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Hi Maria, I love hiring virtually. In fact, I currently have on staff an accounting assistant, sales assistant, 2 editorial assistants and 2 project scheduling assistants.

The key for me has always been to have adequately defined roles, and adequately defined processes.

I think a lot of people expect to hire a VA and have all their problems solved magically, but hiring someone to do a clearly defined role with properly written documentation can dramatically decrease the hassle and risks associated with outsourcing work.

HA HA HA - no such thing exsists - it is like a mythical unicorn :-) 

Ideal - one that works without you as much as possible with happy (or no) staff.

As long as you take all the necessary security measures with your logins and who has access to your data, generally the advantages far outweight any disadvantages.

If you and your accountant only require access, and you have low transaction activity then a traditional non cloud accounting system can be more than fine for basic needs.

The thing is people will just source out free media with advertising. You just need to go to Google news and work out which is the free media. That been said I do think it is a bold move by Fairfax and I am sure that a percentage of people will probably pay for the media. 

Google Webmaster Tools will only give you a sample of your overall link profile. It is a good place to start but it is not ever going to be a complete view of the links you have. I would not worry if links have dissapeared as it happens from time to time. As an example below with the different methods you can use to check links, well some common methods at that: 1. Using the syntax "link:www.website.com" - this will show a small number of links, I would not advise on using it. 2. Using "www.website.com" in google search to view links - this will show more links. 3. Using Webmaster tools - this will show more, but it is not complete. 4. Using Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz - This will show more links but the crawl delay is around 1 month so links take a while to show. 5. Using Tools like Majestic SEO and Ahrefs - these tools will be more advanced in the way they show backlinks they both cost between 100-200 a month to run but they will show a more complete backlink profile. 6. Many people also build custom tools to check links when they are built and how active they are too that is another more advanced option. I hope this helps.

A pricing strategy that I liked a lot was encountered when I was invited to the “Wall Street” bar in Kuala Lumpur.
 
Wall Street is a bar in the heart of Kuala Lumpur's business district. Its drinks prices fluctuate every few seconds, like shares listed on a stock market: when demand for a certain beer increases, so does its price; when vodka is not selling too well, the cost of a shot comes down.
 
Management never let the prices get too high so they are unaffordable. Nor do they let the cost of a drink slip below their basic profit margin, except perhaps during a market crash. A few times each evening, prices of certain drinks, plummet to “record lows”, as if they were unpopular shares on the Malaysian stock exchange prompting a surge of buying activity.

By offline do you mean in retail or physical stores? If you do, the answer is probably yes although I feel that online User Experience is catching up. I would label offline UX as IUE (Immersive User Experience) because you can control and adapt to a customers many senses to create a good environment for catalyzing the sale. Online I would a new acronym is probably more descriptive than UX and that would be CUX (Customer User Experience) I see this as a blending of customer service and user experience.

More companies are starting to higher people to guide and improve their User Experience for customers, however, many establish companies are adopting it at a slower pace than startups and small businesses. This is puzzling because many established companies need a lot more help because they have a much larger backlog of things that need improved and resolved.

One reason I believe UX is not being adopted more quickly at companies is they don't truly understand the value that these professionals add. Many can do front-end development work as well as design and usability work. Also, UX practitioners can help make improvements based on customer feedback and professional best practices to reduce or eliminate issues before they are ever developed or delivered to production. It is between 10 to 100 times more costly (when you consider all the effort and hours) to fix things after they have been released. So, by working with UX designers you can save money up front by not having more issues to resolve later.

I have experienced first hand many times that once a developer, business analyst or project manager see the results firsthand they are much more willing to work with UX professional in the future.

Damn the typos!