When you started out, blogging may have just been a hobby or a way to make a little extra income. As you’ve become more successful, though, your venture may have grown into a full-scale business — and it may be too large for one person to handle alone. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you could benefit from a virtual assistant for bloggers.
Advantages of a Blogging Virtual Assistant
The likelihood is that you began blogging because you enjoy writing and you want to share your knowledge or insights about your passion. However, running a successful blog involves so much more than just writing. There’s marketing, negotiating advertisement deals, figuring out strategy to keep growing, and just keeping up with your correspondence.
There may even be aspects you vehemently dislike about maintaining a blog, especially things outside your area of expertise or activities that take up hours of your time. For instance, you may be unsure how to interpret analytics or struggle with graphic design.
With a blogger virtual assistant, you can hand off any of these tasks (and many more) to a qualified expert, which leaves you free to work on what you do best. Being able to dedicate more time to core activities may mean you can post more frequently or improve the quality of your content. You may also be able to devote more of your attention to loyal readers and find new opportunities. All this means your blogging business will grow and you’ll see an increase in revenue.
What Can a Virtual Assistant for Bloggers Do?
Virtual assistants can carry out just about any task that doesn’t require them to be physically present. For bloggers, this may include the following.
Coming Up with Blog Post Ideas
After you’ve been blogging for a long time, you may start to run out of ideas. A blogger virtual assistant can think of new ideas for you or you can brainstorm together. It’s often useful to have a sounding board, especially if the blogging virtual assistant has experience in your niche.
Once you have enough ideas, your virtual assistant can create an editorial calendar. This will keep you on track — you’ll always know what you should be working on and you’ll publish a balance of topics to add variety to your blog.
Researching Topics
A virtual assistant can also help you with the next step of the blogging process: research. This could involve finding out what your audience wants to know, looking at what your competitors are doing, or conducting keyword research.
Writing First Drafts
If you’re extra short on time, you can ask your blogging virtual assistant to write a blog post for you. All you need to do is provide the specifications for the post. Once your virtual assistant has completed the first draft, you can infuse the blog post with your voice and make any other necessary changes.
Editing Posts
Alternatively, you could provide your blogger virtual assistant with a finished post for editing. This is useful if you have any doubts about grammar or you just want someone else to proofread your work before you publish it.
Another way to use a blogging virtual assistant for editing is to ensure the post has proper SEO. If you only have a basic understanding of SEO, you’ll find this makes a huge difference to the amount of traffic arriving to your blog. Your virtual assistant will make sure you’ve used keywords appropriately, your post has the correct tags and headers, and you have a relevant meta description. Your virtual assistant may know how to use a tool like Yoast SEO for this.
Graphic Design and Photography
Writing may be your strong suit but graphics not so much. Every one of your blog posts needs to have images if you’re going to receive clicks. A blogger virtual assistant can create these images for you.
Your VA can also make the other graphics you need, such as a logo for your blog and social media profiles, infographics to add visual interest to blogs, and images for long-form content like ebooks and presentations. Your blogger virtual assistant can also take photos of any products you sell or want to promote.
Analytics
A key way to improve your blog is to turn to the analytics. However, unless you understand what the numbers are telling you and how to use the data to your advantage, analytics don’t help much. A virtual assistant for bloggers who has experience using Google Analytics can use metrics like benchmarking, assisted conversions, and cohort analysis to improve your strategy.
Support with Advertising and Affiliate Marketing
There are ways to make your blog even more profitable. If you’re not advertising yet, your VA can research the best options for you according to your audience. This could be direct, pay-per-click, or pay-per-impression ads. Your blogging virtual assistant will also manage communication with the advertiser and negotiate a good deal.
Another option is affiliate marketing. A virtual assistant for bloggers can find the right affiliate program for you and select products that fit your brand image for you to promote.
Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities
One effective way to expand your reach is to guest blog. As searching for possibilities and coming to agreements with other blog owners is time consuming and doesn’t require your expertise, it’s the perfect task to hand off to a virtual assistant. Your VA can propose suitable ideas, create an outline, and check the final post to ensure it meets all the requirements of the other blog.
Creating Email Newsletters
Readers may like to keep up with your latest posts and other updates through an email newsletter. You may enjoy writing the content yourself, in which case your virtual assistant can just create the layout and handle automation. Alternatively, you could delegate the entire task to your VA and focus just on blogging.
Social Media Management
Managing social media accounts often requires as much time as blogging. Worse, unless you have a social media background, you most likely lack a solid strategy.
A blogger virtual assistant can create a strategy for all the platforms where you are active and set up accounts on other platforms to expand your reach. Your VA can also schedule posts to go live when your audience are most likely to respond and interact with your audience for you.
Administrative Tasks
Some of the most tedious tasks you need to do fall under the category of admin. From answering phone calls, responding to emails, and replying blog comments to managing your schedule and maintaining a content bank, a virtual assistant for bloggers can do it all.
Technical Support
There’s a large amount of technical work to running a blog that you may be unfamiliar with. For instance, a blogging virtual assistant can make sure your WordPress is up to date, add useful plugins for security, and delete inactive plugins that could be slowing down your site. Your VA will also back up your blog on a regular basis to prevent lost content.
How to Find the Perfect Blogger Virtual Assistant
Now you know why you would want a blogging virtual assistant, all that’s left is to find the right VA for you.
Where to Look
You can find virtual assistants on job sites, social media, and freelance platforms. You could also go through a VA agency and request a blogger virtual assistant.
Skill Set
Since VAs can carry out a wide variety of tasks, you need to decide exactly what you want before you start your search. You can then search for someone who has the right skill set.
Rates
If you just want support with simple tasks like admin, you may be able to find a general virtual assistant who charges between $10 and $15 hour. However, if you’re looking for someone with SEO knowledge, a virtual assistant who can write first drafts of your content, or a VA with Google Analytics experience, you’ll need a specialist. You should expect to pay anywhere from $15 to $40 an hour.
Questions to Ask During the Interview
Ensure you choose the best person for the job by asking the right questions during the interview process. Some questions you may like to ask include:
- Have you worked as a blogger virtual assistant before or only as a general VA?
- What services can you offer to bloggers?
- What relevant tools do you know how to use?
- When do you work? (If you’re hiring someone from abroad, you’ll need to make sure your schedules match up to some extent, especially if you ever want to chat in real time with your VA.)
- What do you know about my niche?
There’s no need to wait until running your blog on your own becomes an unmanageable task before you hire a blogging virtual assistant. Finding a VA early will help you stay on track and grow the business you’ve created around your blog much faster than you’d be able to do on your own.
Choose MYVA360 and we’ll match you with a dedicated virtual assistant for bloggers who has the skills you require. Schedule a consultation and we’ll give you a 10-percent discount on our services.
