The workflow management service is also getting a refreshed design, but it’s the changes to its boards and cards that will be of most interest to enterprise customers. 

“We are building for an entirely new era of teamwork – where people live in different locations, but work stays connected,” Trello’s head of product, Michael Pryor wrote in a blog post. “This is the beginning of a whole new Trello.”

The cards within Trello have been tweaked to improve workflows and also increase integration with third-party services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Salesforce. 

‘Link’ cards can now preview content from sites like YouTube, Dropbox, and even Instagram with just a simple copy and paste of a URL. There are also new ‘Board’ cards that can render a direct visual link to another board to connect projects across Trello.

The company has also announced that ‘Mirror’ cards will be coming in the next few months, enabling users to clone one card to appear on a number of other boards. An update to one of those cards then updates on all its copies. 

The wider platform has also been updated with ‘Views’ which adds more collaborative layers to the platform by providing a collection of new dashboards that show projects in a number of different forms. The first is ‘Timeline’, which as the name suggests, lets users see how different projects fit in a workflow. Similarly, ‘Calendar view’ will display start and due dates across a traditional calendar layout. 

If your workflow is too big and spans across multiple teams and boards, Trello’s new ‘Table view’ offers a more simplistic visual. It pulls cards in from selected boards across your team and displays them in a spreadsheet-style list that can be sorted and filtered down to your exact workload.

For data-driven business, Trello’s new ‘Dashboard’ transforms workloads and projects into tables and charts. It ‘visualizes’ key metrics, such as due date, card assignments, and cards-per-list to offer a different look at your operation.

All the updates have been ushered in with a refreshed logo and platform design with greater use of pastel colors.

Do you need some help with that workflow? Do you need assistance in setting up your Trello account? Let RevStaffing know as we can assist. Our Virtual Assistants are well versed in Trello and ready to help you. Give us a call at 855-738-7821 X700, email us at infor@revstaffing.com, or set-up an appointment by clicking HERE!

Courtesy of: CloudPro

Revstaffing Virtual Assistants provide the same services as on-site employees, without the added costs. Here are some of the tasks you might expect to delegate to a Virtual Assistant:

• Transaction Coordination
• Listing Coordination
• All Administrative Services
• Website Maintenance
• Accounting and Bookkeeping
• Branding Services
• Database Management
• Real Estate tool specific technical support
• Social media networking/blogging/account creation
• Writing, Editing, and Research Services

You may ask yourself, why not just hire an assistant? There are many benefits of hiring a VA over the traditional office assistant.
Virtual Assistants work from their home office and use their own equipment. You don’t have to pay for office space or equipment and this is especially beneficial if you don’t have a lot of space of your own.

Since Our Virtual Assistants are independent contractors you don’t have to worry about taxes, or pay health/life insurance and in addition, you don’t have to pay holidays, vacation time, or sick leave.

The relationship between you and your VA is based on a business agreement and you state the terms. You choose which tasks to delegate to the VA and which tasks to do yourself or to keep in-house.

A Virtual Assistant is an entrepreneur that has their own strengths, background, and areas of expertise. Although they work independently, a REVStaffing VA  is part of a team of virtual assistants available to provide services to our clients and they have access to our internal problem solving.

Need help trying to juggle all of those admin tasks and transactions? REVStaffing can gladly assist you with those tasks! Let REVStaffing help you to achieve your goals and increase your potential! Complete a complimentary needs analysis survey, send us an email, or call 855.REVS.VA1 today!

Spray Weeds with an Easy Vinegar Mixture
You can use some horticultural vinegar or mix up your own weed-buster with cooking vinegar.

Sprinkle Them with Table Salt
Sprinkle table salt over areas where weeds are growing in between the cracks to burn them away.

Burn the Offending Areas (carefully!)
Though this method is a good way to get a clean slate, you have to be very careful when trying it.

