Month: July 2014

When the time comes that you think being an employee ends now and being an entrepreneur sounds better, you will need to prepare yourself to face the impossible. Shifting from a steady employment to make your own name in the world of entrepreneurs requires you to shift your mindset as well. There are a lot of things that will be different from the ways you are used to and a lot of other things you didn’t even knew are packaged along with it.

Finding Your Own Honey Hole

If you’re just going to rely on other people’s suggestions, it will be best if you get back to your full-time job. Finding your own honey hole means finding the right industry to establish your business in. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who used their own skills and industry when they were still employees, while others relied on their hobbies.

For example, you work as a programmer for a BPO company and your favorite hobby is baking. Maybe you’d want to start your own business of programming mobile and web applications and sell them; you can also be a provider of software to multiple IT companies; or build your own mini bakery or invest your severance pay on food carts.

The Power and Responsibilities

Being your own boss gives you the power to do everything and whenever you want it done. Sounds nice, right? But what most new entrepreneurs fail to grasp are the responsibilities that comes with their actions. As an entrepreneur, you will no longer have to wait for someone to tell you what to do or for things to happen, you are the one in charge of making things happen. And whatever the result is – good or bad; you have to take all the responsibilities.

You also have to learn to wear multiple hats, especially if you’re starting out with a small budget. You will have to say goodbye to John from the IT department who updates your OS and cleans your computer of viruses, and Louie, the guy you always pass by down the hall mopping the floors, vacuuming the carpet and watering the plants. You will learn to handle everything; sales and marketing, billing and accounting, customer support and even taking out the trash.

Even if you have the budget to hire people to work for you, you will still need to learn how everything works so you would know if your business is being productive or not. You cannot know if there is a problem if you do not know how things work.

No More Excuses

You’ve probably made a lot of excuses as an employee, but being an entrepreneur, excuses will not help you succeed, and you’ll only be fooling yourself. There will also come a time when people will try to tell you things that you should be doing for your business, these can be new opportunities for you but you also have to learn to say NO because juggling multiple ventures can side-track you from your ultimate goal and that doesn’t make a good excuse either.

Live and Breathe It

As an employee, you learned to schedule your tasks based on the working hours per day you are required to work. But as an entrepreneur, long hours will be a part of your family. This is why it’s important to start something you love to do ‘till the end of time. You will always be thinking of how your business is doing, what more can be improved or if you’re doing the right method. You’ll find yourself logging in to your computer during a weekend getaway with the family or during a vacation on the beach just to check up on your metrics.

Funding Your Dream

Do you know how to manage your cash flow? If you can budget your salary from the day it’s wired to your bank account ‘till your next payday, then you do know how to manage your cash flow. Same goes with building a business, the money that comes in must be higher than the money that goes out or else you’ll go bankrupt.

If you’re really serious about becoming an entrepreneur, fund it ahead of time. That way, you won’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your employees and the bills.

Shifting from employee to entrepreneur is a great deal; it may be easy for natural born entrepreneurs or to those born in a family with a multi-million dollar empire, but it doesn’t mean it’s not for you. Turn your ambition into a goal and keep your eyes open for opportunities that are already in front of you. Remember that you have all the opportunity to create something out of nothing.

To be a call center agent means that you have what it takes when it comes to tackling rush hours, managing work load, and camaraderie. Working in the call center industry in the Philippines is no easy job compared to other Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies in the country, but it does have its cool perks and loads of benefits!

The Big Pay

The call center industry offers higher basic pay for fresh graduates, experienced agents and even for working students. Other benefits like performance-based, night differential and allowances may differ among call center companies, but they do get higher in percentage (%). For some employers in the Philippines, on top of the 13th month pay, they also offer a mid-year bonus, Christmas bonus, cost of living allowance and more!

Free Trainings and Career Growth

Working in a call center company gives you the benefit of free trainings on languages and management. This helps employees to communicate better with customers, potential clients and provide superb services. Some call center companies even provide their employees with post-graduate studies scholarship.

