Running a blog can be overwhelming – how do you find the time to write new content, check analytics, and respond to comments without missing an episode of Naked and Afraid? This is why many bloggers hire virtual assistants (VAs).
Here at Travelpayouts, we started hiring freelance VAs for various tasks years ago. Since we know firsthand what challenges this process involves, we thought we’d share our expertise. Read on to learn about the advantages of hiring a virtual assistant for your blog and how to do it.
What is a virtual assistant?
A VA is essentially a freelancer who works for you remotely. People hire virtual assistants for all kinds of reasons – it depends on what you need done.
What tasks do they perform?
There are plenty of things you can delegate to a virtual assistant. These might be rather repetitive and technical tasks that don’t require your direct input:
- Administrative tasks: answering emails and calls, managing your calendar, creating invoices
- Sales tasks: generating and following up with leads, managing contacts in CRMs
- Personal tasks: scheduling personal appointments, making online purchases, etc.
But you can also hire VAs to handle more specialized tasks based on their expertise, such as:
- Writing content for blogs, social media, and newsletters (remember that you need to share three to four posts per week to drive organic traffic)
- Bookkeeping
- Developing a website or app
Benefits of hiring a good assistant
Hiring a VA who knows their stuff can provide benefits like these:
- Higher revenue, because you can work on creative ways to expand
- A better work-life balance, because you have fewer tasks on your plate
- Expertise, in cases when you hire specialist VAs
- More traffic and readers, if you hire a VA who writes well and understands SEO
Types of virtual assistants
General VAs
General VAs handle daily tasks and processes to help you run your business. This might mean answering emails, doing research, or running social media. You’ll need to show them how your business works and how you like things done.
Specialized VAs
Specialized VAs have specific skillsets and normally charge higher rates. Look for a specialized virtual assistant if you want to delegate tasks like bookkeeping, image and video editing, content creation, and so on. They’ll need an overview of how your business works, but if they’re worth hiring, you shouldn’t have to teach them any technical skills.
When to hire a virtual assistant
Hiring an assistant starts to make sense in two main cases:
- When your business is growing and you need to spend your time on more big-picture things. Then a remote assistant (a general VA or specialist in things like blogging or social media) can lighten your day-to-day load.
- When you want to take your blog to the next level, but to do so, you need certain technical expertise (in marketing, SEO, coding, etc.). Then a specialist can help.
What tasks to delegate to an assistant
Here are some of the more common things a blogger might ask a VA to do:
- Increasing traffic and conversions. An assistant skilled in marketing, SEO, and sales can help you boost your conversions.
- Boosting affiliate income. Integrating partner tools, tracking clicks and conversions, and the other nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing can be time-consuming. An assistant familiar with best practices can handle these things efficiently.
- Building links. Off-page SEO practices such as link building require as much time and expertise as writing itself. The right assistant will help you get quality links and connect with niche experts.
- Actually writing content. Just make sure the VA understands your tone of voice and can replicate it – otherwise, readers might think an alien took over the blog.
- Web design. If you want your blog to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to think beyond Wix. A designer can help beautify your site.
- Promoting your blog on social media. Every social media platform has a unique ranking algorithm, so to reach your target audience, you need to develop a marketing strategy. The right assistant will help you create optimized posts and grow your social community.
Where to find a virtual assistant
Freelancing platforms
Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are the most obvious place to find virtual assistants. They offer hundreds if not thousands of freelance assistants at affordable prices (starting from $5 per post). Remote contractors on these sites charge either per hour or per project.
You can create a gig so that freelancers looking for work can apply directly. Make sure to give your project a descriptive title and detailed description, specifying what kind of expertise and skills you’re looking for. You can add questions for candidates to answer to help you find the one.
If you collaborate with an assistant through a freelancing platform, you’re most likely to pay a fee for each project. On Fiverr, for example, it’s roughly $2 to $3 per transaction. While insignificant for a one-time project, this can add up in the long term.
We at Travelpayouts often use Fiverr to book proofreading services, and we try to place a few big orders instead of many small ones. This allows us to streamline our workflow and avoid paying service fees multiple times.