Lay newspapers over them
Smothering weeds is a great way to wear them out, and using newspaper? Hello, recycling!

So let’s go!!! Be sure to tune in each week for RevStaffing’s ‘DIYTalk’ section for more DIY Helpful Tips and Tricks.

Managing remote teams are tricky. It’s easy to fall short of your goals, even if you feel like you’re doing everything right. Hiring your first Virtual Assistant (or your next one) is a daunting task.

In today’s post, We’ll be going over some key criteria to keep in mind whether you’re just hiring your first Real Estate Virtual Assistant, or whenever you’re adding to your off-site workforce.

Outsource existing tasks you already know well.
While a company like ours is an expert at many of the common tasks found in real estate companies, everyone still does these tasks slightly differently. If your plan is to outsource something new to you & your business, you’re VA has probably already performed that task.

If it is your first time outsourcing, start by delegating something that’s already going on in your day-to-day operations, something you know well & can describe in elaborate detail to any new employee (in-person or otherwise). This will help you learn what it’s like managing a virtual team by delegating tasks with which you have intimate familiarity… making your job of training & monitoring someone who is off-site much easier.

Have a Clear Goal in Mind
One of the most obvious & easy issues to avoid is clearly setting out your goals and expectations before you hire a Virtual Assistant.

In the same way that you had set out specific expectations, quotas, rules, values, and other core company objectives & guidelines for a local employee, you need to do the same for your Virtual Assistant.

The simple way to do this is to focus on the details of your successful outcome and plan backward from the end game. 

How to choose the right Real Estate Virtual Assistant.

While this isn’t simple, the basics are the same across the board. You need to classify if you’re going to be starting with an Admin Task, or a Voice Task. Usually, going for a VA who can do an Admin Task is the more difficult hurdle.

Hire a Virtual Assistant who is a good culture fit.

You can’t just hire a VA because they are good for the task-list at hand. If things go well, you’re going to be working closely with this person. It’s important that you can get along. When we hire VAs for ourselves, their interview process is two phased. Phase One consists of the basics: questions about their similar past experiences, job qualifications, and skill levels with a variety of common tasks & tools. Phase Two, however, is what has made us the masters of managing real estate VAs: the culture-fit test.

While your company culture is unique, and therefore cannot follow the recipe from anyone else… the basic idea is simple. You need to ask questions to determine if this is the kind of person you can work with! If you’re fastidious & detail oriented, but your VA is big picture & entrepreneurial, or if you’re artistic & creative, but your VA is strictly “by the book,” then while you might get short-term results, the long-term relationship is doomed to fail.

Be careful to keep your outsourcing & insourcing compatible

Believe it or not, we’ve lost clients who were 100% satisfied & getting excellent results using our VAs.

You not only need to hire the right VA for the right task, but you also need to be sure your local operations are prepared to harmonize with your off-site teams. You need to set up an outsourcing effort that is compatible with your core business.

AFTER Your VA Has Started Work

Even though your VA might have some experience doing real estate virtual assistant tasks, they haven’t had experience doing these tasks in your business. You need to set aside an incubation period to train the VA regularly in the beginning to make sure they get acquainted with your culture & core values. Don’t just put the VA to work, help them understand the “why” and “how” of their job so they feel committed and aligned to your goals. Have the VA create these processes in writing to refer back to.

The biggest success factor for long-term VA success seems to be a good culture fit from the beginning. By taking extra care in who you hire to be sure your VAs is not only technically capable, but also aligned with you & your company’s core values. They need to not only buy into the job, but to your grander mission, so they will be truly excited to work for you and help you achieve your business objectives for years to come.

It is essential for any business to leverage its resources, especially where time is money, hiring a Virtual Assistant may be exactly what your business needs. If you would like to have a discussion and find out what a Virtual Assistant can do for you, call us today for your no-obligation consultation and let us share with you how you can work less and earn more.

