So, today is the day we go back to normal, Christmas has been completed, you’ve eaten all the chocolate, you’ve recovered from the New Year parties and you’ve taken your decorations down.

To help kick start 2012 Seeking Serenity is offering a massive 50% discount from our services (valid for the next 14 days)

We’re busy carving pumpkins and preparing for our party this evening.

What are you doing for halloween?

So you’re sitting at your computer, blank screen in front of you. You may be transfixed by the blinking cursor and find that your eyes are starting to glaze over.

It may have been a long day already and you’ve got so many other things on your mind. You’ve got family commitments later; you may have a social engagement to attend. You’ve got to do your monthly accounts at some stage this evening and then you’ve got a full day of client work tomorrow. So much to think about as an entrepreneur and it’s very difficult to clear our mind as it were in order to focus on writing.

However, this is no time for writer’s (or blogger’s) block. You’ve got to come up with content for your blog and it’s been more than a week since you last posted anything on there.

Can’t you just use some of that PLR content that you’ve got in a folder somewhere on your hard drive? After all, you spent good money on it and shouldn’t you put it to good use?

Maybe tonight is not a good time to be trying to create content. They have a saying south of the border – mañana. I’m sure we can put this off until tomorrow, as maybe we will be more creatively inclined, have more inspiration and be able to type away merrily to create not just one blog post, but two?

I’m sure this sounds familiar to you. Writing can be quite a challenge at the best of times and remember that we are not talking about “any old” writing, either.

If you’re going to get anywhere with your blogging you simply have to create good quality content. When we talk about good quality content we don’t just mean that it’s got to be grammatically correct and free of any spelling mistakes or punctuation errors. It’s got to be highly relevant, informative, inspiring and/or thought-provoking.Ideally, it should be all of these rolled into one.

Think about it this way. If your content is not epic, it’s probably not going to stand out above all the other noise that your potential customers come across on a daily basis. It’s no small challenge. However, remember that you are supposed to be an expert in this particular niche. That by itself should be an inspiration to you, but you must nevertheless understand how important it is to provide this epic content often and regularly.

In truth, not all of us are very good when it comes to writing. Some people have more of a flair for it than others. It’s also true to say that time is very difficult to come by, especially if you’re trying to juggle your business time with family and other commitments.

A Virtual Assistant knows how important it is to create epic content and also knows how crucial it is to do so regularly and with conviction. Maybe you should put this chore into their hands and not have to worry about writer’s block ever again.

Do you have Bloggers Block? Why not call in a Virtual Assistant who can help you.

Contact us today!

If you really want to be a digital nomad, then you really need to embrace technology.  This doesn’t mean that you have to be a nerd by any means, but if you want to be productive and actually connected when you’re mobile, you have to use some of the most exciting of devices of today and be familiar with the technology enabling you to do so.

A digital nomad may not be someone who travels endlessly who is always on the go, but may well be somebody who moves frequently and as such does not have a central, “home office” to return to as such. If, as a location independent entrepreneur, you travel to different countries you need to be familiar with the communication options provided across various borders, but nevertheless need to have all your hardware options in place ahead of time. While the ubiquitous laptop may well be your office on the move, many people are choosing to explore the possibilities afforded by the new breed – the tablet. They are perfect for navigating from place to place, keeping up with e-mail constantly, interacting with your social networks, sending your “tweets,” keeping up with the news, creating documents, reading business books and so much more. While many people argue that these devices have yet to find a “niche” as such in our connected world, others are convinced that they will one day be the answer and compromise between the awkward size of the laptop and the inadequacies of the smartphone.

The chances are that if you speak to some experienced digital nomads they will tell you that they have long since forsaken the PC for the Mac. Some say that this is like going over to the dark side, but those who have made the change seem to be far happier with a laptop device such as the Apple MacBook Pro with far fewer crashes, data losses and a much more intuitive set up across the board.

All this hardware is well and good but we all know that its functionality is in many respects limited until and unless we can connect to the Internet. If you travel extensively you know that this can still be a challenge, even though Wi-Fi is becoming increasingly more available. Certain cities, London among them, are said to be planning citywide Wi-Fi access in the very near future. As all devices these days, the tablets, smart phones and laptops have Wi-Fi built in; it would be great to know that blanket Wi-Fi coverage is available wherever we travel. If Wi-Fi is not available at your chosen destination you’ll have to investigate the opportunities afforded by an air card, connected to one of the major mobile phone carriers, ideally with unlimited data plans and roaming access.

If you truly are mobile and may be operating from very remote locations you may even have to consider a satellite tripod dish and modem. While you cannot expect this to provide you with  unfettered access and home office like connectivity, it can still give you that sense of freedom and availability all at the same time.

Look at it another way. The website could be one week old or one-year-old. Many webmasters may not update their pages for a considerable amount of time and while Google is always telling usthat our content should be “fresh,” a regular visitor to your website may not really notice any change since the last time that they visited. However, your blog should be very different. It ought to be updated regularly, at least several times a week. Some bloggers who simply don’t have the time to devote to ongoing maintenance use one of those WordPress add-ons that mask the actual date of the post. In that way, visitors cannot automatically see that you haven’t updated your blog for however long it may be. A neat application this may be, but it masks an underlying problem, doesn’t it?

