There are heaps of ways a Virtual Assistant can help with your writing. In the past I’ve blogged about ways a Virtual Assistant could help with your blogging here and here. However, the fact is that a Virtual Assistant can help with all aspects of writing that you need to do in your business including blogging, letters and emails, proposals, marketing materials, articles, press releases, staff profiles, case studies, compliance statements, annual reports, newsletters and so on. So, here’s just some of the ways a Virtual Assistant can help with your writing:
Research:
A Virtual Assistant can help by taking some of the research off your hands.
- They can find facts to back-up your arguments
- Give you citations for scholarly articles that you refer to
- Find URLs for other online documents and articles you want to link to
- Source popular topics for articles in your industry
- Collate statistics, departmental reports and other information required for business reporting or compliance
Proofreading:
As long as your Virtual Assistant has good English skill, including high level comprehension, grammar and spelling skills there’s a lot they can do to help make sure your documents are error free and help you to regularly publish mistake free articles and blog posts. Your Virtual Assistant can:
- Checking spelling and grammar for error free posts and documents
- Make sure your keyword phrases are used when practical and in a manner that flows well within your document
- Converting dot point ideas into blog posts that read well
- Fact check data and statistics to make sure there’s no typographical or data entry errors
- Ensure there is a consistency in the style of all your communications
Formatting:
Formatting documents, blog posts and online articles or newsletters is a time consuming and often frustrating job. It’s easy to become discouraged, or to not have time to spend getting it “just right” and end up with posts that don’t look quite like you want. A Virtual Assistant can take the time to format your documents and articles to make sure that everything you send out looks as good as it possibly can. They can:
- Take care of the fiddly bits involved in formatting a blog post to make it attractive and easy to read
- Make sure images are sized well, link as appropriate and include alt tags that use the article keywords
- Create templates for documents such as proposals, general letters, profiles, marketing materials
- Format your newsletter so that it’s easy to read, obviously from your company and looks like something your clients will want to read.
- Make sure that numbering is consistent throughout a document, that page numbering runs in sequence and that any references and indexes appear as they’re supposed to.
Publicity:
Once you’ve finished your post or article, you need to make sure it’s getting seen. A Virtual Assistant can take care of making sure your post is seen by as many people as possible, and more importantly, that it’s seen by the right people. Some of the things they can do include:
- Share your articles on your social media accounts
- Source contacts for press releases, article submission and guest bloggers
- Distribute Press Releases
- In conjunction with you, select key phrases from your articles and posts to turn into graphics or repurpose in other ways.
- If your Virtual Assistant has a pleasant speaking voice, they could create audio copies of your posts, or edit and upload audio posts that you’ve created.
So there are a few ways a Virtual Assistant could help with your writing. There’s probably plenty more the right person could do. If writing is a problem for you, think about what parts are the worst and let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can tell you how a Virtual Assistant could make it a bit easier for you.
