Task Virtual Blog

For new age entrepreneurs, a blog is an extremely powerful medium. It is a great way to increase your email list and connect with potential customers. Also, it works as a marketing medium for your business. It is an approach of soft-selling where the customers are educated, entertained and inspired to try out new products. The pace of conversion of readers into customers is better than any other form of advertising that businesses try out. Here we are going to discuss the ways in which VAs would handle the different aspects of your blog posting. So that your blogs can be ready to go live.

Why managing a blog on your own can be difficult.

Managing a professional blog along with the rest of your business is a different ballgame altogether. A lot goes behind getting a blog to run technically glitch free, coming up with new content ideas, publishing blog posts within a consistent routine and also interacting with all those who might have left a feedback on your blog or emailed you regarding it. Also, you may not be a good writer or that tech-savvy to begin with, which will lead to a lot of struggle in running a professional blog.

You may not be acquainted with the latest trends in blog-writing and the features that would make a blog post stand out from the others so that it comes up much earlier in the search results on google. For the latter, you need to have a knowledge of SEO and the appropriate way of applying it to your business. Then there’s the task of marketing the blog at the same time. So, as an entrepreneur, finding time to manage all these aspects will take a toll on you and your business. And this is why you must hire a virtual assistant to help you out!

How virtual assistance helps your blog

A virtual assistant (VA) is a highly professional individual with a specific set of skills. In this case, his or her skills would include managing each and every aspect of a blog. The areas of managing a blog include its technical aspects, the content aspect and finally the marketing aspect. In order to run a well rounded professional blog, all of these aspects must be managed and run efficiently. The virtual assistant you hire to manage your blog will take care of all of these areas, thus freeing your time and helping your business run better. Given below are the summaries of the tasks your virtual assistant will fulfil under each of these areas.

VA managing technical aspects of The Blog

These are the basics that will keep your blog up and running securely and consistently.

Updating your blog platform

If your blog runs on WordPress, then your VA will keep your blog up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress. This ensures that your blog runs seamlessly and is also secure. Your VA’s job will also entail updating the various plugins used in your blog, like Akismet, Yoast (for SEO), WPforms, Backup Buddy etc. He will also delete inactive or unused plugins that may be taking up space and slowing your site down. The most appropriate practice is to upgrade to the newest version when it has been released officially released.

Backing up your content

This is an extremely important aspect of keeping a blog. Your content is your primary resource, hence you should protect it from any unforeseen technical glitches leading to its loss. If you write your own blog posts, it may not always occur to you to back them up.  This is where your virtual assistant will protect your content by regularly backing them up. Your VA can install the plugin and then configure it for either making regular updates or just a backup of the database.

VA managing content aspects of a blog

Now comes the core of the blog, its content. Even if you are the one who is writing the blog posts, you may still need assistance in managing other aspects of creating good content. This is where a VA helps you out.

Creating editorial calendar

By making an editorial calendar, your VA helps you keep a good track of what is to be posted and when, so that your blog positing frequency remains consistent. The VA can use the results obtained from his or her research and turn that into an editorial calendar for you. This would never keep you deficient in ideas and would keep you informed about when those ideas need to be transformed into content and published.

Coming up with post ideas

Just the act of thinking up new post ideas takes a lot of time. By delegating this to a VA, you will be ensured of a weekly catalogue of new post ideas, from which you can pick one and start working on immediately. Giving your VA a list of the keywords and topics around which your blog posts would revolve would help him or her to generate effective and interesting blog ideas.

Optimizing your posts

Just writing a post isn’t enough. It must be optimized to get maximum hits. Your VA will install requisite SEO plugin and help you out in this! The VA can fill up the custom fields for you when he/she is drafting the posts. He will also find relevant keywords to optimize your blog better. He can further optimize the post by adding a keyword-rich title and alternate text, an SEO benefit majority of bloggers don’t pay importance to.

Formatting posts

Before publishing the post, you need to format the draft properly, which takes quite a bit of time. You VA can take care of this part and keep the draft publish-ready for you. That way, all you have to do is check it once and then hit the publish button!

Managing feedbacks & comments

The comments your blog subscribers and visitors leave must be responded to in order to maintain a good readership. Initially, it may be done by you, but as the readership of your blogs goes up, it would become difficult for you to reply to every comment, which is where a VA can most willingly help you. Also, there may be many spam comments which should be filtered. You VA can take up these tasks thereby maintaining a good communication with your readers and also freeing up your time.

Keeping a Bank for Blog Content

You VA can keep a spreadsheet which would contain all your blog posts and any content for reference for the future. They would then be able to refer to this document for the purpose of internal linking and for writing updates on social media. He or she can even pass it on to a SEO experienced VA for long-term strategies for link-building.

VA managing marketing aspects of the blog

Without proper marketing efforts, your blog will never reach its full potential. Your virtual assistant can become your blog marketing assistant as well!

Promoting your blog posts

 Your virtual assistant can help you with the task of promoting each new blog post you publish, by sharing it on various social media. Also, he can promote some of your popular old posts as well, in order to bring in more traffic.

Submitting your blog to directories

If you want to get your blog out there and gain eyeballs, then this is a good way to do it. Your VA can start submitting your blog in various web, blog and RSS directories so that your blog gets more visibility.

Commenting on other blogs

You VA can start commenting on other blogs related to your industry so that it results in some traffic by the readers of that blog clicking on your blog link.

Find guest blog opportunities

 guest blogging is yet another good way to get new readership. Your VA will work at finding out new and good guest blogging opportunities that will help you maximize your traffic.

So when your VA is there to help you, you won’t need to spend time in WordPress, in making your posts look attractive and in drafting them too. You work would be done in much less time than you would have taken and would also be done much more efficiently. Once your VA has performed all the necessary tasks to make te post ready to be published, all that you need to do is to log in to the blog posting platform such as WordPress and get a preview of the post for once. Then you can straight-away click on the publish option or schedule your post to go live at some particular time.

With a virtual assistant by your side, managing a blog will be easy as a breeze! Still on the fence about whether or not to hire a virtual assistant for your blog? Opt for the free trial at Task Virtual and find out the perks of virtual assistance for yourself!