Full-time Employee vs a Virtual Assistant Cost Comparison

Full-time Employee vs a Virtual Assistant Cost Comparison

Want to SAVE over £30,000 in business expenses this year?
If you answered yes, read on …

COST COMPARISON	Full-time Employee	Virtual Assistant
Hourly Rate of Pay	£10.00	£18.00
Fringe Benefits @ 30% (Retirement Plans)	£3.00	None
Overhead Rate @ 60% (Office Space, Equipment and Office Supply expense, Insurance, Compensation, Overtime Pay, Administration Costs)	£6.00	None
Total Effective Rate of Pay	£19.00	£18.00
**Hours Per Year	2,080 hrs	480 hrs
TOTAL Annual Labour Cost	£39,520.00	£8,640.00

Difference = £30,880.00 per year

By hiring a Virtual Assistant…

You SAVE over £30,000.00 per year!

Although the Virtual Assistant’s hourly rate is more than the employee’s rate, you save the cost of benefits and overheads that would have to be applied to the new employee’s wage. Virtual Assistants are usually more experienced, more efficient, and better connected than the employee. You will need to devote far less time to the project to get the same results, only 480 hours a year versus 2,080 for the new employee.

**Remember, with a Virtual Assistant, you only pay for the time on task by the minute! You don’t pay for socialising, hour long lunches, frequent trips to the bathroom or cigarette breaks.

Your employee’s 8 hour day can be crunched into 3-4 hours with a Virtual Assistant.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant is more cost-effective. A Virtual Assistant will go above and beyond the normal assistant’s duties to impact your own productivity. No task is too big or small for a Virtual Assistant to handle. Even if you only have 1 hour of work a month. You wouldn’t be able to hire a temp for just 1 hour but you can hire a Virtual Assistant for 1 hour.

*Source: Virtual Assistant Networking Association Cost Comparison
(Converted from $ to £)

The Largest Global Network Online for Successful and Aspiring Virtual Assistants

If YOU want to save £30,000 a year and hire a Virtual Assistant visit Help on Tap for more information.

Free PDF Converter – Maintain Your Embedded Hyperlinks

I have been testing a number of free PDF converters to find one that will maintain all my embedded hyperlinks. By embedded hyperlinks I mean a link within text e.g. Help on Tap will contain a link with the full URL of my Virtual Assistance website. I want that to be clickable once the Word document is converted to a PDF.

I have now found the answer and it is using OpenOffice. OpenOffice is free opensource software that is available to download from www.openoffice.org.

As you can see from the image below, OpenOffice has a number of applications including Spreadsheet, Text Document, Presentation and Database. It is possible to save any documents produced in these applications to their equivalent in Microsoft e.g. you can save a Spreadsheet as an Excel Spreadsheet. I highly recommend you download the software and try it.

To convert to PDF:

1. Click on Open a Document.
2. Locate the document to be converted to a PDF and click open.
3. On the top menu click File > Export as PDF.
4. Click on the Security tab if you want to add security.



5. Click Export.

Note that the PDF will not open automatically, you will have to locate it.

(P.S. I used ScreenHunter 5.1 Free Download to capture the images in this post – so unbelievably easy to use).

Problem Uploading Images in Wordpress 2.8

I decided to purchase a Wordpress Theme from Brian Gardner after reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook.

It was a huge learning curve as it was my first Wordpress blog. The code was beautiful, until I got my hands on it! I am extremely pleased with what I have managed to do so far and with the quality of the theme.

I experienced problems with images from the start. When I first uploaded the theme it didn’t look right and none of the images were showing.

I contacted Brian on a Sunday evening and was not expecting an answer until at least the Monday. I received a response within an hour. He stated that the theme had been corrupted during the upload process and to try uploading it again. I did, but with the same result. I emailed him back and he uploaded the theme for me. It was all ready for me to mess up the code on Monday morning. Fantastic customer service.

Anyway, the problem with the images! I accidentally deleted all the images from my virtual assistance site . Being highly organised I had a backup. I uploaded the images and discovered that the images were being corrupted during the upload process to my web server (Brian was right all along!). I downloaded Filezilla, another FTP program, and uploaded the images without any problems.