To be able to advance in terms of your online presence takes time and effort. You have to convince those who are thinking about it, or maybe on the fence, to engage with you. Yes, we all know about those seven individual exposures. Marketing law dictates that people have to be exposed to our products and services on average seven times before they pry open their wallets. What better way to gently remind them of your presence than to update your blog on a regular basis with good, repeat “good” content? If you have persuaded your visitors to sign up for your RSS feed then your name will come up in front of them periodically. If they like what they’re reading and remember that they have a problem to solve, you’re on your way to getting them to return to your site and click on the buy button.

Updating content can be a challenge. You’ve got plenty on your plate just trying to make your business run smoothly, to say nothing of all the other distractions that you have in your regular life. It can certainly be difficult allocating an extra hour or so in the morning to write the content necessary to populate your blog. This is where a virtual assistant can absolutely shine. Not only does the VA know how to write creatively and how to get a particular point across with colour, but they also know how to upload the post, optimise from an SEO perspective and all the other ancillary and time-consuming  tasks that need to be done as you publish.

Seeking Serenity can help you with your blog, why not speak to us today!

What exactly is Google Apps?

It’s basically a communications and collaboration package all rolled into one, within a budget friendly platform. There are a number of different standard applications including Voice, Wave, Buzz, Calendar, Docs, Sites and Mail and there are a growing number of third-party applications available, enabling you to plug even more functionality into your experience. You can sign up for Google Apps on a trial basis for a month and thereafter it costs only a nominal amount of money. It seems little expense in return for the advantage of having all your communication and collaboration tools in one place, hosted in the cloud.

It wasn’t that long ago that we had to rely on computers which were the size of a typical home refrigerator to handle quite simple tasks, such as payroll processing for example. In only a couple of generations the size of the computer necessary to handle our important tasks shrunk considerably, leaving us with the ubiquitous desktop. As technology further improved we have come to rely more and more on laptops, tablets and iPads and as we don’t, in most instances, need much storage capacity anymore, there’s no reason to consider lugging around any old technology.

It’s said that Google sees the laptop computer of the future as being merely a web browser and the screen with a keypad. This is the ultimate projection of cloud computing functionality and means that we would, in that case, be able to access all our software programmes as a service online, store all our important documents in the cloud and make use of the new functionality represented by Google Apps for our everyday business needs.

For the location independent entrepreneur, it’s all about streamlining, efficiency and being able to access those important tools, software and files from wherever you are without any issues. With an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, the solution provided by Google seems to be worthy of consideration.  Remember that laptop computers can be stolen, hacked or damaged and everything contained within a hard drive can be compromised. Even though we are definitely used to the concept of backing up files these days, there’s a lot to be said for the peace of mind associated with storage in the cloud. In the event of disaster, everything can still be accessed from a web browser at your nearest Internet café, for example.

So, not wishing to make anyone reading this jealous, I’m sat here in 40 degrees sun, not a single cloud in the sky which as blue as you could imagine, there is a soft breeze coming in from the dessert, which, along with my nice cold glass of cola is keeping me from melting into my sun lounger, that and the occasional dive into the swimming pool.

I’m here in a very hot Marsa Alam in southern Egypt in a remote hotel, which is massive, everything in the complex is included in the all inclusive package, which means that I really can switch off – apart from my mobile phone, which I do have attached to me at all times, mainly because, I’m here on my honeymoon, and I’ve left my lovely daughters at home with family, and they keep texting me and calling me.

There is something that my new husband (!) and I find amazing and at the same time makes us feel slightly guilty – there are hundreds of people in the hotel, but only a few English people and yet everything is written in English and everyone speaks English to everyone else.

Whilst I learned French and German to A’level standard and Spanish to GSCE – which will hopefully, come in handy with Seeking Serenity, I’ve no idea how to say thank you to the locals here in Egypt.

Its always polite to say thank you, try and learn how to say it in the local language if you’re travelling, to help you along the way, we’ve listed a few ways to say thank you*:

Arabic                    ~                Shokran

Czech                     ~               Dekuji

Danish                   ~                Tak

Dutch                     ~                Dank u

Estonian                ~                Aitah

Filipino                  ~                 Salamat

Finnish                  ~                 Kiitos

French                   ~                 Merci

German                 ~                 Dankeschon

Hungarian            ~                  Koszonom

Italian                    ~                 Grazie

Norwegian            ~                 Takk

Polish                    ~                 Dziekuje

Portugese             ~                 Obrigado

Romanian            ~                  Multumesc

Spanish                 ~                Gracias

Swahili                 ~                 Asante

Swedish               ~                 Tack

Turkish                ~                  Tesekkur Ederim

*Taken fron Google Translate.

No longer is it sufficient to focus on conventional marketing methods, advertising campaigns and traditional media outlets. Our business customers are increasingly engaging in a social networking world, which puts a lot of emphasis on word-of-mouth, social proof and testimonials.



