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How to Virtually Guarantee the Perfect Vacation Experience
Going on a vacation is, for most people, something they look forward to and plan for upwards of a year. The thought of anything going wrong is cause for much anxiety. Sometimes in peoples desire to book the “foolproof” vacation they out smart themselves and actually guarantee that they won’t have the best vacation possible. How?
The first thought that everyone has concerning guaranteeing that their vacation goes well is that transportation aside, pick the right destination and get the best accommodations. With research and preferences done and considered you can choose the right destination. Now how about the accommodations? This is where you can’t afford to go wrong, but where most people do.
The thought is to stay in the best hotel or resort that you can find at or near your chosen destination. You can’t go wrong with that thinking, right? Well hotels and resorts are businesses run by employees doing a job. And they are only concerned about their future vacation, not your current one.
Even if the staff is at it’s best, you still have to hope that all the other guests are on your same schedule (late night partyers make it tough on trying to rest and relax and vice versa) and wouldn’t it be nice to have more than 250 square feet to call home for a couple weeks? The pool will close regardless of your desires and needs and why eat in the same handful of usually very pricey restaurants?
With less research than you put into choosing your destination you can find and secure a private home for your vacation at less cost than almost any hotel or resort worth staying in. You will be able to talk with (via email and/or phone) the actual home owner, and get your price! Try doing THAT with a resort!
Private homes in desirable vacation areas are owned by people that have spent years nurturing and building their home into something that they are proud of and you will find nicer than any other type of accommodation. They are “turn key” in their set up and all you are required to do is feed yourself in whatever fashion you choose (EVERY meal doesn’t HAVE to be an event, unless you want it to be). Their location will be in the heart of the action and, and yet being it’s a private residence, afford you the privacy to live on your own terms.
And in a lot more than 250 square feet of space, with a pool and spa that doesn’t close, multiple living spaces and a bedroom and bath for every adult in the party.
Steve R. Robbins has been vacationing and working in the Bonita Springs/Naples area for over a decade. He has come to know the area and what it offers better than most travel agents. Visit www.floridagulfcoastvacationhomerentals.com for more information on this tropical vacation paradise.
How a Virtual Assistant Helps the Small to Medium Business Owner
Most business owners know that their time is valuable – so valuable, in fact, that the simple everyday tasks of running a successful company can quickly become the day’s biggest chores. That’s why hiring a virtual assistant is on the top of to-do lists everywhere. After all, whether you’re working from a small business that you run out of your home or a medium business that you’ve grown from the bottom up, virtual assistants are a great way to get the personalized administrative or clerical assistance you need without the additional overhead of hiring a full-time staff.
What a Virtual Assistant Does
The services offered by a virtual assistant vary depending on the skills of the individual or firm that you hire as well as your specific needs. If you need something as simple as help sending out thank you letters after a successful fundraiser, a virtual assistant can quickly and efficiently get the job done. If you need something a little more complex (for example, if you are launching a new campaign and need market research), you might opt for a temporary virtual assistant with a specific task in mind. A more permanent arrangement, such as answering emails or taking phone calls for a few hours each day, can also be accomplished through the services of the right virtual assistant.
Virtual Assistants are Designed for Small and Medium Businesses
While there are no restrictions on the size of a business that can benefit from a virtual assistant, small businesses and medium businesses stand to gain the most from the services offered by a competent, dependable professional. Unlike standard full-time help, virtual assistants are not employees – they are either independent contractors or part of a larger firm. This means that you – the business owner – do not have to pay the taxes, insurance, and fees associated with having your own staff. For small and medium business owners, this can mean the difference between bringing in a profit and falling short of your minimum fiscal goals.
When you factor in office space, vacation time, sick days, health insurance, breaks, and a lengthy training period, the cost of hiring an employee is almost three times the cost of a virtual assistant. These kinds of issues are even more difficult among small and medium businesses, which typically don’t have a Human Resources Department to handle all the issues of payroll and legal compliance with breaks and vacation time.
Choosing Your Virtual Assistant
Finding the right virtual assistant for the job can be a long, arduous process. When you hire just one person, you might not be able to get the right level of professionalism for the job, especially if you’re looking for a specific skill set. For example, an individual is typically limited in his or her level of experience and education, and may not be able to meet your needs for a brochure layout one day and typing the next. You are also at risk of finding someone who is new to the field or poorly trained as a virtual assistant.
This is where hiring a firm can make all the difference. When you turn to a company like IAC Professionals, you get all the help you need for a variety of tasks in one quick and easy location. You get incredibly diverse technical and administrative skills on board a competent virtual assistant team, as well as a company that understands what you expect from your virtual assistant. This way, you never have to worry about the level of professionalism you’re paying for.