The holidays are behind us and 2021 is here. If you haven’t started yet, now’s the time to plan your business strategy for 2021. However, it can be difficult to figure out where to start. Keep in mind that you’ll always have a long to-do list but prioritizing your crucial tasks can help you get organized and start the year off strong.

Start with something small.
Even if you’re short on time, there are still small ways you can start planning for 2021. One of the most important and simple things you can do to prepare your business for the upcoming year is to take the time to get organized. This can include your office, client files, marketing materials, and listing profiles. Reviewing these will also help remind you of tasks you were putting off or planned to do but were never able to get to.

Attract more leads in the coming year.
Much of the time, your potential clients find and evaluate you online before they ever reach out to you. Everything from your website to your Facebook reviews is under the scrutinizing gaze of buyers and sellers. If your online presence is lacking, you might be missing out on potential lead opportunities. Because of this, you should verify your business on all major search engines. Additionally, remember that the majority of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Take a look at your online reputation to make sure you’re presenting your best image so that online browsers will be more likely to reach out to you. If you don’t have any online reviews, ask your current clients to add some feedback to your Facebook page, Google, or other online locations.

Plan new ways to communicate with current clients.
Now’s also a great time to set up ways to keep in contact with your current clients so that you can avoid losing touch when your schedule is tight. First, consider ways that you can divide your clients so that you can create targeted marketing pieces for each group. Then, create an email campaign for each group with content tailored specifically for them, so that they know that you’re thinking about them all year long. Your campaigns can be as simple as “5 Ways to Boost Your Curb Appeal” or “Top Reasons to Stage Your Home.”

Another way to keep up with clients is by scheduling out your social media posts. Create a simple content calendar and schedule some posts in advance so that your current followers will have more opportunities to interact with you throughout the year.

Planning ahead can play a big part in achieving your goals for2021. Once you’ve worked through your small goals, it’ll be easier to create and implement a long-term strategy that’ll make 2021 your most successful year yet.

If you need administrative assistance to get ready for 2021, contact us at REVStaffing or Call Today @ 855-738-7821 X700

#REVStaffing #2021 #virtualassistant #PREVA #realestateVA #transactioncoordination #listingcoordination

Marketing your property online takes a lot of work, though! Uploading photos, doing walkthrough videos, writing property descriptions, entering data into the MLS – along with your website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Craigslist, etc. Whew, I’m tired already. All that typing, tweeting, and uploading adds up, and the more properties you have, the higher your workload is.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant
How do most agents do with this? Without beating around the bush, they work after-hours – until they finally decide they’ve had enough”, and they look to hire a Virtual Assistant. A crazy but necessary move! At the same time, a smart one. When you are spending your time uploading pictures and processing videos, you’re not out there with your buyers and sellers.

This is where hiring a Virtual Assistant comes in: they work to get your properties online, while you concentrate on the tasks that make you money. It’s the smart way to save yourself time, money, and a massive headache from having to try and split your time between selling houses and promoting them online.

So why hire a virtual assistant? It really all comes down to savings – time and money. That’s where hiring a Virtual Assistant with Real Estate experience from RevStaffing comes in.

In other words, by going virtual you get a Virtual Assistant that you can immediately work with to take over your real estate tasks.

What Does A Virtual Assistant Do?

• Transaction Coordination
• Listing Coordination
• Database Management
• All Administrative Tasks
• Listing Presentation
• Accounting
• Property Management
• Manage Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.
• Blog Creation
• Design and create flyers
• Manage contents of drip campaigns and process leads into appropriate campaigns
• Handle basic SEO (update web content, virtual tours, update listings) for team
• Design, layout and create direct mail campaigns like postcards.
• Update Real Estate newsletter, whether it’s the online copy or hard copy.
• Edit and post videos/virtual tours for website, social media sites, and YouTube, etc.

Tasks VA’s Provide

Those are just a few of the many tasks that a Virtual Assistant from RevStaffing can do. Take our Needs Analysis Survey to see what areas you need help with.