Promotions and incentives are faster inside a call center company than any other BPO company in the Philippines. Employees’ efforts and hard work are easily recognized and quantified!

Being a call center agent doesn’t just limit you to accepting or making calls; you can also be a language translator, an online tutor or an effective operations supervisor or manager.

Health Benefits

Because call center companies are notorious for their rush hours, Holiday and rotating shifts, employers have developed the perfect Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) to help their employees with their medical and dental finances. Not only that, different call center companies in the Philippines even provide sleeping quarters for employee who will be changing shifts the same day, a computer and gadgets room to satisfy the gamers, unlimited supply of coffee and juices if that’s what you’re into, and spa vouchers so you can have your tired body relaxed after work.

Do You Have What It Takes?

To be a customer or technical support professional is not for all. A call center agent might have already told you the amounts of stress he or she had. But no work is stress-free! Even an elite company’s CEO gets stressed from time to time; they just know how to handle it, so should you if you want to be a part of the call center industry.

This kind of method has been around for so long, people don’t call it Negative SEO back then and it is used to drop page and websites from search results containing false news and offending content that ruins the good reputation of a person, business and organization. Programmers are even more successful in doing this with a simple hacking or just by reporting the site that hosts the offending content, but that could take ages.

Today, Negative SEO is being used to attack people and businesses online with the intent to lower their website’s rankings, popularity and eventually destroys their name. Whatever the reasons are; political, financial or personal reasons, there are people out there who are doing this today, probably right now.

3 Main Reasons Why Negative SEO is Being Used Today

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)

It may sound shady, but yes, this is a totally legitimate way on how you can clean your business’ name online, also referred to as Online Reputation Management. Back then, SERM wasn’t widely used but today a lot of businesses are acquiring the aid of SERM specialists due to the increasing amount of virtual attacks. The SERM specialist’s task is to clean up bad rumors and false news against their client over the internet.

SERP Bubbling and Google Bowling

SERP bubbling is the process of lowering a competitor’s website ranking in search result so yours will float up to the top. While Google Bowling is intended to completely remove a page or site from Google’s search results by making Google think that it is spammy. The methods are simple but deadly.

• Thousands of unnatural backlinks in a short time
• Backlinks using bad keywords
• Dropping of links on link farms, adult sites and forums
• Site hacking and infecting
• Adsense and Adwords banning
• Black hat social bookmarking and networking

There are a lot more Negative SEO techniques which I cannot share here, in case you might get the idea of trying them when you get angry.

Senseless Attacks and Racial Discrimination

There are those who are gifted with coding complex programs who use their skills for senseless actions like hacking websites just because they can and even infiltrating a person’s social media account and gather their personal details for the purpose of humiliating them. While other hackers use their skills to target specific ethnicity just for the fun of it.

The demand for constant change and uniqueness on designs online and offline has made a lot of businesses successful in marketing their products and services, while others still struggle to find their success. So it isn’t a big surprise that many businesses today are considering hiring a professional graphic designer, local and offshore.

A professional graphic designer’s excellent visual perception make it a lot easier for businesses to update their website’s design to what their targeted audience would like to see and feel. This also gives them power to attract offline customers using properly prepared digital artwork for a commercial print.

A $25-$50 dollar already prepared design or logo online can sure save you the time and effort instead of creating them yourself, but there are a lot more benefits you’re missing. Here are 3 big reasons why you should hire a graphics designer.

Creativity and Adaptability

Standing out from the rest can either be good or bad for your business. The key is to stand out from your competitors by the way their website and brand looks like, the colors they use and even how they present their ads because most of them have been using the same strategies and materials for years, and you don’t want your website to look just like theirs.

• An experienced graphic designer who’s been in the business for years is well aware of the latest trends and how to blend graphics with specific thoughts and feelings that your audience is looking for.
• It is easy for a professional graphic designer to understand your brand and how to make you stand out good.
• Adapting to changes and upgrading of skills as the market demands it is natural for graphic and web designers. They think outside of the box in order to make your design dreams come true.

