If you write content for a living, whether for your own blog or for clients, we’re here to tell you that there’s a secret weapon you can use to level up your productivity and produce more blogs. For many writers and bloggers, more content means more revenue, and with a virtual assistant for bloggers on your team, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to catapult your success.
Giving you time to focus on your blog can let you tap into new markets, improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and generate leads from your website.
Let’s get started. We’ve covered all the tasks that virtual assistant for bloggers can help with, and grouped them into the different phases of blog writing, By delegating these tasks there’s nothing stopping you from becoming a successful blogger.
Phase 1: Conceptualisation
Research
First things first. Research. Before any brilliant piece of content is written there needs to be some investigation on the topic at hand. This may seem like a lengthy task, but it’s an incredibly important part of the process if you want your blog to be a rip-roaring success.
A virtual assistant can give you a head start by doing research for your blogs and can help you feel inspired if you’re losing steam.
They can assist with:
- Keeping an eye on the competition to look at the topics they are speaking about.
- Keyword research to assist with your SEO.
- Brainstorming sessions. Two brains are better than one!
- Creating a skeleton brief or what we like to call a 10% blog.
Having a virtual assistant assist with the research helps to have a fresh perspective on your content.
Blog calendar
For content writers, there is no better feeling than to be organised and on track.
Your virtual assistant can put together a blog calendar to map out and organise your blogging schedule. That way you have clear deadlines and next steps mapped out for you, and you’re not chasing your tail.
The humble spreadsheet is a great tool to use for a content calendar. There are loads of free online templates that you can use to store all the fresh blog ideas that have been researched. Having a variety of topics scheduled throughout your blog calendar assists in making sure the content stays interesting for your audience.
Phase 2: Content & Execution
Editing
Even the best writers need a second set of eyes to proofread their work, but where do you find someone to help with that? Your virtual assistant can be your second set of eyes and run it through editing programmes like Grammarly, saving you time and letting you hotfoot it onto your next blog.
Your assistant can help with the quality control of your blog, make sure your primary keywords appear enough times and help give your content that extra bit of polish.
Phase 3: Technical support
Backups
In this day and age, it’s simply not enough to just have your beautifully written content saved on your computer’s hard drive. Backups in your cloud provide that extra bit of security to make sure your hard work is never lost.
With a virtual assistant, you’ll have someone on hand who can do all the groundwork for you to make sure all your blogs are updated and backed up in the cloud.
Updates
Keeping your website up to date is vital for your content to be seen on the world wide web. Now, not every VA will be able to manage web updates for you, but Outsourcery’s staff has the support of a web division. That’s right! Bring on the time-consuming, nitty-gritty tasks which help your website run effortlessly and without any mishaps.
Avoid broken links and landing pages by hiring a virtual assistant, backed by a team of specialists, to keep your website updated with the following:
- Keep plugins updated on the website to make sure they still are compatible.
- Remove any outdated or unused plugins that just slow your page down. Not only are these plugins unnecessary but having a delayed, unresponsive page harms the user experience.
- They can assist with making sure all security and anti-virus programmes are updated.
- Installing any new versions of software.
Phase 4: Publishing
Formatting & Optimisation
Now that your content is written and edited, you’ll need to publish it. This is a task that doesn’t require much wordsmithery, as the job is mostly done, and yet it can still be time-consuming. So much time can be spent formatting and optimising your blog, that by the end of it you feel unmotivated to write another.
Hiring a virtual assistant to help with formatting and publishing your blog means you can save precious hours while still ensuring that your blog looks neat and is easy to find online.
A VA can save time by doing the following tasks for you:
- Formatting of paragraphs and titles for better SEO.
- Formatting the blog copy into H1, H2 and H3 headings and paragraph text.
- Sourcing relevant images for featured and online images.
- Optimising your blog SEO with plugins like Yoast. This includes adding titles and alt text for each image, relevant external and internal links, meta descriptions and adding of the primary keyword.
A well-formatted blog that is optimised for SEO is easier to read and helps improve your organic ranking on search engines.
Analytics
Measuring and tracking your blog performance with web analytics is incredibly important to know which areas of your blog are working and which need to be improved.
A virtual assistant can create regular reports based on the metrics that you want to keep track of.
Phase 5: Promoting
Social media management
Don’t think that once your blog is published your work is done. That is only the beginning. It takes a lot of self-promotion to generate traffic to your blog and get your audience to read it before you start to earn an income.
Come up with a strategy and enlist your virtual assistant to do the time-consuming task of sharing your blog across your social media channels. While they create hype around your latest masterpiece, you can get on with writing more content.
But wait, there’s more! Your virtual assistant for blogging can also create engaging posts, surveys and polls on your social media platforms for your audience to vote on the content they want to see next. Remember that idea bank you were creating in your blog calendar? Social media surveys and polls are a perfect way to find inspiration around what your audience wants to read!
Guest blogging opportunities & digital networking
You’ve written your blog, published it on your website and promoted it across your social media. Is that all there is or can you do more? Get some help to position yourself as an industry expert. This can be done by finding opportunities to be featured on other blogs as well as networking within your blogging community.
How does your virtual assistant help with that?
- Research relevant guest blogging opportunities.
- Approach the brands that would be beneficial to be associated with.
- Start to build relationships with said brands.
- Answer all questions and queries that may come in, be it from a reader or potential blog partner.
- Comment on other blogs to drive traffic to your blog.
Having a virtual assistant help with the tasks above can open a world of opportunities for your blog to grow while you are busy (you guessed it) writing more content. Before you know it, your blog will start to be noticed by the right people, and, with a bit of luck, it’ll be shared far and wide, proving you to be an industry leader.
There’s a lot more to blogging than what meets the eye. Now you’ve identified all the ways a virtual assistant can help with your blogging you’ve realised how much time you were actually wasting doing the tasks yourself when you could be writing. Your VA can also help with other tasks such as email and calendar management which gives you more time on your hands. Having more time to focus on other areas allows you to write more which in turn generates more revenue, builds brand awareness and boosts business growth.
