Category Archives: Clerical / Business Services

Save Valuable Time ~ Delegate Social Media to Your Virtual Assistant

Owning your own small business is very rewarding … and, at the same time, quite exhausting! There is never enough time in the day. It is very time consuming to create relevant content for your audience and/or find inspiring quotes and tips to share. Hiring a virtual assistant to handle posting to your social media platforms is the answer to having enough time to manage all the other aspects of running your business.

Of course, you may be thinking that the VA may post something you wouldn’t like and/or you wouldn’t have posted. You may be thinking the VA wouldn’t convey your company’s “voice”. As a virtual assistant, I spend time learning my client’s personality and company “voice” via scheduled phone or Skype calls. My clients provide me with content ideas and relevant articles to use as reference for creating industry related posts.

You may be thinking it will be expensive to delegate your social media tasks. It is money well spent when you consider the time you will be saving (time that can now be devoted to growing and building your business) by taking this task off your plate every day (and you should be posting consistently/daily). It will give you peace of mind knowing that your social media posting is being taken care of by a trained professional. Tracy Helps You offers Social Media Packages that provide a certain number of posts per month, as well as, managing engagement (likes, shares, comments & messages) with your followers on your behalf. Think of it as you would any other necessary expense for running your business.

You may be wary of completely outsourcing your social media postings. The good news is that we can work together in creating and implementing your social media strategy. Tracy Helps You can create and schedule the bulk of the posts and you can add some personal content type posts. You can also respond to comments and messages. Another great idea is to post Live Streaming video. This gives your online presence a face and a voice for your followers to connect with. Interacting and building relationships is the main reason to use social media as a business tool … it’s social 🙂

Save some valuable time by delegating your social media posting to Tracy Helps You … help is just a phone call away! Call now!

Managing Your Email Inbox

Email is a wonderful thing. It’s so simple to use for fast and easy communication. It’s convenient. It’s inexpensive. Nearly everyone uses it.

Email is a great tool, and like other types of tools, it needs regular maintenance. Without regular maintenance, it can quickly become out-of-control and over whelming.

As your Virtual Assistant, I will help you clean up your email inbox. I will help you organize and maintain your emails:

By “filing” them into their proper folders and sub folders. If you haven’t set up a folder type system yet, that would be one of the first things I would help you implement. When you have all the related emails filed together, you can easily find the one you are looking for.
By deleting unwanted emails and creating tighter spam parameters to prevent future emails from that sender.
By “unsubscribing” to emails that you legitimately requested to receive but no longer find helpful.
By setting up an auto responder for those times when a quick reply is not available. An “out of office” type of message would be sent out as soon as the email is received explaining when you will be replying to them and who can help them if their matter is urgent and needs immediate attention.

Tracy Helps You can save you valuable time by organizing your email inbox for you. It is one of the many types of tasks that can be delegated to your virtual assistant, so your time can be spent on the matters that demand your expertise and/or personal attention. Call soon to schedule your initial appointment, then we can start to help you (in this area, as well as, in others) 🙂

Tracy Helps You’s Top 10 Blog Posts of 2016

Holiday Cards & Your Hectic Holiday Schedule

Tomorrow, we flip over another page on the calendar … to the last month of 2016. December is a month full of fun, holiday celebrations, but regular life still goes on. All the normal day-to-day responsibilities don’t necessarily take a break during this “most wonderful time of the year”, which means your schedule is even busier than usual.

In today’s world, most of the mail we receive is computer generated – sometimes its addressed to us by name (computers are smart 🙂 ), but many times it is addressed to “Current Resident”. Companies spend a lot of $$ to send you these advertisements, but most people consider it “junk mail” and toss it.