On the other hand, platforms provide benefits you won’t find elsewhere: you’ll be able to open disputes for unsatisfactory work or fraud and the platform will take care of logistics like issuing payments.
Social media
Social networks play a significant role in connecting brands with potential employees: one study revealed that an overwhelming 92% of recruiters prefer to search for talent through social and professional networks. Below are some of the most popular social media platforms to help you find the perfect virtual assistant to hire for your blog.
As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn boasts over 500 million active users worldwide, including roughly 200 million with premium subscriptions who are interested in building partnerships.
To begin your search, type in “virtual assistant” and filter the results by “people” to see potential candidates. You can also set additional filters, such as the number of connections, particular locations, current company, etc.
Next, you can study the profiles in the search results to learn more about the candidates’ educational background, work experience, connections, and client testimonials.You can also check to see if the assistants you found have previously worked with similar brands or projects and what customers have to say about them. This might be the closest thing you can get to referrals, so make sure to use LinkedIn’s functionality to your advantage.
You can also set up a LinkedIn page for your business and share a job posting there so that people can find it themselves. Note that the platform offers a premium membership, which makes hunting for talent easier with perks like DMs outside your network.
Facebook is another good choice for finding a VA. Type in “virtual assistant” and filter the results by posts, people, groups, etc.
Here are some of the most popular Facebook groups that travel bloggers might use to search for virtual assistants:
- Making Money From Blogging has over 12k members and multiple posts a day.
- Travel Creator Community has about 3k users and is managed by the renowned travel blogger Jessie “on a Journey” Festa..
- Travel Blogging Success has about 4k members and is aimed at coaching travel bloggers around the world to run their businesses successfully.
- Travel Blogger Tips & Tricks has 1.5k users and provides daily tips from a full-time travel blogger.
While Reddit isn’t primarily aimed at facilitating business connections, it offers space for conversations, which you can take advantage of to find a great virtual assistant. Sign up, if you haven’t yet, and start by exploring the following subreddits:
- Affiliate Marketing (reddit.com)
- r/freelanceWriters
- r/copywriting
- r/writersforhire
- r/forhire
- r/freelance_forhire
- r/hiring
- r/WorkOnline
Join these and similar subreddits and, if the subreddit rules allow, create a post offering an assistant job to the forum members.
Note that some subreddits require a certain amount of “karma” before you can create a post. You can get karma by taking part in existing discussions and getting upvoted.
Online job boards
The internet abounds in job boards where you can share your project. Some are specifically for assistants and writers, and some will ask you for a fee in exchange for a single job posting or for a monthly subscription. This might be a good investment if you are looking for several assistants.
Here are a few job boards to start with:
Job boards usually curate their postings carefully but don’t hold themselves responsible for the quality of the contractors you’ll find there, nor do they provide any logistics.
Blogs
If you want to hire a VA with copywriting skills, make sure to look through blogs and online magazines with a similar focus to your topic of interest. Once you find writing samples that you like, contact the authors and send them your offer. If their contact details aren’t available online, reach out to the platform hosting the post you found and ask them for the writer’s email. There’s no guarantee, but they might be willing to share this information.
The good thing about this approach is that you can find precisely the type of writing skills that you need and get in contact with the author directly without paying any fee (unlike on freelancing platforms).
Referrals
If you don’t want to hire a rando, ask for referrals via your personal or professional network. For example, you can share a job on LinkedIn or other social networks – your connections may point you in the right direction. You can also reach out to agencies, companies, and experts in the niche and ask for recommendations. Word of mouth remains an efficient way to get referrals, and besides, it never hurts to let more people know about your business.
How much does a virtual assistant cost?
The cost of hiring a virtual assistant depends on various factors, such as the type of work and skills necessary, type of employment, amount of control you want to have, training you are ready to give, method of hiring, and more.
Hiring a freelance virtual assistant can be one of the cheapest options, as opposed to working with an agency or hiring a VA full-time. If you are time-flexible, you can look for an assistant in various time zones to lower your costs. Freelance virtual assistants may charge as little as $5 to $10 per hour.
