Virtual Assistance was born out of the demand for small business owners to focus on core tasks while they trust someone with the skill and knowledge to keep all the other balls up in the air.

Someone to help you streamline, organize, set up and administer things you are not so good at. Today I’d like to give some attention to scheduling, notes and the use of Google Documents. If you do not use Gmail at this time as an email solution, you are missing out on a lot of great features that could make your life easier.

Did you know that your domain emails can be managed by Google Apps enabling you to use the full set of features Gmail has to offer using your i...@mydomain.com email?

Did you know you could easily share folders, files and presentations with clients, colleagues and contacts via Gmail?

This also keeps a copy of a file online, accessible through ANY computer with an internet connection. Making it unnecessary to travel with a USB key or laptop to where you need to be?

Are you sitting at a meeting, taking avid notes? Share them in one step with all present and absent members that need to remain up to date, at the click of a button.

Send editable proposals via Google Documents, course material and any other file your contact needs to be prepared to meet and work with you.

Make appointments and check each other’s calendar via Google Calendars.

Well I’m a raving happy Google Documents user, the best part is it’s free.

Another great benefit of having a Google Email management account is, if your PC crashes, your emails are still online in an ever growing inbox, so you can archive to your hearts content and never loose a contact ever again.

Last but not least, BlackBerries have calendar support and so do iPhones, a lot of smartphones can synch with the calendar making is accessible on the go!

We offer virtual assistance to all our clients and can help you set up your Google Apps email inbox system for your domain, quickly and hassle free. You can also use all these features if you have a Gmail account!

How has Google helped you streamline the way you work lately?

This week has been a bit crazy, the weather is crazy, my mood is insane and the amount of spam I have received via websites I manage has been truly outrageous.

In one night I received triples of 20 different emails from spammers via the “contact us” form from one website and another has a user that’s been spamming on a weekly basis up to 45 posts in under a minute about weddings, this all on a health website.

Come Wednesday morning and what do I find, a pretty little gem of a post, that answers the questions I’ve been having. Is having a contact form really a good practise?

According to the article 5 Items to Delete from your Website by Kipp Bondar over at Hubspot.com contact forms are among the 5 things you should seriously consider getting rid of from your website. This of course in favor of targeted landing pages with effective conversion forms.

To understand this advise I’d like to propose you imagine your contact form is a mailbox, would you rather have it indiscriminately filled, causing clutter and confusion and have absolutely no control or oversight on what comes in OR would you like to make it so that incoming mail is organized according to what the sender is interested in or wants from you at that particular time?

The landing page comes with the possibility to allow people interested in a particular service or product come to you just for that, you receive an email and it’s not an initial greeting that may lead to more interactions where you finally discover what it is they need/want from your company. The contact established through a landing page is many times more straightforward and direct.

So cut the time you spend sifting through spam emails and random contacts that do not want your services and focus on creating real leads, getting the mail you want and hope for and let go of ever receiving any spam, ever!

I’m certainly convinced that I will do this for the websites I currently manage, to free them from unnecessary email bulks, especially because the one doing the sifting is usually me, but most of all because we all want to focus our time effectively, don’t you?

I have recently encountered various situations where a business owner has realized that more needs to be done to improve their website’s performance, reach a bigger audience and engage visitors and starts the process to improve the website, only to find himself (or herself) with hurdles along the way.

In this case I was the implementing party, contacting the existing website manager or web host service provider, only to look under the hood of the website to find the bare minimum amount of settings and freedom.

Ranging from very huge limitations on disk space and bandwidth, — who uses 250 MB as disk and bandwidth now a days, really?!?!– to missing functions like PHP, SQL and support for client autonomy, and with that I mean clients are unable to independently add new email accounts, email forwarders, subdomains, folders, meta-data and let alone upload new files for their website. Even if they wanted to add a new page or change content, some were so tied up by the limitations, the only way to get any updates was through their gatekeepers.

I have even encountered some who claim the website is their copyrighted material and so the client gets to never access the coding, html or layout of their design, SAY WHAT?!?! So basically then, you are paying to make use of their website, your preferred domain name belongs to their company and requests to adjust the Whois are swatted down with a, “but changing this is not a free service”.

I have to also warn that very, very cheap hosting only leaves room for a limited amount of pages and often just supports a static website. Say goodbye to hosting and tailoring your own conversion forms or calendars, adding e-commerce functions and any other features conveniently dubbed “extra”.

The funny thing is if you buy from hosting providers like Hostgator.com, you may be paying that same low price for a whole lot of features, support for a full fledged site with RSS, Blogs, Galleries, Slideshows, Audio, Video and so much more, straight from your own server account.

Yes, there are plenty of work arounds, which offer free options, like, Wufoo.com. They have a very decent form service. The free account allows you to make 3 forms and they offer varying paid subscriptions, which charge monthly fees to allow you more freedom.

But someone that has no idea how to workaround these limitations ends up coughing up payment for all sorts of charges to “upgrade” their hosting and wait, yes, wait for these guys to get around and find time to schedule in your request.

My two cents: hosting providers working like this have no sense of what a website should be, it is a product, it should belong to, YOU, the customer, they are a support team, ready 24/7 to help solve technical issues, but a lot of the freedom and responsibility should be on the client, because a website is no longer a commodity but a tool and if you do not adapt, soon, these web hosting providers will become irrelevant.

All in all be aware of what you buy, shared hosting servers are fine for starters, but for extra protection from possible spammers on your server, which can get your mail server blacklisted, go for a Virtual Private Server account and if you can dish out the extra dough and really want to be on your private island, get a dedicated server.

Always make sure you are receiving the following base services (this is just a short-list, not all the things are listed, yet):

• PHP 4 and up support
• Ftp Account
• Cpanel or any similar hosting management solution
• MySQL server acces, management and databases
• Automated account creation, login and password retrieval system

It’s just plain important to NOT need the provider for every little change. Most of all, real time changes need to be allowed, which really means you need to be in control. It sounds easy to let some “expert” deal with it, but you spare yourself a lot of headaches if you are in full control and have full access and send in a reliable, trustworthy Virtual Assistant to set things up for you when you need it, as fast as you need it.

That is the working relationship we offer here! We are a web hosting reseller for Hostgator and we give all our clients full access, meaning they can work on it whenever they choose to, if there are any serious technical issues they can’t handle, we are ready to deal with the technical team at Hostgator for you and have the problem addressed within 24 hours. And if they decide to let us manage things for them we do this as Virtual Assistants and try our best to be ready when you call!