Most everyone loves receiving Holiday cards. I’m talking about physical, snail-mail cards. It’s fun to check your mailbox each day, hoping to find something for you personally. I think of them as “fun” mail … something I want to open right away. I enjoy reading the Holiday Letter that many people include with their card. It’s a good way to catch up with the happenings in their family, especially for those who are not on Facebook 🙂 I also love getting packages in the mail, many of which are gifts I have ordered online … who doesn’t love seeing the UPS, FedEx, USPS or Amazon truck pull up in front of their house (please tell me you do too, that it’s not just me)?

All that to say, sending Holiday cards are is time honored tradition of the season, but also a time-consuming task to do in an already busy time of year. Tracy Helps You can take this task off your to-do list for you. Whether it’s your personal family cards, or cards sent out to your business clients and colleagues, we can take care of it for you – freeing up some time for you to handle all the other things on your to-do list.

This hectic season is the perfect time to delegate some tasks to your personal / virtual assistant. Time is a valuable commodity! Let Tracy Helps You save you some valuable time 🙂 Call today!!

Money Woes

There is a saying, “Money makes the world go around” ~ and it does in the sense that it is the currency that our world operates by. Money is part of our day-to-day lives. It changes hands daily for goods and services. We buy items at stores … we buy food at restaurants … we buy gasoline for our cars … we pay our bills. Like numerous other businesses, Tracy Helps You provides a service to our clients, and we get paid for those services. For payment, we accept checks or cash.

Earlier this week, I got a crash course on being on the receiving end of several counterfeit twenty dollar bills. Like many people, I pay most of my household bills online. It’s simple and convenient – schedule the amount and the date, click OK, and you are done. Except, that I forgot about an annual insurance payment that is taken directly from my account each year. Not a big deal … I just had to deposit more money into the account before the bill payments cleared. I also forgot that the banks aren’t open on Labor Day, so I did the next best thing. I counted out $300 in twenty dollar bills (counted out 15 bills, checked 3 times), put them with the deposit slip into a sealed envelope and put them in my banks “night deposit” vault.

Tuesday afternoon, I signed into my online banking to just make sure that all the payments and the deposit went smoothly. I’m glad I did, because instead of a $300 deposit pending, there was a $240 deposit pending. I made a trip to our local bank branch and was informed that 3 of the $20 that were in my envelope were counterfeit bills and were being sent to the Secret Service. To say that I was shocked would be huge understatement.

They explained that they confiscate the bad bills and sent them off to the Secret Service for verification, and that I basically just lost $60. She advised me to check out their website to learn more about how to spot a counterfeit bill and what to do if you find one.

So, I went home and spent a couple of hours learning about counterfeit money. I encourage you to please take some time and learn for yourself … here is the website www.secretservice.gov. Just click the Investigation drop-down menu toward the top of the page and then click on “Know Your Money”. It takes you to a PDF file showing all the safety features that are incorporated into each denomination of US currency.

The reason for me telling you all of this is to share my unfortunate experience and to pass along some knowledge to hopefully prevent you from having a similar experience.

Having an Assistant Can Be a Real Lifesaver

An assistant can seem like a lifesaver because they can save you valuable time. Everyone is busy, their calendars and schedules are full of appointments, events and occasions.

We all get 24 hours in a day. It’s a challenge deciding which activities take priority over the others. You may sometimes wonder “how in the world will I get everything accomplished”? Continue reading →

Office Help ~ Virtual Assistant or Onsite ~ Your Choice

As a personal assistant, I offer many different types of services. In the last 6 months or so, I’ve had quite a few requests for administrative / office kind of help.

Around Thanksgiving time, I sent out Christmas cards for 2 individual clients and 3 business owners. Each client had their own instructions, but basically, I copied and folded family letters to be included, printed labels, addressed envelopes and applied stamps – but mostly, I saved my client valuable time. I also helped one of those same business owners plan their company Christmas party. That was fun for me, and was another item checked off his to-do list 🙂

Another client had me fill in for his Office Assistant while she was out sick for a few days. He said it was more cost efficient hiring me than using a temp agency.

