When you’re working with a Virtual Assistant, it’s tempting to get them to take over time consuming jobs like writing your blog. I’ve covered the reasons for my problem with that in my post Why I Won’t Create Your Content For You.
That said, there are a lot of ways that your Virtual Assistant can help you with the blogging process. Here are just a few examples:
Before writing starts
There are several ways a Virtual Assistant can help with the setup and creation of a new blog. For example they can:
- help choose a platform
- set-up your account if necessary
- create and edit themes so your blog fits your corporate image
- organise RSS feeds for your blog
Developing a new post
The research is one of the most time-consuming parts of writing a blog. Your Virtual Assistant can help you to:
- They can help you to decide on topics to keep the content of your blog fresh and constantly changing. By researching what people are looking for, what people are talking about in social media, and what’s happening in your industry, your Virtual Assistant can help you pick content that’s relevant today.
- They can do research for your blog to find statistics, examples and other articles you can use as a reference. Because sometimes, you’re not 100% sure of how or when something happened, or you want to be able to back your point up with a statistic, or even just because you want to be able to point to a few leaders in your field and show what they’ve said on your topic.
- They can create a schedule that plans out posts so you never have to sit in front of a blank screen and wonder what to write about. By doing some research on topics and working with you to create a schedule for daily, weekly or monthly blogging, your Virtual Assistant can develop a schedule you can diarise to ensure you’re always on top of your posting routine.
- Find suitable blogs for you to guest post on because guest posting is a great way to get yourself in front of a whole new audience. And
After the post is done
- They can find appropriate images for the post. Because it never looks good to have a stolen image on your blog. Your Virtual Assistant can find or create images that suit your post, but don’t infringe on anyone else’s copyright. If attribution is required, your Virtual Assistant can make sure all images are correctly attributed in the post
- They can proofread. It’s really hard to proofread your own work, and even harder to do it immediately after you’ve written it. Your Virtual Assistant can help to make sure that what’s posted is error free and keep you looking super professional.
- They can post the blog, insert the image and make sure the whole thing looks great. Posting and formatting the blog can be one of the most time consuming parts of the blogging process. Sometimes, it’s even tempting to post something with a bit of dodgy formatting just because you’ve spent so long fiddling already. A Virtual Assistant whose familiar with WordPress or whatever other platform you may use for your blog, can generally get the post loaded and neatly formatted relatively quickly.
- Create tags and keywords that increase the posts findability. While there are plugins that help with this (i.e. Yoast) there is still a bit of work to make sure your post is optimised for SEO.
After the blog is posted
- They can share the blog on your various social media accounts. Even though you can automatically share posts across several social media platforms, there are some where it’s better to manually share them to make the formatting work the way you want it. Plus, there are some platforms where you must manually share posts.
- They can keep an eye on comments; approve or mark them as spam; respond to some if applicable; and notify you of any that you should respond to. Nobody can sit around all day waiting for comments. But it is nice if comments can be approved reasonably quickly to get a conversation started. Your Virtual Assistant can keep an eye on your posts when they go up. Then get on top of the comments quickly so that discussion flows nicely. And trolls and spammers are dispatched without having a chance to get a reaction.
- They can monitor your blog statistics and see which topics get the best responses. That helps you decide which topics to write more on, and which don’t work. It also gives you the opportunity to test things such as different posting times or posting on a different day of the week to see which gets the most views. It also shows you which social media platform/s give the most traffic.
These are all things a Virtual Assistant can do for you while leaving you as the sole content creator.
If you’re not confident about your writing ability, a Virtual Assistant could even take the points you’ve written, and string them together to make a better flowing post for you to approve. But when it comes to the content, the meat of the blog – if you’re not coming up with that yourself, then it’s not really showing that you know your subject at all.
There are a few of the ways a Virtual Assistant can help with your blog. However, if you do need extra help with your blog, talk to your Virtual Assistant about it and they’ll be able to tell you how they can best help you.