I was uploading the images manually to my web server and all was OK. I then discovered that Wordpress could upload the images for you, via the Add Media link. But low and behold, it didn’t work.

After searching the internet for a solution and much investigation the problem was very simple. If you are experiencing problems, these are some of the resolutions I came across while investigating.

Try these:

1. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous > Store uploads in this folder. Check the directory where it is uploading your images to. This was actually my problem. It was pointing to hotvasoftware/wp-content/uploads. As my website is hotvasoftware.com it was creating a new directory called hotvasoftware. It is now using the default setting of wp-content/uploads and appears to be working.
2. Check the file permissions on wp-content. Here’s a good forum post on file permissions http://wordpress.org/support/topic/194297.
3. Apparently, plugins can cause problems. As I had no plugins on my blog at the time, I could take this out of the equation. If you have a number of plugins, try disabling them and adding them back, one at a time, to see if one of them is causing a problem.

I noticed that Wordpress 2.8.1. is now available so you could always try upgrading.

Recommended Email Software

I hear of VA’s and Business Owners sending their emails out in batches of 25-50 at a time. This is so the emails are not treated as spam and to supposedly save money. It becomes a time-consuming task when it is done this way. It is also open to human error.

Why not just press a button once and be safe in the knowledge that you have a 98%-99% guarantee that your email will be delivered? You can then receive vital information as to who has opened or deleted the emails. Email marketing software saves you time and thus money.

There are so many packages available and it can be a minefield. I am currently using AWeber on the recommendation of highly respected internet/affiliate marketers. All the email software listed below allows you to personalize your emails. This will improve your open rate.

AWeber

I have used AWeber for over a year now and highly recommend it. It has helped me to:

• Turn website visitors into potential clients. It is really easy to create web sign-up forms and insert them onto your website..
• Ensure I am not seen as a spammer. It is a double opt-in autoresponder. This means that once a subscriber signs up for your newsletter/free ebook then they must confirm their subscription.
• Build up a relationship with my subscribers by using Autoresponders.
• Set up a 14 day email course using Follow Up messages that will automatically be sent out to new subscribers in a sequence.
• Send emails as frequently as I like. Some services charge per email sent which can get expensive fast. Aweber charges you by the amount of subscribers you have.
• Know exactly where my subscribers are coming from. I have a number of lists set up, each with a different web form so I can track my subscribers. If you want to provide email management as a service you can set up a separate email list for each client.
• Automatically handle unsubscribes. lf a subscriber decides to leave a list this is handled automatically. Aweber doesn’t actually remove the subscriber but marks it as inactive. I do advise you to remove anyone who has unsubscribed though, as you are charged for the amount of subscribers you have.

Sign Up for a Risk-Free Trial NOW and Increase Your Income Potential

iContact

iContact is a simple and inexpensive email marketing software tool that allows you to:

• Test Drive the Software.
• Capture those important money making email addresses.
• Start an email campaign to your subscribers. Once set up these will run automatically.
• Obtain feedback from your clients by sending them a survey.
• Keep your subscribers updated with regular newsletters. You can use one of iContact’s 300+ professional email newsletter templates.
• Be reassured that your subscribers are receiving your emails as iContact has deliverability rates of between 98%-99%.
• Import any email addresses that you have already gathered.

Test Drive iContact NOW and Grow your Business.

If it is simplicity you want then iContact is the email package for you. I took a test drive and found it extremely simple but lacking in functionality and that is why I decided to use Aweber.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers a free 60 day trial. Every free trial includes a subscription to their email marketing best practices newsletter and email campaign coaching tips.

Some of the features include:

• The ability to produce customizable website visitor sign up forms.
• Over 100 professional HTML email templates (newsletters, promos, invites and more).
• Automatic delivery in the correct format, HTML or text.
• Real-time reporting (including opens, who clicked on which links and more).

Try it FREE for 60-Days

Conclusion

Having used Aweber for over a year now and being completely satisfied with its functionality and deliverability this is the email software package that I recommend. It is also heavily utilised by Internet Marketers.