Virtual Businesses - The New Frontier5227289

Virtual businesses are the stuff of dreams. Pick a beach, any beach. Imagine yourself sitting on a tropical deserted island basking in the sun, listening to the ocean and running a multi-million dollar company. Not just anybody's multi-million dollar company, but your own. Ask almost any business owner in the world and you'll get the same answer.

The cool thing is that the possibilities exist for this scenario to come to fruition for tens of thousands of people. It may not be a multi-million dollar enterprise, but you can sure make a darn good living, sitting on or near a beach. This is all made possible through the advances of technology. More specifically, the incredible array of software that's now available to help you run a business is better, faster and downright cheap.

Virtual businesses are becoming the norm, rather than the exception. Let's take a simple example of making and receiving a call. There are several really good answering services / call answering software available. Today, they operate in what is being called "The Cloud." The cloud is nothing more than software that someone else manages and supports for you. These services allow you to be a SMALL company, but look like a BIG one. Customers only need call one number to easily find and communicate with you. These services provide features like: "hunt", "rollover, "transfer", "music on hold" and much, much more.

Other great software for virtual businesses includes applications for virtual meetings and collaboration. With these software products you can literally hold a board meeting, pointing to slides, drawing on a "whiteboard", switching presenters and so much more. Traveling, as they say, is so old school. In fact, the beauty of these type of solutions is that you can hold meetings "on the fly," even while people are literally scattered across the world.

Some terrific software is absolutely free. In fact, the software from the largest search engine in the world, allows you to share documents, such as spreadsheets, PDFs, files, and more. The best thing about this free service is that you can collaborate on these documents in a shared capacity with your colleagues. No need to file them in some arcane place on your desktop. And, it literally works flawlessly.

We've been using all of these technologies now for a number of years. However, consumers are just now coming into understanding how to use them. In fact, I believe that the economic downturn has really turned people's eyes toward keeping expenses low, while aggressively increasing one's income through marketing.

What are some great ideas for virtual businesses? If you think about the two biggest resources that people and companies struggle with, they are time and money. You can never have enough of both. In fact, not even the richest person in the world has enough time, because eventually time runs out for everyone.

One of the fastest growing areas for virtual businesses is providing virtual assistant services. These types of services help others in areas, such as answering calls, marketing, sales, or even creative writing. It just makes plain sense for people to seek out others who can help them and at a much lower cost than hiring a full time person.

For Harold Whaley's accomplishments in the Virtual World, visit Harold Whaley.