Consistency and Quality on Work Output

Having a distinct brand that’s acceptable with your audiences’ eyes based on what you’re offering is a sure winner, but how can you achieve it? Consistency in your designs, whether for online or offline use, plays a big role. Using different fonts and themes may seem pretty for you, but you’ll have to remember that you are designing for your customers not for yourself.

• A well presented design can give a huge impact on potential customers.
• Uniformity gives your brand an identity, something that your customers can recognize easily.
• Sometimes just a few tweaks on colors can come out greater than the rest.

A professional graphic designer is always up-to-date with the latest technologies available so they can deliver better designs that suit both you and your business’ needs.

Money and Time Saving

A professional graphics designer is pragmatic and he knows his software and tools very well. Unless you are one, doing all the designs for your business yourself can lead to a disaster.

If you’re planning to teach yourself how to produce good looking designs using Photoshop, then you’d be wasting a lot of time on it than working on the more important parts of your business. It’s not bad to learn designing step-by-step if you have the extra time. But since a growing business gets a lot busier every day, it would be wiser to hire a professional graphic designer to help you out.

• Your printed designs may look different from what you’ve created due to some image specifications. It will be faster and cost-efficient to have a designer to make it all print-ready for you.
• The time you spend fixing your own images takes away the time you could be spending on improving customer service or other crucial parts of your business.

The next time you consider hiring a professional graphic designer, do add these few tips on your “to do” list to get the most out of your graphic designer.

• Research for the right service provider who can help you from start to finish.
• Clearly state your objectives. It helps if you write them down.
• Always have time to communicate with your provider to eliminate time consuming misunderstandings.

The Philippines, where English is the second language, has always excelled in providing English-based services; from simple graphic designs to full complex software and website development.

iStaff Outsourcing Services is always ready to help you grow your business. Let’s start from what you want and what your business really needs.

The process of manually typing, updating, maintaining and retrieving information from a computer system database are the specialties of Data Encoders. Though it may look like an easy task, Data Entry requires precision and accuracy at all times. It has become widely essential for business today to hire Data Encoders, since data is the foundation of all businesses.

Why the need to outsource Data Entry? Whether local or offshore, outsourcing parts of your business gives you access to the latest technologies and a wide pool of talents you’ve never seen before. Here are the top 3 great benefits you can enjoy from outsourcing Data Entry.

Higher Efficiency Rate and Time Saving

Partnering with the right service provider enables you to focus more on the core competencies of your business. It takes away the cumbersome and tedious Data Entry tasks and places them in the hands of the right people who specialize in them. This is a huge advantage for large businesses with a lot of data storage to manage.

• You get more time resolving in-house issues
• You can focus more on customer service or other revenue-generating tasks
• You get access to the latest technologies
• You get to choose from a wide range of talents to work for you

Strategic Advantage over Competitors

Your in-house employees can be more creative and productive and because of competency, your outsourced Data Encoders would perform more effectively.

If you’re business is in the USA and you’re considering hiring an offshore outsourcing company, specifically in Asia, this gives you faster turnaround because of the huge time difference. Same goes for businesses in the South America, UK and other parts of Europe who are seriously considering offshore outsourcing.

Lowered Overhead Cost

The money spent on hiring and training new employees will be decreased if you outsource your Data Encoders. Same goes for the time and equipment you’ll be investing in. You can get your work done at comparatively lower costs.

• Time and effort in hiring and training in-house Data Entry staff will be eliminated
• No need to invest on new equipments
• You can get lower costs without sacrificing quality

The Philippines, where English is the second language, has always excelled in providing English-based services; from simple clerical tasks to complex web-based programming and designing.

iStaff Outsourcing Services is always ready to help you grow your business. Let’s start from what you want and what your business really needs.