Need help trying to juggle all of those admin tasks and transactions? REVStaffing can gladly assist you with those tasks! Let REVStaffing help you to achieve your goals and increase your potential! Complete a complimentary needs analysis survey, send us an email, or call 855.REVS.VA1 today!

1. Responsible for processing of all contracts through closing.

2. Coordinating appointments for inspections, appraisals, and closing.

3. Effectively communicates with clients, customers, other agents, lenders, title agents and other service providers throughout the process.

4. Responsible for proper documentation of the file to comply with brokerage policies.

5. Assures that all post-closing disbursements, filing, and procedures take place.

6. Frees the agent client up to focus on business building activities.

In many offices across the country, there are staff who are shared among the office. While this approach seems practical or beneficial on the surface because the coordinator is in house and can be accessed by stopping by her/his desk. It’s not always the best or most effective approach when explored further. There are many reasons. The transaction coordinator is paid by the office and is not always exclusively coordinating transactions. Meaning, they could get pulled away from their job to help the other departments such as receptionist, listing coordinating or what have you. This means they aren’t working on your transactions.

INTERRUPTIONS ARE INEVITABLE
There can also be a huge amount of interruptions in an office setting! The facts are clear, it can take more than 20 minutes to get back on task after an interruption. Most offices have no contingency for covering sick days, vacations, or when the workload is higher than normal. When the onsite transaction coordinator is out of the office, the agent is expected to handle their own transactions.

While no perfect world exists, there are solutions designed to help the agent provide the best service to their buyer/seller from contact to close without many of the most common challenges associated with having an in-house transaction coordinator.

One would be hiring your own transaction coordinator to work exclusively for you. While this may be costly, it would provide you with the ultimate solution to help leverage your time.

At RevStaffing we have solved the most common challenges that an onsite transaction coordinator faces by providing an agent focused cost-effective solution.

DO YOU NEED ASSISTANCE?
Need help trying to juggle all of those admin tasks and transactions? REVStaffing can gladly assist you with those tasks! Let REVStaffing help you to achieve your goals and increase your potential! Complete a complimentary needs analysis survey, send us an email, or call 855.REVS.VA1 today!

The LinkedIn insight tag, a snippet of JavaScript code you add to your website, is intended to be used by LinkedIn advertisers to track conversions. In addition, it gives you access to Website Demographics, a free reporting tool that provides information about the people who visit your site.

While account-based marketing (ABM) integrations rely on IP information and third-party data to understand who visitors are, LinkedIn is more accurate in identifying users because it relies on its own user data. This means LinkedIn can provide more information at a higher accuracy rate than most ABM systems can.

The best thing about the Website Demographics tool is that it’s free. You need to have a LinkedIn ads account but you don’t have to actually run any ads to gain access to the insights.

With this tool, you can get insights for your website as a whole or specific pages (which is helpful if you have multiple products and various types of consumers).

RevStaffing would be glad to help you add this to your website and google analytics.

Need help trying to juggle all of those admin tasks and transactions? REVStaffing can gladly assist you with those tasks! Let REVStaffing help you to achieve your goals and increase your potential! Complete a complimentary needs analysis survey, send us an email, or call 855.REVS.VA1 today!

How Ranking for Keywords Has Changed

Optimizing your blog post to rank high in search engines used to be straightforward: pick your keyword and make sure you use it in the title and a few more times in the article. If you picked the right keyword (and if your blog was well-established and referenced), you were most likely to rank somewhere in top 10.

Keyword research has quietly changed over the past few years. First, search engines like Google have become much more sophisticated when it comes to understanding what “high-quality content” is. It’s not only about how well your article is optimized: it’s also how in-depth, useful, and comprehensive it is.

Second, the competition is growing: most bloggers know the basics of search engine optimization these days. It’s harder to stand out and get ranked.

