is not limited to the above examples.

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After pay, health insurance is the most important inducement small businesses use to recruit and keep employees motivated. Yet many employers are finding the ability to provide cost effective health insurance more challenging as premiums continue to rise and the options available continue to decrease. Employers are beginning to think “out of the box” and are looking at new ways to offer their employees benefit programs, and to keep them motivated.

NAPEO, the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations, conducted an employee benefits survey in November, 2007 of its members’ clients to understand the concerns of small and medium-sized employers. NAPEO is an organization that represents firms, PEOs, which specialize in providing human resources outsourcing support and employee benefit packages to small and mid-sized employers nationwide. Mirroring the sentiment across the country, the trade association found that health care costs were their second-biggest worry after attracting workers.

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One of the most misunderstood small business marketing tools is branding. I flinch when I hear media sales representatives and agency sales representatives tell a small business owner that they need to build a brand and get their name out there so that when a prospect is ready to buy their product, they will think of that company’s name. This scheme is nearly always a failure and even if it works, there is rarely a method in place to track the results so it is unmanageable, if not impossible to determine the profitability of your investment.

Try this example: When a rep tells you that you should have a brand-building effort, tell them that’s fine as long as long as you can pay for the ad with the sales from it. They’ll allege something to the effect of “Well, there are too many things beyond our control. You really need to do this over several weeks or months to get results.”

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In today’s wired world, it is absolutely necessary to have a strong online presence. Having a good website for your business is imperative if you want to conduct business in today’s digital market place. However marketing that business is something all together different, what is the point of a great web site with awesome products if no one ever visits? Just like the real world, the key to success on the web is: Location, Location, Location! If your site can’t be found in search results, you wasted your money.

Properly marketing your small business online will bring a steady stream of traffic interested in your products or services. You will never reach your online business goals without good search engine marketing. The best online marketing will put your website’s name and description in front of millions of potential customers, for everything to do with your business and offerings. The name of the game in internet marketing is Relevant TRAFFIC. To accomplish this, you need to encourage people looking for your offerings or that of your competition to visit your website, and make it easy for them to find and get what they want. There are a number of ways to market your small business online, some are good, some are not. What works for one company may not work for yours.

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People are under the impression that an Internet business is really only financially possible for big businesses. Not only that, they may feel that the Internet may not have much of an impact on their business at all. Even if you have a small local business, the Internet can push some sales and leads in your direction. You may also be interested in starting up a small business and running it on the Internet. This is a great way to either put some extra money in your pocket or even earn enough that you can go at it full time. You don’t need to be big, however, the start.

Not all of us are able to throw everything that we have into a business at this point in our lives. As a matter of fact, many of us are looking for a way to start a business without any money down at all. Although this is possible with Internet marketing, it can also hold you back to a certain extent if you don’t at least invest a little bit in your early efforts. It doesn’t mean that you have to invest a lot, just set aside some money so that you can begin operating online. If you do this, you won’t be at the mercy of the free websites.

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Operating a small business can be hectic and stressful in every stage of its development. It’s important that you grab whatever fun you can. You will be surprised at how well you will feel and how much easier it becomes to run your business.

I was reminded of this when our young consultant returned from a client visit.

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My neighbors are entrepreneurs at heart. They are part of the 860,000 new small business enterprises that opened doors this year. At the rate they are going they could also be part of the churned small enterprises that will close their doors over the next year if they don’t proactively take preventive measures.

My neighbors represent the vast majority of small business owners entering the market daily. In the beginning they are brimming with bright optimism and bright ideas. By the end they wonder how they could have made it all work as they close doors on yet another opportunity.

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To survive and compete in the marketplace every business should know and use the latest technologies and methods. And the same is valid in the area of promotion and advertising. However a solution has been found to tackle this problem and it is named as SMO.

SMO basically stands for social media optimization. You may have known about SEO but SMO is a new word in the online dictionary. To start with, it’s important to understand what are these social media platforms? Sites that are not strictly trade oriented but their actual focus is on social interactivity are said to be social media sites. They indeed help in exchange of thoughts and ideas. Some of the popular and well known social media sites are YouTube, Digg and MySpace.

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