Remember that onboarding a freelancer might require some training, especially if your business has special requirements.
How to find and hire an assistant for your blog
So, you’re ready to take the plunge and hire a VA? Here’s a suggested workflow.
Document your tasks
Start by listing all the tasks and processes you want to delegate. This will tell you what skills and experience the ideal assistant will have. It’s also a good idea to sketch out an onboarding plan at this stage, since it’ll be directly related to your list of tasks.
Create a job description
Make sure to include the following sections:
- Information about your brand, mission, target audience
- Ideal candidate profile with desired education, experience and skills
- List of tasks and responsibilities, as well as apps and tools to be used
- Employment type, compensation (per hour/project, etc.), and other benefits
- Your selling points, such as access to advanced tools, flexible schedule, etc.
- How to apply (do you want to see work samples, or will you have a test task, or…?)
Post your vacancy and review resumes
Next, choose one or several of the places we listed above, post your job there, grab a beer, and watch the resumes flow in.
Hopefully you get a lot of interest, but try to narrow down your list to 5 to 10 candidates. Then it’s time to schedule interviews.
Here are the main qualities to assess in a candidate:
- Communication skills
- Knowledge of your niche and/or brand
- Job-related soft and hard skills, as well as knowledge of relevant tools
Give your top candidates a test
Consider sending a test task to assess a candidate’s skills. Be ready to pay them if the task requires a lot of time (if it’s a blog post, for example).
Depending on your needs, you can also send out a personality test or aptitude test to find the right hire.
Offer the top candidate a trial period
So far they seem like the perfect VA, but the proof is in the pudding. Consider offering a 30-to-90 trial period so you can see how well you work together before committing 100%. Make sure to sign a service agreement in advance, as well as a non-disclosure agreement if needed.
5 things to do before hiring a VA
To ensure the smooth integration of a new assistant into your blogging routine, make sure to properly onboard them. Here are a few important steps to consider.
1. Protect intellectual property
When hiring a copywriter assistant for your blog, it is important to complete a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to make sure that you retain intellectual ownership over the content. To ensure maximum security, some bloggers prefer to give out an NDA to their new contractors even before they discuss a business idea or concept.
2. Give appropriate access
A good rule is not to give anyone access to pages or services that they don’t need in their work. If you’ve hired a copywriter, they don’t need to see your personal calendar, and they won’t need access to a document that you’re writing by yourself.
If you partner with Travelpayouts, you might want to use the Delegated Access feature and allow your assistant access only to certain tasks. In this case, the VA won’t be able to change your personal data, create new projects, or submit any requests on your behalf.
3. Choose task management software
You can register on a work management platform such as Asana and Trello to track the tasks you assign.
At Travelpayouts, we use Trello to assign and manage tasks for freelancers and find it very convenient. It lets you create multiple boards, customize them, and change task statuses (from “To do” to “In process,” for example) just by clicking and dragging. You can create a free account with up to 10 boards and unlimited cards, which is great for both small businesses and freelancers.
4. Prepare documentation
Your VA won’t be a mind reader, so get your expectations and guidelines down on paper. Describe your target audience and desired tone of voice, provide lists of favorite sources, list major do’s/don’ts, and so on. If you have SEO strategies in place, make sure to introduce them as well. Affiliate marketers might want to share guides for the affiliate programs and platforms they use.
You can also create templates for emails, blog content, and social media posts. Keep in mind that this may give you quality control, but it can also lead to repetitive writing.
5. Choose a time tracking tool
Most VAs charge an hourly rate, so make sure to choose a convenient time tracking tool. Programs such as the free TopTracker (which we use at Travelpayouts) not only count the time spent on each task, but also the number of mouse clicks and keyboard hits, while taking screenshots every now and then. All you have to do is send an invite to the project to your assistant and ask them to install the tool on their computer.
There you have it – hiring a VA from A to Z.
Have you ever hired an assistant for your website or affiliate campaign? Do you have any tips and tricks that you want to share with your fellow creators? Or maybe some horror stories? 😱 If so, please let us know in the comments below!