Because competition is so fierce, landing consistent new clients isn’t just about talent. It relies heavily on who you know, and how well connected you are.

Social media can expand your freelance network no end and yield opportunities that you’d never find elsewhere. But just like building up your client list, it takes investment, hard work, and time.

Social networks can be useful in different ways. On one hand, they are a marketing platform where you can share and promote your work. On the other, they serve as rich community resources for freelancers. Once you’ve built and cultivated your network, a simple tweet or update can yield valuable wisdom and connections.

Social media , unlike traditional marketing methods, have benefits that outweigh the risks if you use the services wisely.The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement, your business will gain exposure not just through your own advertisements, but through past clients and friends gained whilst using the services.

Take Twitter for instance. Since joining Twitter 15 months ago we have made invaluable friendship and connections with local people and businesses, we have found out about services and companies we didn’t know existed, we have learnt about news articles before they have reached the tv and we have gained clients that are still with us now.

The most common advice we received from people using social media was to use it to engage your customers in conversation, not just sell your services, offer information and advice to people if asked,  tell people about the services you can offer, but don’t hard sell. The quickest way to lose followers has to be the automated tweets going out once an hour with the same old message. Where’s the personality and involvement in that?

From monitoring our Google Analytics recently, 46% of our traffic actually reaches our website via Social Media. The two biggest referrers are Twitter and Facebook. We think those figures speak for themselves.

If you run a business and want to invest more time in social media, talk to us about how we can help. From the smallest thing such as designing your Twitter background to managing your entire social media accounts on your behalf, there are a number of ways we can help you.

Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5% of all bandwidth. However, YouTube reigns supreme in that department, accounting for 10% of all business bandwidth used. An accompanying survey showed that 43% respondents are concerned about this seemingly excessive use of social media in the workplace.

Facebook certainly appears to dominate business users’ attention while at work so are you really happy paying for employees to be looking at Facebook?

If previous findings that Facebook is the fourth largest destination site for news are accurate, then perhaps we can safely assume that in-office use of Facebook is for more than just social networking.

Top five websites visited by businesses:

• 1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
• 2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
• 3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
• 4. Yahoo – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
• 5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic

With Analytics you can do a number of things such as:

• Run custom reports
• Set up regular alerts
• Look at visitor trending & loyalty
• check out your most visited pages
• Monitor traffic sources
• See which ‘other’ sites refer the most traffic to your site
• Monitor your Adword campaigns
  
• Look at your top content & pages
  
  

and so much more….

Contact us to find out how we can help you use Google Analytics to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site as well as helping you make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions and profits.

To find out more about using this tool – read all about it here: Google Analytics – more info

This is due to the problem of role remits, lack of training, work overload, lack of time, higher demands made on workers, redundancy and staff cutbacks.

This is why there are so many important reasons to outsource work.

One of the most important reason to outsource work is that freelance/virtual workers can charge less an hour than a temporary employee as we have no agency fees or commission rates to compete with plus the company also saves a lot of money by not having to pay for training, benefits, equipment, sick-leave etc.

Here is a list of many reasons why outsourcing work is a good thing:

• It allows the company more time to increase customer satisfaction.
• The company can save time and money on advertising for new staff
  
• It can lower training costs
  
• There are no sick, holiday or legal expenses to worry about.
  
• The company can cut back on HR staff.
• It helps to establish new business relationships.
• It saves time and frees up resources.
• It reduced overall operation costs

One crucial element to consider in the current climate is how much money you and your business could save by outsourcing work. We carried out an experiment recently and worked out that by using a Virtual Assistant such as ourselves to outsource work to, we could save you nearly £16,000 in one year.

Click here to see how you could do this…

The outsourced work is always completed perfectly and in a timely manner just as long as the company outsources to qualified providers, it’s a win-win situation. While there are service providers out there who are not experienced or qualified, the company can strike gold if they choose qualified professionals such as YourAdmin.

I took a call from a lady a few hours ago claiming to be called Susan and stating that she knows the last time she called me I told her that I didn’t want to hear from her anymore, but she had to call me to advise me that my advert was going to print soon and she needed to confirm the address to send my invoice to. (Are you liking the sound of this already….?)

I replied that I did not have the foggiest what she was talking about and proceeded to ask for some more info on the advert, to which she told me that I had “verbally agreed” with her last September that I would place an advert in her publication and now the advert is about to be published, I needed to make the payment.

She told me that as it was a “verbal agreement” she was unable to send me anything in the post apart from the invoice, which was now outstanding for £149.00. She said she was more than happy to take payment over the telephone today as this would save me “time and money” apparently? What a thoughtful person Susan is.

When I asked for the name of her company she was very vague but told me that they were called SPL Advertising and they were based in Manchester. When I asked her for the company website address, she said she didn’t know it (it gets worse….) so I asked for their phone number and the name of her Manager…she advised me she was not able to provide that as the department she worked in was outgoing calls only, so I asked for the main phone number so I could report them to Trading Standards at which point she shouted at me to stop being awkward and advised I would be sent the bill in the post to pay within 14 days.

She also said the telephone number and web address would be on the invoice/letter so I could call back and query it then. So…let me get this straight:

1. The company is nowhere to be found on the net, companies house and does not have a web presence at all.
2. A company that runs nationwide ad campaigns cannot provide a phone number for me to call back on.
   
3. It seems acceptable for employees of this company to shout at their *clients* (that be me apparently…)
   
4. I owe them £149 and it must be paid within 14 days (this is my favourite one…..)
   
5. I verbally agreed to place this advert but when I queried the advert content she could not advise me and said I would be sent a copy of it AFTER I had paid the invoice.
   