Here’s how you can get ahead of your competitors.

#1: Include More Keywords

The days when you wrote one blog post per keyword are gone. Google (as well as your audience) now looks for more in-depth long-form content that features a varied vocabulary including synonyms, related phrases, and concepts.

The following tools will help you expand your keyword lists:

Seed Keywords helps you crowdsource your friends and followers into suggesting related keywords for you. The tool creates shareable mini-surveys for your followers to help you brainstorm more ways to search for your topic.

Soovle will generate keyword suggestions from multiple sources (Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers.com, and Bing), giving you a good overview of how people search for your keyword on different platforms.

Another tool that does the same (but supports fewer sources) is the Google Keyword Suggest Tool. It generates suggestions from Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon and it digs very deep, so you’ll get hundreds of phrases to work with.

If you’re looking to optimize your existing blog posts, use Serpstat to go through your site, pick the most powerful pages, and suggest a list of “missing keywords.” Essentially, these are words your competitors are ranking high for, but you’re not.

Connection Strength refers to the number of competitors that rank for the keyword that you don’t have on your page.

Now all you need to do is go back to your articles and optimize them for those missing keywords to increase your ranking.

An easy way to optimize existing content for new keywords is to add new sections (with subheadings) targeting those new words. This helps content get more comprehensive over time, which naturally results in more social media shares and backlinks.

#2: Refer to Notable People, Places, and Brands

One of the biggest changes in search engine optimization is Google’s focus on understanding entities. “Entities” are related notable people, places, organizations, brands, etc., which associate in some way with your keyword.

For the easiest way to demonstrate how entities help in ranking your content, read this awesome case study by Bill Slawski. Bill took a well-optimized piece and rewrote it the following way: first by making it much longer, and second by including notable events and people. The result was astounding. The article started to drive referral traffic from people linking to it, and return visits. And yes, better search rankings too!

Google pays special attention to entities when trying to understand how concise and useful your content is. Google has had years to learn to understand entities, concepts, and their relationships.

Google pays close attention to entities and how they relate to your content.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is an entity graph. Search for any notable name you’re aware of to see how Google structures and relates entities.

To research related entities, use your own common sense. Chances are you already know a lot about your content’s topic. Next, search Google. In some cases, Google suggests related concepts while you’re still typing your query.

Google uses entities to verify how concise and useful your content is.

Run content that ranks well through an entity extractor. Pick a few in-depth articles on your topics and run the content through AlchemyAPI (alternative tools: TextRazor and Open Calais). AlchemyAPI extracts entities from the content using color-coding to markup sentiment.

Run several long-form articles on your topic through AlchemyAPI and you’ll have a solid list of related entities.

#3: Answer Niche Questions

Another area Google focuses heavily on days is measuring the ability of content to answer popular niche questions. You might have noticed Google’s “quick answer boxes” each time you type a question

Is your content answering popular niche questions?

It’s important to make question research part of your keyword research each time you’re writing a blog post.

The aforementioned Serpstat does question-focused keyword research, too. There’s no visualization, but it returns unique results, which are free.

This is a whole list of content ideas for you to use!

Answer The Public is a cool tool for content inspiration and question-focused keyword research. Type any word into Answer The Public to see a visualization of various types of questions people ask using that word.

The question modifiers are: which, who, what, when, why, how, are, and where.

Answer The Public is great for content inspiration.

Another trick is to research niche questions using Twitter Advanced Search. The search won’t deliver as many content-worthy results, it will help you research and use natural language (which is something Google is focusing on as well, especially for mobile search).

To find questions on Twitter, search any keyword with a question mark placed one space away, like this: “keyword?” This filters Twitter search results to those containing a question.

You can search Twitter for updates containing questions.

You can use Cyfe to monitor and archive the Twitter search results.

Cyfe searchable Twitter search archives can provide inspiration when you’re stuck.