Grow Your Business without Breaking the Bank
This is one trend that isn’t going to be going away any time soon. When your bottom line is at stake, you have to find a solution that meets your staffing needs without compromising your financial future. Whether you’re just getting your small business started or you are looking to expand but simply don’t have enough time, a virtual assistant is just the thing you’ve been seeking.
IAC Professionals
8260 NW 14th Street
Suite V6115
Miami, FL 33126
1-786-214-6074
www.IACProfessionals.com
1-786-214-6046
1.877 MY-IAC-VA
cindy@iacprofessionals.com
IAC Professionals
Experience the World With Virtual Tours
In the corporate world, one needs the proper tools in order to increase market sales and profit, virtual tours have been proven to be very useful in this area. In order to let people see the beauty and detail of a specific location, some business owners provide their customers with virtual tours of their facilities. The different areas and rooms of the establishment can even be integrated with a floor plan to create a fully navigational virtual tour.
Whether you’re selling your home or promoting a university, you can utilize a full service virtual tour to make it happen. Have your website come to life with amazing virtual tour technology. If you have a website that promotes real estate, schools, hotels, museums, or restaurants then why not make it more appealing by incorporating a virtual tour? Gone are the days of still images being solely used to lure potential customers. In this era, multimedia and the internet have played a great role in making sales and creating lasting clients.
If you are planning to buy a new house or are looking into a resort for an upcoming vacation, you should look for sites that have a virtual tour of your desired property or location before making a decision. This technology is especially helpful for out of state customers, making it possible to view and tour the property without having to travel there first.
If you plan to stay in a hotel or vacation house, wouldn’t it be great to be able to tour the rooms and other accommodations before booking your stay? Being able to see the room from every angle and direction is a total different experience than just viewing the room from one or two still photos. Or how about being able too see a restaurant through a virtual tour before making the reservations? You would be able to get a solid feel for the restaurant and the type of atmosphere it exudes before going there.
Posting virtual tours on your website will definitely boast positive results. Do not take the risk of losing business by having a static website. It is time that you make it more in captivating by implementing a virtual tour. A person who is looking for a hotel or condominium online will surely be allured by the virtual tour added to your website. Wouldn’t you find it helpful if you could view a property or location from the comfort of your own home? Especially considering how busy we all are these days, anything we can take care of online will save us time.
A high quality virtual tour is right at your fingertips, Regal 360 is a professional full service virtual tour provider. They specialize in panoramic photography and they also offer other services such as video, still photography, web design, and logo design just to name a few.
Premiere Virtual Tour provider. Increase sales and generate traffic with cutting edge virtual tour technology. Visit www.regal360.com for details.
Should You Become A Virtual Assistant?
32% of the virtual assistants surveyed charge $31-40 per hour for their services with the majority of virtual assistants putting in 31-40 hours of work per week. Amazingly, 43.6% of the virtual assistants surveyed normally work on weekends.
93.7% of the Virtual Assistants surveyed stated that their clients are found through word of mouth referrals with 80.1% of virtual assistants also marketing through a website online. *Source: The Media Virtual Assistant Survey
Many employees are working in the job market where they are being cross-trained to provide countless services. This is great for employers but takes advantage of the employee. Cross training is often presented to the employee as “team playing.” But this practice is what has caused many individuals to start thriving, part-time, Virtual Assistant businesses. Which is many cases blossom into full-time income!
What is a virtual assistant?
Virtual assistants often provide administrative and office support services to small businesses. Nowadays these services are being purchased by new entrepreneurs and home-based businesses owners who can’t afford to hire full time employees. The number of entrepreneurs entering the marketplace is exploding. According to Entrepreneur Magazine these new business owners are entering the marketplace at a pace of 8,000 per day.
Virtual assistants work from home with their own equipment, handling tasks that their clients don’t know how to do (or don’t want to do).
New business owners can concentrate on the parts of the business that make the money and leave the details to competent virtual assistants who enjoy the freedom of working from home.
This is a true win-win.
The entrepreneur doesn’t pay the virtual assistant to chat around the water cooler, instead virtual assistants only get paid when they produce. This means more productivity for both the virtual assistant and their client; the entrepreneur.
The obvious benefit to someone employing a virtual assistant is not having to deal with payroll taxes, vacations, sick days, or employee benefits.
Plus virtual assistants work remotely and fee up office space and computers.