6. Her name is Susan but as company policy states they are not allowed to provide their surnames, that is all she can tell me.
   
7. Susan doesn’t like being called a liar as I found out when she hung up on me. Sorry Susan.
   
8. SPL Advertising call from a withheld number so you can’t trace the call or call them back to rant at them then hang up back…(Which I find helps my anger management)
   

When they send me the invoice I will, of course, post it up here for all to read (and laugh at) and I will send it back to them with a copy of this blog and a copy of my letter to Trading Standards, which I am sure will do absolutely nothing and SPL will change their name and carry on as usual…grrr.

Since writing this blog yesterday, I have had the same company call me on my mobile and my husband’s mobile twice today, both times telling me they were calling to thank us for our support with their charity campaign a few months ago. When you question anything they say they just hang up and the annoying thing is they call from withheld numbers so they cannot be traced.

I have also spoken to a number of people on Twitter and they have been called by the same people also trying the same scams over the last few weeks. It seems the company makes a call to you a few days prior to get the contact name and position of someone in the company (Mine was someone calling from “HMRC” to send me some new legislation paperwork for small businesses)  and they then use this name to pretend that that was the person who verbally agreed the work.

I came across this which is quite interesting reading…

http://www.adscams.co.uk/

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/fakebilling.php – Which actually lists SPL Publishing as Summit Publishing Ltd.

There are plenty of smartphones on the market now but it seems there are two main contenders. The Blackberry and the iPhone.

Durability:

Blackberry:
I am quite heavy handed with phones so the blackberry has always held up well for me, although I will say the cheap painted chrome effect casing around the edges is pitiful at staying put and within 2 weeks of owning it, it was chipping and the black paint underneath was showing through, which certainly did nothing to hold its £300 market value.

The Blackberry is a durable and strong phone, is more compact and definitely built to withstand the handbag treatment more I would say, so long as it is in a case to avoid the paint chipping.

Iphone:
I can see the iphone is going to be an absolute nightmare to keep scratch free as after a day of owning it and spinning it around on its back on the table top (which is just too much fun not to do) it is already scratched and scuffed. But no problem, I have already found that Ebay sell replacement snap on covers for £3 a go and they come in a range of lovely colours too.

Early on, the iPhone had a bad reputation for being fragile because of the touchscreen and the amount of plastic on it. But come on, when dropped on the kitchen floor enough any phone would eventually break. The iPhone proved that it actually is quite durable, as long as you don’t drop it on its lovely glass face. Without anything protecting the glass, you are looking at a shattered iPhone. However, there are products on the market to help protect your iPhone, from rubber sleeves to hard plastic cases.

Ease of use:

iphone:
Being a typical woman I didn’t read the ‘easy set up’ manual o2 stick in the box, so upon delivery I unpacked it like an early Xmas present and stared at it for a few minutes before realising there was no place to stick the SIM card. I pushed buttons, pulled bits and I turned the volume up and down 10 times before I realised none of these were the SIM card slot. So I googled it only to find out that there was a tiny little hole in the top that needed an open paper clip stuck in it so the SIM card casing popped up. If I had read the ‘easy set up’ guide I would have also found the enclosed ‘special tool’ provided to actually open the holder rather than reach for the nearest paper clip. Women hey.

The touchscreen and motion sensibility on the iPhone is unmatched by any other touchscreen devices. Bump to exchange contact information, play games by tilting the phone, zoom in with a finger slide motion. It’s simply amazing technology and even the touchscreen Blackberry Storm doesn’t come close.

The email set up is easy and the push/fetch options are easy to work out and set up.

Blackberry:
The menu is harder to navigate although you can choose how many icons to display in a row and group them etc, I still prefer the Iphone’s menu and lists and the drag/drop facility.

Email set up wins on the Blackberry as you can log on to o2 mail and set the accounts up online, whereas the iphone you have to add all the info on the actual phone and trying to enter 20 digit passwords made up of letters, numbers and symbols on a touch screen is definitely an art I didn’t master straight away.

Appearance:
Since ordering the iphone 32gb I must say, it wins hands down for me. Its sleek, expensive looking and well made. All the things a woman loves in a man, sorry, phone.

Likes & Dislikes:
iphone:
I love the idea of everything being held in widgets and I like the slidy touch screens and ease of use. I also love the new Qwerty keyboard on this recent model and reports from other friends who have the 3g say it’s hard to use and certainly takes some getting used to.

I also like the look of a lot of the applications out there that can be downloaded to the phone. Although I haven’t had a chance to download many others yet, I headed straight for the itunes website and made sure Facebook and Twitter were put on there first. Hey, a girl needs to stay in touch!

So far there is not much to dislike apart from the fact that the ringtones and message tones are very limited and although there are cheats out there that enable you to custom make or use a song as ringtone, it took me around 10 minutes to work out how to do this and get my favourite tune set as my ring tone. I am still stuck with one of the few awful message tones programmed in. Unless you want to pay Apple £1 to have the privilege of downloading a song to your phone to set as a ringtone, you are stuck. Surely Apple make enough money from the Iphone itself to have to charge people extra for bits like that.

Blackberry:
I like the fact that as opposed to the iphone you can use any sound or song you want as a ring tone and you don’t have to pay for the privilege or change the file types around manually.

I also like the 6 icon menu on the home screen that flashes or beeps at you when you have a text or mail as it saves you having to take the phone right out of the case or go in to the menu to manually check every hour or so.

Therefore, I would say that the phones are pretty much equal in my opinion. The iphone wins for me on appearance, ease of use and applications but the Blackberry wins on durability and Set up. Just as well I have one of each then I guess!