You probably hear it all the time. As a Virtual Assistant, you should be blogging.
Many VAs struggle with getting a blog started – or keeping it going.
But writing a blog is not the only way you can create content for marketing your business.
There is really one main skill you need to develop to get lots of content created for your marketing.
It’s called repurposing. Repurposing means to reuse something you have already created in a slightly different way. I’ll explain how to do that below.
First things first, usually the thing that stops you from creating content is not knowing what to write about.
VAs who say they hate to blog probably don’t hate to write – they just don’t know what to write about.
What To Write
To figure out what you need to write, you first need to know what your audience wants to read about, or learn.
If you are a bookkeeper, your audience wants to know how to do their part better. So you can write about tax tips, organizing paperwork better, software to use, apps that are new, actual methods to categorize or post expenses, and so on. You are not trying to teach them to do their own bookkeeping. You are trying to showcase your knowledge and expertise so that they might want to hire you.
All VAs can write about online tools to use to build or grow your business, or work/life balance, or organization and productivity, and so on.
You need to figure out what it is that your audience wants to read about, that supports the services that you offer.
Choose two or three categories of topics to start with and then you can grow from there. Start simple and develop good content creation habits.
Repurpose
Ah here we are!
Repurposing content means to reuse it in other ways, so you don’t have to create something new every day.
For example, if you write one blog post, you can turn that into a number of pieces of other content. Here are 10!
1. Put it in your newsletter and send it to your email list.
2. Post it to your blog.
3. Post it as an article on Linked In (do this at least a few days after it has already appeared on your blog, not on the same day).
4. Turn it into a Facebook Live (you honestly just have to read it on air!)
5. Upload the Facebook live video to your Youtube channel.
6. Transcribe your video, or take notes from it as you talked (if you did not read it – you don’t want to miss your ad libbed parts – those are often the best teaching parts!)
7. Go through the blog post and transcript to pull out short social media postings for whichever platforms you are on.
8. Pull out advice from your videos or blog post that can be used to create custom images (no more stealing other people’s quotes!)
9. Post your custom images to Instagram (or any of your social media platforms).
10. Look in the transcript for opportunities to expand on any areas – thus creating another blog post that you can link back to.
Do you get the idea?
One article gives you at least 10 other ways to use one blog post to create more content. And everything is about things your audience wants to read about.
Or Don’t Write
When creating content, it’s important to choose a delivery method that you enjoy. If you like to write, then blog. If you don’t like to write, try doing video.
Facebook Lives are very popular these days.
If you prefer doing video, then start there and use the transcript to create a blog post.
Look at your blog posts or videos so far. Have you written something once, posted it, and thought that was enough? It’s not.
I challenge you to take an existing blog post and repurpose it using the steps above.
One thing it will do is show you how much of your efforts you are missing out on.
The other thing it will do is let you figure out your favourite way to create content – so you can do more of what you like!
We all have the same amount of time to market our business. Wouldn’t it make sense for you to make the most of your time to do yours?
For more blog ideas for your Virtual Assistant business, check out this article to get 10 Content Ideas for Your Blog.