As many as one in two people now admit to maintaining a Facebook account and we also know that Twitter has become the rage for the transmission of short messages, which often convey opinions, positions and propagate that “social buzz.”

The majority of forward thinking business owners long ago realised that they had to have an online presence. Yet it’s not good enough to simply maintain a corporate site anymore. You have to have a dynamic presence that, in itself, interacts with your clients and potential customers. You have to do whatever you can to convince prospects that they should engage with you, that you know what you’re talking about and that you can meet their needs.

Today, blog writing has long ago left its roots among those ardent technical enthusiasts and those who may have had some kind of an axe to grind. Now, it is a tool to get a business message across – a focal point for the organisation altogether.

For an organisation to create and maintain a blog, a considerable commitment is required. Material must be sourced that is very pertinent and timely and pages must be updated on a regular basis, if not daily. For the typical business with much on its plate and existing advertising and marketing channels to feed, this can be a daunting prospect.

However, it’s a perfect task to outsource to a virtual assistant. Given the right brief, the virtual assistant will be able to generate material that is perfectly tailored to support the organisation’s message and to promote its all-important keywords. The assistant will be able to update the blog regularly with tailor-made and purposefully written content.

Many businesses treat the blog as the centre point. This web portal is the place that they direct all their prospects and new web traffic to. Within the blog visitors can find information that helps to convince them that the company is, itself, a thought leader, an expert in this field and worthy of consideration.

Blog creation and maintenance is undoubtedly a significant commitment, but it is a perfect task to be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Formation doesn’t have to be a stumbling block either, as the good virtual assistant is very well aware of what information needs to be gathered and the kind of brief that the client should provide in order for the whole process to be engaged. This all-important, additional level of marketing activity is now a fundamental consideration.

Here are Seeking Serenity we love writing blog posts!

Are you going to make the most of it? If, like me you’re a Virtual Assistant – will you choose to embrace 3 days without working, or work the 3 days and get as much work done as you possibly can, with little distraction?

5 fun things to do at the weekend

(as suggested by you Virtual Assistant!)

• Get all of the chores done Friday afternoon, make the house clean, (normally school uniform would be washed and put to dry, but its the school holidays and this isn’t necessary!) and then make the most of your Friday evening, plan a nice meal and a film – Friday night is part of the weekend, enjoy it!
• Go for a family bike ride, I’m sure there are lots of lovely places where you live locally that you don’t get to see during the busy week, best of all its free, don’t worry if its raining, splash through puddles like a child wearing wellies, enjoy being outside!
• Geocaching -  Like a treasure hunt, but using GPS locations – there are hundreds of little bits of ‘treasure’ hidden in your local area, from the website you are given coordinates for the geocache, and you go hunting for it, we like doing this, it allows you to explore your local area and again its free!
• Play sport – whilst this might not be very appealing for some, Seeking Serenity loves playing Netball – whilst some Sunday mornings in the winter can be a little on the chilly side, theres nothing better than starting the day with an hour running around throwing a ball – eating a big roast dinner and having a nice glass on wine feels nicely deserved after burning of a few hundred calories on the netball court. Obviously netball isn’t to everyone’s taste, but checking out what your local sports centre has to offer for you to try has to be worth a look.
• Relax – enjoy and appreciate the time!

What are you doing this weekend?

How is the business owner to keep pace with this kind of development? There may well be exciting opportunities ahead, but how are you going to tap into them if you truly do not understand Web 2.0, let alone this new wave? Amazing as it may seem, there are yet still business owners out there who do not understand how important it is to have a web presence, so they do indeed have a very steep learning curve ahead of them.

In the economy of the future, more and more businesses will need to be focused on building solid relationships and in understanding semantics. Semantics is the study of “meaning” and is now beginning to drive how the massive search engines provide information back to those all-important online searchers. In short, when somebody searches for a particular keyword, the search engines are increasingly interested in providing them with tangential information, making them aware of synonymic alternatives and, in point of fact, trying to get “inside their heads” to determine their actual needs.

As relationships between individuals and between products and services become intertwined with semantic analysis the business owner must be increasingly focused on the position. This may all sound rather complicated and hypothetical, but the bottom line is this: The business must be able to “own” its authority within its market, be highly competent and be able to communicate this competency to its marketplace.

In the “Web 3.0″ world, more relevance will be placed on what people are saying and what people are doing in relation to any given market or niche. Social media communications, comment streams and trends are going to be used by the search engines to help them determine how each individual topic within each niche is related to other topics, either horizontally or vertically.

We can therefore see that each and every business must be engaged in social media channels. This extends far beyond the mere creation of a Facebook page or a Twitter account, into a deeper understanding of exactly how people within your market or niche operate.

As this area continues to emerge, the business owner may be wondering how on earth to proceed? This is where a virtual assistant can help to lead the business owner through the minefield of new technology and new opportunities. A good virtual assistant simply must keep on top of these new trends and will not only advise the business owner, but fundamentally, implement the tasks and procedures necessary to help them engage.