Yesterday, I did a mass mailing for that same client. I did the mundane, but necessary work of printing the letters, folding them, labeling the envelopes, stuffing them and running them through the postage machine. It took 3 hours, but his Office Assistant wasn’t taken away from her normal duties for this occasional type project.

I have an ongoing client that I send out hand written thank you cards to all the leads he meets / talks to. He sends me an email with their info and I mail them a card. After our initial meeting, this is all handled virtually. He has the stationary and stamps delivered directly to me. I invoice him monthly and he sends my payment. Easy Peasy ! I also created and maintain a database / spreadsheet with all these leads for him.

Another client has also hired me “virtually”, to manage her Facebook business page. She gives me images and facts pertaining to her business and I use them to create Facebook posts for her business page. I also create her weekly events.

Are you a business owner who could use some administrative / office “help” ?? Tracy Helps You is just a phone call away 🙂

5 Tips for Managing Your Email Inbox

A year or so ago, I wrote a post about organizing and managing your piles of paperwork and junk mail. These days, I get more, actually much more email than snail mail. Email is a wonderful tool for business as well as for personal use. It is great to have (nearly) instant responses.

Technology has advanced very quickly in the last couple of decades. We now live in a 24/7 world, where practically everything is available at a moment’s notice. Gone are the days of typing a letter, mailing it, and then waiting a week or more for a response. Nowadays, people get impatient if they don’t get an instant response to an email they sent.

As a result, nearly everyone has at least one, if not more, email addresses. I have both personal and business email addresses … all told, I have 6 email addresses. Do you have more than one?
Email inboxes fill up fast. Some people get hundreds every day. It can become overwhelming very quickly.

Here are some tips I try to follow monthly:
• Create sub folders to file emails you will need to refer back to at a future date.
• After reading an email, delete it or file it away in the appropriate folder
• Try to respond right away … saving it for later keeps the inbox cluttered.
• If you get too many emails sales ads from stores, you can request to receive fewer by changing your preferences or unsubscribing completely.
• You can delete multiple emails at one time by using the search bar to find all the emails from a specific sender, then click on check all, then click delete all.

Once you get your inbox emptied out, try to stay on top of it by setting aside some time every month to keep it manageable. It will take less and less time each month.

I hope these tips prove “helpful” for you 🙂

Need A Ride ???

Are you traveling for the holidays? Do you need a ride to or from the airport? Maybe you need a ride to and from a doctor’s appointment or hospital for an out-patient procedure. Many people choose to take care of medical appointments at the end of the year to take advantage of flex spending account balances and paid deductibles. Continue reading →

Time Consuming Errands ~ Tracy Helps You Will “help” You

Recently, I heard that the State of Illinois will no longer mail out license plate renewal reminders to the thousands, upon thousands, of vehicle owners. This decision is said to save the state hundreds of thousands of dollars each year ~ and hopefully be helpful in balancing the budget.

They suggest registering on their website to receive an email reminder. That will be fine for the majority of people … but then again, not everyone owns a computer and/or smartphone or has reliable internet access. Some people don’t have an email address (or if they do, feel comfortable using / relying on it).

Personally, I’m fine with remembering when my sticker expires and replacing it before they do. That being said, I do like having the post card in hand when I go to the DMV … it has all the info the clerk needs in one handy location. We all know what a joy it is to have to get in a different line / wait again because we didn’t have all the right info 🙁

Government agencies are usually great places to people watch … you’re probably going to be there awhile, and you’ve already taken time off work (thanks to their “convenient” business hours). It’s not how I envision using my vacation time 🙂

As a personal assistant, I run errands for people all the time. I’ll pick up your keys and cash from you at work, take your car for its emission test and get your new license plate sticker the same day … I can even return your library books & pick up the dry cleaning, then return your car.

Think of all the things on your To-Do List that can be accomplished … even while you are at work. Call Tracy Helps You … today 🙂