Virtual Assistants provide many of the same services as onsite employees, without the added costs. Here are some of the tasks you might expect to delegate to a Virtual Assistant:
” Personal Assistance
” Website Maintenance and Updates
” Customer Service
” Answering Service
” Link Exchange
” Article Management
” Online Advertising
” Data Entry
” Accounting and Bookkeeping
” PowerPoint Presentations
” Database Management
” Word Processing
” Technical Support
” Transcription
” Travel Arrangements
” Reminder Service
” Writing, Editing, and Research Services
Below you will find just a few of the many benefits of hiring a Virtual Assistant over a conventional or temporary employee:
Cost of Work Space and Equipment
Virtual Assistants work from their own home or office and use their own equipment. You don’t have to pay for office space, equipment, maintenance, or addition utility bills. This is especially beneficial if you don’t have a lot of space of your own.
Cost of Taxes and Benefits
Since Virtual Assistants are independent contractors you don’t have to spend time or money dealing with taxes. Another benefit is you don’t have to pay health/life insurance or workers compensation. In addition, you don’t have to pay holidays, vacation time, or sick leave.
You’re In Charge
The relationship between you and your VA is based on a contracted agreement and you state the terms. You have the added benefit of paying by the project, by the hour, or on a monthly retainer. Since they bill for work completed you don’t have to pay for personal phone calls, tardiness, child issues, or sick leave. You choose which tasks to delegate to the VA and which tasks to do yourself or to keep in-house.
Professional Ideas
A Virtual Assistant is an entrepreneur that has their own strengths, background, and areas of expertise. They work from home and provide a service just like you do and have their own ways to market and solve problems that you might never have thought of. Having an experienced business person to bounce ideas off of will help you and your business grow.
Time to Focus on Your Business
Hiring a Virtual Assistant will free up your valuable time to focus on improving your business. Delegating administrative work such as bookkeeping, writing, research, customer service, and other jobs will allow more time for you to expand your business.
Virtual assistants can make as much as the job demands. There are cases where virtual assistants can make up to $100 per hour. Invisible workers offers this kind of pay scale for their workers.
Janet McNair is one of the Partners at CAS
a company that specializes on providing employment opportunities for Virtual (Home) Workers.
email:
Active Virtual Tours: Panoramas Vs. Standard Size Photos
Someone coined the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”, after viewing regular size photos of something beautiful, like the Grand Canyon. How many words would come to mind after viewing a panoramic photo of the Grand Canyon in all of it grandeur in one photo? There would not be enough words to fully describe a panoramic view of one of nature’s beautiful sites like the Grand Canyon.
It is a fact, when purchasing anything especially over the Internet, having a photograph goes a long way in the decision process on moving forward on that purchase.
This brings me to my point that having regular size snapshots of something of interest is good, but having a panoramic view is even better. Let’s look at the real estate arena as to where this can really hold true. Often time real estate agents will go into a home that is for sale and will take a few photos and present the photos along with any legal written description in hopes of engaging potential buyers to buy the property. With the use of the Internet in today’s real estate marketing, some time the problem with these small photos are that they do not tell the whole story of the property, and at times will leave potential buyers dissatisfied and the desire to move on to the next house. This also holds true for home owners that have property for rent, weather it is long term or short term vacation rentals. Real estate for sale or for rent should be presented in a way that makes the viewers see themselves in that house enjoying all that the property have to offer.
Having a lot of small photos of a large area often shows that area in a disjointed fashion and do not give the viewer a true feeling of the area.
Take for example a large back yard with a pool, long patio with patio furniture and a jungle gym play area for the kids. Generally at least three different photos would be taken to show all the areas. Now if that same area was presented in one panoramic photograph, the viewer would get a better sense of the area and realize the actual size of the large area. Go to http://www.activevirtualtours.com to see examples.
For property sale or rentals, having good panoramic photos can make the difference and especially when they are presented in a good virtual tour format. Some virtual tours are simple slide shows of small photos, but a good virtual tour will give a view of the property as it is and not a fish eyed view. The viewer would have the ability to actually go from room to room, inside and outside the house and even things of interest in the surrounding areas of the property.
Pictures are a vital part of our everyday business on the Internet, and so photos that have more details all inclusive are always good to have. When it is appropriate to use virtual tours as a presentation tool, it will make those photos even better.
If standard size photos are worth a thousand words, then panoramic photos are worth ten thousand.
Expand your view, go panoramic!
Go to http://www.activevirtualtours.com to see how to improve real estate sales and vacation rentals using NAS Photography, LLC creator of Active Virtual Tours.
Small Business Owner