Ways a Virtual Assistant can enhance your content writing

Writing quality content for your website or a blog is a great way to build your credibility and your brand. It can also be a wonderful way to draw in the audience you will benefit from. Thats your way of saying, “Trust me, I know and understand what I’m talking about”. The challenge though, is finding the time to write and post that content.

Writing a great post or finding someone else to do it is not all it takes to be successful with great content. The key is to promote the post on the right platforms so it can garner the attention of the right kind of audience and further promote you and your business efficiently. Also, it’s not enough if you are producing good content alone. It’s also important that you maintain that consistency. Keeping up with it can be a bit of a struggle. Hiring a Virtual Assistant to manage your content marketing strategy, could be your solution.

A Virtual Assistant can assist in:

• Setting up & scheduling posts
• Research to help with content writing
• Repurpose the content already created
• Promote the content

Setting up & scheduling posts

Setting up a blog page for your website can be a time consuming effort by itself. Added to that, is the time that a blog post in itself, demands. Formatting the post and adding pictures takes up significant amount of time apart from the time already spent in writing the content.

Many Virtual Assistants are not content writers themselves but can help with these time consuming tasks by formatting the layout of the post and finding the right pictures and ensuring they are of the right size and format apart from previewing the blog to determine it looks good before it gets published.

They can also, manage your publishing schedule so you are regularly posting on social media, which is a key element of your content marketing strategy.

Research to help with content writing

Research the content
Determining what to write and for who to write, researching what your competition is writing, learning what your audience wants to hear, are some of the very important things you need to learn before you sit down to write. Speaking to your audience in a way that’s different from your competition, about topics they want to learn about, is key to getting their attention and promote your brand. Figuring out these aspects can take quite a bit of research which is a time consuming task. With all the other things that you need to handle, you are probably hoping for 25 or 26 hour days. to accomplish it. The solution is to hire a Virtual Assistant who can do this for you. They can also help with researching key points on the topics and provide you with a list of related resources, so you can get started on writing.

Research Market conditions
A Virtual Assistant can monitor the market by setting up alerts for certain keywords – relevant to your business, and report to you about new technologies or what your competitors are upto and such, so you are in the know about your target market. They may also be able to keep an eye on forums or news sites looking for opportunities or threats or developments in your line of business and further investigate the details for you.

Research the audience
Virtual Assistants can help you in determining who your target audience should be so you can write posts that speak directly to them instead of writing for the general public. They can further help by looking for and finding where your target audience is located and their likes, dislikes, concerns & values. The way they would do this is by looking for comments or discussions in your particular niche and collating ideas from them. This will help you enhance your content.

Research your competition
Know your enemies better than yourself. Your enemies in this context are your competitors. Knowing their strengths, their weaknesses, their strategies (that seem to work for them), their capabilities in comparison with yours and keeping up-to-date about their activities is another time consuming but very beneficial task. Outsourcing this to a Virtual Assistant will help you as they will do the needed research in this area and provide you with reports so you can ensure that you don’t lose sight of whats happening in the market around you.

Research topics to write about
Although you know that you should be continually putting content worth reading out there, figuring the topics to write about can be a daunting task.
Virtual Assistants can help with this by doing research into what questions people are asking , looking for topics that can be explained better, finding sites that you could link to or write guest posts on, and things like that, all in relation to your expertise or line of buiness

Repurpose your content

Finding things to write about regularly can also be a time consuming task or can be a costly affair if you are hiring a content writer to do the job. So, it makes sense to use the same content in more ways than one instead of just for one blog post.

Content repurposing or recycling is to reuse what you already have in a different way like using the contents of a video on YouTube to write blog post, or using the content from your blog to create an infographic, or using parts of the blog to make a social media post like on twitter or add it as a caption to an image and post it on social media. There are many ways that content that’s already out there can be repurposed to make many newer posts.

This can be another of those tasks that can be time consuming and can be delegated to a Virtual Assistant as they can spot the opportunities to repurpose your content and implement them.

Promote your content

Its not enough if you have top- class content alone. This content needs to reach the people it was written for, so it can translate into a content marketing strategy that benefits your business. It happens when the content is promoted in the right places using the right channels.

Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author, top web influencer, top marketer and one of the top entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by United Nation, says on one of his posts, “With no marketing budget, zero connections and a blog that was only a month old, Robbie Richards grew his traffic to 272% in 30 days by creating the right content and promoting it to the right people.”

Although, it might not be the case for all, it still highlights the importance of post promotion.

Virtual Assistants can help with promotion by either setting up email newsletters to your email client list letting them know about the new content, or schedule social media posts promoting your content, or find influencers who can mention or link to in your content and many more ways.

In conclusion

Content marketing is one of the key marketing strategies. Using it well can benefit your business immensely. Researching about what to write and how to write and then promoting what you have written are all a part of this strategy. The write-ups need to be researched well and written well so audiences will want to read it and will be convinced that you know what your are talking about. Promoting this well written work to the audiences that want to read it is another key aspect. Also, of key importance is reusing what is already available in more ways than one.

Hiring a virtual Assistant to take on these tasks can be a good investment for your business.