Going Virtual: How to Work with a Virtual Assistant to Manage Your Blog

Blogs are a great addition to your arsenal of getting your business out there. It has the power to help with marketing your business and bringing on board new customers. It’s a soft-sell approach to educating, inspiring and entertaining readers and prospects that, in today’s business landscape converts better than any form of advertising.

Why Business Owners Struggle with Their Blogging

As entrepreneurs, time is your MVC (most valuable commodity). However, as with most business marketing and growth strategies, when it comes to blogging there is a certain amount of hard work involved. It’s not as simple as writing a 500-word post and hitting the publish button.

To really catapult your blogging to a level that will make a difference, you need to keep a number of different things into mind, including:

• Find time to blog.

• Dealing with technical issues.

• Researching ideas for content

• Actually writing/putting together the post

• Publishing the post

In addition to all this, very few small business owners start out as writers and most of the time, blogging does not come naturally to them. Even if you’re tech savvy, when will you find the time to manage your blog between answering your emails, sitting in meetings, talking with clients and growing your business?

Thus, it makes total sense to ‘go virtual’ with your blog management, by learning how to work with a virtual assistant to manage your blog

What are some of the ways a virtual assistant can help with your blog?

Having Your Virtual Assistant Manage the Content Side of Your Blogging

• Start Your Blog

If you don’t already have a blog, he/she can actually make one for you. There are a lot of sites out there, some of them free, which can be used for a blog. It’s not hard, it’s just labor intensive. But blogs, are another important weapon in your arsenal of business growing and recognition. It’s another service your virtual assistant can do for you.

• Research Blog Posts

You can come up with some ideas of what you want on your blog. Give her some ideas for sites she can go to get ideas.Your virtual assistant can then take it from there.

• Maintain Constant Publishing

You want to keep your blog fresh, but also allow people to read old posts as well.Or as time allows he/she can write some extra posts and save them as drafts and when needed in a hurry, there are some there. This means that you’re never short of ideas, and you know when those ideas need to be turned into content and published.

• Draft Blog Posts

Formatting a blog post takes time. Assign this to your virtual assistant, so you can focus on the bigger picture. Otherwise you’ll find yourself taking up a lot of time needed to actually work on growing your business.

• Manage and Reply to Comments

It’s best to reply to every comment that you receive on your blog. You can do it yourself fan base, but it’s probably going to become tough to reply to every comment – this is something that you should be able to trust your virtual assistant with as well.

• Keep a Blog Content Bank

It’s always a good idea, when your virtual assistant is researching content for your blog that she keep a copy of all that research, that way he/she can just refer to it at any time when he/she wants to put together a post. That’s what I do for my clients. Keep a Blog Content Bank. It’s always a good idea, when your virtual assistant is researching content for your blog that she keep a copy of all that research, that way he/she can just refer to it at any time when he/she wants to put together a post. That’s what I do for my clients. That way when I don’t have time to do research, I have ready made ideas/content that I can use for a post.

As you can see there is a boat-load of work involved in this. You probably already know that if you’ve got this far, I know – but, once you start adding this stuff up it’s literally hours and hours of work – hours you could (and should) be spending way more productively, as a business owner.

2. Having Your Virtual Assistant Get a Blog Post Ready for Publishing

One thing you certainly should not be doing is spending time on your blog site, drafting your own blog posts, spending time making them trying to look pretty. Seriously, you have way better things to do be doing. And even if you don’t, it’s boring. Have your VA handle it.

There is a lot of work that goes into doing it right. That hard work translates to a lot of time invested, and if you can utilize the skills of a virtual assistant to do it for you, then why not, right?

It’s a no-brainer that a virtual assistant should be handling this stuff, while you are ‘out there’ working ON your business, instead of being trapped working IN it.