Conclusion

Keyword research has evolved, and it’s definitely more complicated. At the same time, though, it’s also more diverse. It encourages you to create in-depth content and works wonders for inspiration.

What do you think? Are there any unique keyword research tools you’d like to share?

Need help staying in contact with all the leads that will soon be coming your way? REVStaffing can gladly assist you with those tasks! Let REVStaffing help you to achieve your goals and increase your potential! Complete a complimentary needs analysis survey, send us an email, or call 855.REVS.VA1 today!

A virtual assistant is an employee who supports various business operations from a remote location. Startups can use VAs to help with inbox management, social media content, online customer support, and basically any task that doesn’t require them to show up in person.

Some VAs specialize in a specific task or industry. For example, there are VAs that focus specifically on marketing, and others that work only in the tech industry. More specialized VAs often cost a bit more since they offer a more focused skillset. However, there are also general VAs who can handle a variety of tasks and work with businesses in a wide array of industries.

Virtual assistants have been around since the 1980’s, when organizations like ABSSI and Home Secretaries popped up to support moms looking for work-from-home jobs. However, the niche really took off when home internet usage became more ubiquitous around the world.

And it’s still growing today. In fact, Gartner, Inc. predicts that about a quarter of digital workers will use a VA on a daily basis by 2021. If your small business has yet to jump into this growing trend, here are some of the main reasons why it may be time to reconsider.

They Put Processes in Place

Inefficiencies cost businesses between 20 and 30 percent of their revenue each year. Often, these inefficiencies are a result of not having processes in place. Processes can be anything from canned responses in Gmail to automated invoicing.

Many business owners don’t take the time to set up these processes because they’re so busy working on their day-to-day operations. Hiring a VA gives you a way to set up these processes without having to focus on them yourself. Give your VA a list of processes you’d like to set up or hire someone with experience setting up business processes so they can identify inefficiencies on their own. This can actually make your business more efficient even when your VA isn’t on the clock.

They Filter Communication

Not all of the emails, calls or live chat messages you receive are necessarily worth responding to. And some can simply receive a canned response or quick reply that doesn’t require your personal attention.

By hiring a VA to manage your inbox or other methods of communication, they can filter those messages that don’t require a thoughtful response. This allows you to really focus on those other messages, rather than constantly being overwhelmed with an overflowing inbox.

They Capture and Organize Data

Today’s businesses have access to more data than ever. Your data is essential for helping you make decisions about the future of your business. But too much of it can be overwhelming and distracting.

Additionally, collecting and organizing all of your data can be quite an undertaking. You can have your VA go over all of your web analytics and customer data to organize it and share it with you in digestible reports or updates. This allows you to more quickly access the information that’s pertinent to your business at a particular moment, without having to pour over all the minute details for hours on end.

They Complete Tedious Daily Tasks

Things like data entry and Internet research tend to be fairly time-consuming and don’t necessarily require attention from a high-level team member. But they’re still essential for your business. By giving these tasks to a VA, you can feel confident about the completion of those important items without taking significant time from your own day, while saving managers and specialized employees from focusing on them.

They Let You Focus on What You Do Best

Most entrepreneurs have a specialty. Maybe you develop software products or help other businesses develop marketing plans. But when you start a business, you also have to handle support tasks like bookkeeping and marketing. If you’re not good at these things, you may end up wasting a ton of time learning the ins and outs or struggling through trial and error.

Hiring a specialized VA allows you to outsource the items with which you struggle. You can trust that the tasks will be handled competently — maybe even better than you would have on your own. And it frees up a ton of your time to focus on things that you’re actually good at. It also gives you a better opportunity to work on growing your business, rather than getting stuck in the day-to-day operations. This can be especially helpful for solopreneurs or very small businesses where the owner needs to wear many hats at once.

If you need assistance contact us at Revstaffing or Call Today @ 855-738-7821 X700. Visit our website at www.RevStaffing.com.

Courtesy of Anita Campbell