Your Partner In Success Welcomes Rebecca Quinn

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 24, 2010 in Internet Mastery, Your Partner In Success | 0 comments

Your Partner In Success Radio Show

Rebecca Quinn is an online business manager, virtual assistant and business advisor who works with small business owners, solo-entrepreneurs, service professionals. We will be speaking about organization, specifically systems and processes. Once you set up systems for everything in your business you free yourself up to be creative and build the part of the business that you are in love with and passionate about.

Basic Systems: Why set up systems in your business? Where to start and what systems you really must have in place.

Emergency Preparedness: Why is this so important? Most business don’t survive disasters and information losses. Rebecca will give you tips on how to create a quick and easy mini-disaster plan for your business.

Systems for Getting Business, Marketing & Social Networking. Everyone needs more business; everyone has unprecedented access to get their information out in the world due to internet and social networks. We will discuss how to use systems to simplify your social networking.

Does Your Small or Online Business Have a Toll Free Number?

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 20, 2010 in Internet Mastery, Web Development | 0 comments

One thing we always recommend during a web development project is that the client consider obtaining a toll free number. Having a toll free number on your website while offering credibility, also offers the opportunity to not publish to the world your home or cell phone number. In this day of work-from-home entrepreneurs, this is an important consideration.

My office uses Grasshopper which used to be called GotVMail. Grasshopper is very easy to set up. Just pick a toll free number for your business, or transfer your current number. Then record your main greeting. You will also have the opportunity to have it professionally recorded if that is your preference. Add departments and employees, choose what phone number you want your calls to terminate to and you are done. I actually don’t have my toll free number ring to my office as it can be terribly disruptive. What we have done is to create mailboxes and departments and have the voice messages emailed to the proper department as an .MP3.

There is also a “Read Your Voicemail” function available for an additional $10 a month. If you are on the run a good bit, the voicemail transcription will be emailed to you as readable text. You’ll be able to stay connected when you can’t listen to the .MP3 file of your voicemail. You can also listen to your messages on your Blackberry or iPhone. Just click the “Play It On Mobile link in the notification email and you’ll be listening to your voice mails without dialing or logging in to your account. For those of us on the run, this is a great tool.

Another really great feature is that you have unlimited extensions for your small business. Each extension has its own call forwarding, voicemail and message delivery settings. Even if you’re the only employee, by utilizing unlimited extensions you are giving your small business the big business sound that it needs.

Truthfully, there are too many features for me to list here. What I can tell you is that we use it, and love it. It is also very affordable to have a toll free number these days. Plans start at $9.95 a month and there is a $25 activation fee. My monthly bill seems to hover around $25 a month which given all that the system offers is remarkably affordable. Be warned though, if you make a habit of answering the calls that come through on your toll free number you will run your bill right up through the roof. I strongly recommend that you treat this strictly as a voice mail system and return the calls at your first opportunity.

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://internetmasteryblog.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.

Does Your Business Phone Accept All Callers?

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 11, 2010 in Internet Mastery, Virtual Assistance Industry | 0 comments

Quick question. Does your small or home-based business lose potential business or miss connections with a potential client by refusing to answers callers with a blocked number?

This post is going to explore how accessible your business phone should be.

Recently I was given a couple of recommendations for (insert service here) by somebody whose judgment I trust. I called both people and had no problems at all connecting with the first person on that very short list.

However, the second recommended business person would not allow my blocked number call to go through. Now understand that my phone number is blocked for some very legitimate reasons, one being that if my direct phone number became widely known, I would never get anything done. That number is given to my clients and team members. Period. My toll free number is published on all my websites/blogs and is embedded into my business emails. We are easy to get in touch with!

Now, I really did want to speak with this person about a project for a client and just kept going down the numbers given me until I reached a toll free number where I was relieved to be able to leave a message. That was three days ago.

This is where the accessibility question comes in.

Today my call was finally returned and when I mildly expressed my concern with not being able to reach this person’s business phone I was treated to fairly huffy explanation of their reasons. When I explained why my number is blocked (remember now, I have several reasons, all of them legitimate) the response was, “Well that’s weird.” Not a great start to a working relationship.

So my question is, why would a business, whether brick and mortar, or home-based block callers who may not want to show their phone number right away? Isn’t this where voice mail become a wonderful business tool? I have to wonder just how much potential business this person is actively turning away by refusing to accept calls.

Your thoughts?

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://internetmasteryblog.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.

Your Partner In Success Welcomes Back Deborah Dubree

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 10, 2010 in Internet Mastery, Your Partner In Success | 0 comments

Your Partner In Success Radio Show

From answering phones to owning and running a $20 million business…

Considered one of the most dynamic business and personal acceleration specialists around, Deborah Dubree has earned a reputation for training serious achievers worldwide to stop wasting time, energy and money and reach their goals.

Bold, clear and practical in her approach, Deborah delights in inspiring clients to build their mental agility, communicate for results and walk like a winner … as they become #1 in their field of expertise.

Tenacious and gutsy, she gained a unique perspective on business during her climb up the ladder of success from answering the phones as an inexperienced receptionist to owning and running a $20 million commercial construction company, all with only a high school diploma.

Eventually, Deborah stepped away from her CEO position to create ClearEdge which is for serious achievers who willingly dig deep and strip away their self-limiting beliefs.

In this interview we will be discussing Clear Edge – what it is and why it is important. Deborah will show you how to “Get Clear – Get Structure and Get Results”.

In this second interview with Deborah we will discuss:

1. What does Deborah mean when she says “Monetize You?”
2. Everybody these days wants to get more of something, whether it’s money, time, energy, romance or a number of other things. What are the steps that you can and should take to achieve your goals?
3. What is the biggest trap that most people fall into when trying to reach their goal?
4. What is the missing ingredient that people MUST reclaim in order to be the most productive in business and in life?
5. Lots of people struggle in their relationships, whether they are work-related or personal.  What’s the first thing that people need to understand about achieving high levels of communication effectiveness?
6. What’s the second thing people can do to have more effective communication?

Your Partner In Success Radio Show

When: Friday, February 12, 2010

Time: 9 am PST, 10 am MST, 11 am CST, 12 pm EST

Where: Your home office telephone or computer.

Website: Your Partner In Success Radio Show

Call-in Number: 347-843-4988

We look forward to “seeing” you!

Manage Your Time by Managing Your Self-Interruptions

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Jan 8, 2010 in Internet Mastery | 1 comment

Wasted Time

The promise that technology will make our lives easier is true in many respects, but more people are finding themselves time poor than ever before. To run our businesses more effectively we need to become very aware of where the time bleeds are and manage them.

If, for instance, you are in the habit of checking your email every 30 minutes or so, you will find that at the end of the day you wasted a considerable amount of time on a task that probably should be scheduled twice a day. Do you spend a lot of time in and out of Social Media sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Again, by designating a specific time, or times of each work day you can save hours of wasted motion.

I use an online productivity tool called Rescue Time (available for Mac and Windows) that allows me and the members of my team to easily and effortlessly track how productive we are each day so we can avoid and in some cases, banish distractions.

Rescue time actually allows you to specify a period of time you want to focus on the projects at hand and will block the parts of the web that you tend to go to without thinking or planning. You can set the number of hours you want to spend in a day on a particular site and Rescue Time will alert you on your email, RSS reader, or by SMS when you run out of time. You can create groups and compare your online stats with other users. There are Rescue Time widgets for blogs, iGoogle, and Netvibes. You can also create a white-list of sites that you want Rescue Time to pay attention to.

Check out the free trial here and please be sure to let me know your thoughts on this tool after you have used it for a while.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://internetmasteryblog.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.