Blogging and vlogging are both great ways to make bank online, using them as a platform to sell your own products or as an advertising platform for Google affiliates or other private advertising networks to sell their products in exchange for paying you a commission. Each allows you to go from a poor week-to-week nobody to a filthy rich online presence in much less time than it would to establish an offline brand. As an online brand grows, email management can become near impossible, often limiting wealth-building opportunities to entrepreneurs who refuse to outsource the task.
Our friends at 24/7 Virtual Assistant offers their tips on how a VA can help you expand your brand through blogging, vlogging and email management, freeing up your time to do only the most important of tasks.
1. Blogging
The era of crappy, throw em’ up and forget em’ affiliate blogs is long gone, giving way to modern day blogs full of daily posts, complete with high rez images and videos, guest posts, and an emphasis on innovative information that hasn’t been repeated over and over again on every other site within a visitor’s area of interest. While some blogs like Seth Godin’s are able to run on the sole tireless efforts of one person, it’s near impossible to do all the work by yourself. Certainly not to the level it takes to make hundreds of thousands of bucks a month.
You need a diverse range of topics, complete with interesting images and other supporting media, in order to get the number of visitors you’ll need to make big bank with a single site. Even more if you’re managing several niche blogs in the hopes that at least one will strike gold. A Virtual Assistant can handle all the legwork for you: researching, writing, posting, image selection, adding tags, SEO, social sharing, responding to on-site comments. Even if you want to do all the writing yourself, think of how much easier it would be to have everything but your unique written voice taken care of for you? The more quality posts you have on a blog, the more opportunity for sales of your products, services and/or affiliate products.
2. Vlogging
The king of all vlogging media is YouTube. Aside from the need to be interesting and have some sort of value to offer your audience you have to upload content often, daily if possible, in order to stand out in a swelling sea of competition. Most important, you need to offer high quality videos, with funny or interesting images that relate to what you’re talking about. Social media logos or buttons need to be embedded in the video for branding and increasing social follows. And most important: Grainy video quality and distorted audio with a dog barking in the background won’t get you more subscribers!
It’s much harder to become a millionaire blogger when it takes you at least 60 minutes to shoot the video (if you could be so lucky), then hours of editing and smoothing to get everything right. You need to be an expert at using programs like Window’s Movie Maker or Wondershare; taking out what you don’t want and putting in extras that you do. Then you have to prepare the video description and share it on your social media channels. You can have your VA take care of all these creativity-killing, post-filming tasks that make the prospect of doing the same thing over tomorrow just dreadful!
3. Email Management
Emails are a definite productivity killer. Reading and answering them is essential to any successful blog or vlog too. It’s rare to find entrepreneurs who got rich answering emails all day long. Though many have become rich by sending them! Life-hacker extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss, can all teach aspiring millionaires a thing or two about outsourcing email, a job that used to tax his time and patience for 6 – 8 hours a day! (see his blogpost on the subject). Tim knows time is money and that his brain has to be working in a peak creativity zone to give his readership the innovative tips and teaching he offers.
As you start to grow a brand, the number of separate email addresses you need to manage your business effectively start to quickly pile up and the ratio of truly important emails (like customer service, price quotes, and joint-venture requests) start to be drown out by companies sending you spam, lawyers sending legal threats, etc, etc. Tim spent an entire year teaching his email VA’s “How to behave like me. Not to imitate me, but to think like me.”
Think of the time and exhaustive effort that you’ll be able to save and devote to expanding your brand when a Virtual Assistant takes over the boring stuff, freeing up your time to focus only on the important creative work needed to increase your online income.
