The first person was a small locally based businesses owner that didn’t want to outsource their calls to another company that has 50 staff in a call centre sitting there purely to take messages all day. He wanted to have a small personal company that only looked after the needs of a few clients and knew the story behind the business, whilst treating callers like they were their own. The last thing he wanted was to transfer his calls to another company and then have his clients complaining that is sounded like they were dialling a call centre.

He wanted to find someone who only looked after the needs of a handful of people, would be prepared to get to know his clients and his diary and would most importantly be civil and personable to all of his callers – good job he found us then.

On the complete other end of the spectrum I had a lady call to say that she had come across our earlier blog regarding the charity advertising scams and was being harassed daily by people wasting her time trying to sell her advertising space or marketing.  She didn’t mind if we were a call centre, nor did she mind how many staff we had just so long as her calls were answered professionally and we only contacted her with messages from client’s or people wanting to talk to her about her product.

I advised her we could certainly help her out and both of them have agreed to trial our service for a week to see if it helps free up some time for them to concentrate on the more important aspects of running a business.

At YourAdmin we pride ourselves on taking the time to speak to each of your clients like they were our own and our current clients report back that we are friendly, well informed and professional.

If you would like to try out our service please contact us to see how we can help you. We are happy to simply take your calls for a few hours a day or offer you a complete call answering service with diary management and text service, 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. Our lines are manned from 8.00am until 6.00pm and we can even offer a weekend service too if required.

Going on the statistic that 70% of callers will hang up if they get through to an answer phone – can you really afford not to have a call answering service helping you out?

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.

• We had our accounts cleared out by some lovely fraudsters

• We had 4 disputes ongoing with Royal Mail over lost ‘signed for’ packages and after 7 weeks of arguing and filling in forms, we got the money back, but, ironically, 2 of the original cheques sent to us as a refund got ‘lost in the post’. Royal Mail loses Mail. Brilliant.

• We have another 2 new claims to now file with Royal Mail as in the last 3 weeks they have managed to ‘lose’ another 2 of our signed for parcels that we sent out to clients.

• We pulled an all-nighter completing an urgent piece of work for a client that called in last minute – but after 1.5 hours sleep between 2 of us, we made it through the night and got it completed. Well done us!

• We signed up new repeat clients which is always great news and are of course, always welcomed.

• We spent time working for clients in London and Essex, planning events and managing them, which was a lovely break from the office and was great to get out there and meet prospective clients, suppliers and people. And of course the events were a hit, had raving reviews and gained us more repeat custom for 2010. Yay!

• We saw our SEO stats increase since the launch of our new website and branding and now rank one of the highest on Google for Virtual PA’s.

• We had our busiest month of the year so far… and loved every minute of it!!

Lets hope December is just as fun and crazy and we have an even busier month yet…..