Virtual Buzz Assistant

If you are a virtual assistant and you are setting up a virtual assistant blog to demonstrate your skills, promote your virtual assistant business and promote your clients, this blog post is for you.

What should your virtual assistant blog focus be?

• Business casual is a dress code that is someplace between formal and casual.  Your Virtual Assistant blog should be written business casual.  People should get to know you but you should not forget your blog has a business focus and you are selling your virtual assistant services.  Find that happy place in between.
• Your virtual assistant blog should contain examples of how you have helped clients.  Help a new blog reader visualize exactly how you help people.
• A good virtual assistant blog will be written with search engine terms in mind.  What are your potential clients searching for – write articles about that.
• Don’t blog for your competition.  You might think that writing articles about being a virtual assistant is appropriate.  But too much of that is more likely to generate your competition looking at your blog instead of your potential clients.  For example, if you do a lot of book keeping, are you not more likely to find a client via search engines if you write articles about how to hire a virtual assistant to help with book keeping?
• Contact information – You HAVE TO make it easy for people to contact you.  Really easy.  Why spend all that time writing your virtual assistant blog if your visitors just get frustrated when they cannot find the contact page and information.
• Testimonials – Your clients can get some great PR and you get better credibility if you ask them for testimonials that you can place online.  Just be sure that you are secure with your client as publishing your client list can be an invitation for other virtual assistants to contact them.
• How to – Don’t just tell, show potential clients how to do things that you can assist them with.

Your virtual assistant blog is a great tool that will help you build relationships and trust before people decide to hire you as their virtual assistant.  By taking the VA Blog writing seriously, it can be a great tool for getting search engine results, bulding an audience and generating great sales leads.

A blog can go a long way promoting itself if you are putting out GREAT articles.  However, it takes a long time to get someone to discover you and building an audience.  So this article is How To Promote a Blog, assuming you already are producing good articles.

If you are a really good writer, I would suggest you hire a Virtual Buzz Assistant to do most of these activities for you.  The reason is that producing great information regularly on your blog is your number one goal.  If you do not do that you can generate traffic but you cannot capture an audience that cares about what you have to say.

Part 1: How to Promote a Blog Online?

There are so many ways to promote your blog online that I can only give you some of the more well known options here.

You can promote your blog with:

1. Article Marketing – Write and submit articles to eZineArticles.com
2. Blog Commenting – Write good comments on some good blogs, not spam lots of blogs.
3. Add your blog in your email signature.
4. Participate in online groups that have the audience that would find your blog interesting.
5. Publish and reference your blog articles as part of broader resources in sites like Work.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, etc.
6. Add clear ways to subscribe with email or RSS.  Getting people to come back is much easier.
7. Do keyword research and write blog article that people are searching for.
8. Add a link from your website to your blog.
9. Syndicate your blog in sites like Tumblr.com, FaceBook, Twitter

Part 2: How to Promote a Blog Offline?

1. Go to local events and meet people.  If they are interested in your blog topic, invite them to read.
2. Have your blog listed on your business card or on its own business card.
3. Send postcards or greeting cards to promote your blog – Targeted, not mass mailing.
4. Promote your blog within invoices and mailings to existing customers
5. Promote your blog with a bumper sticker on your car with your blog URL.
6. Make sure local media knows about your blog so you are seen as a local expert.  This could land you in print.
7. Join or start a local bloggers group, where other bloggers come and share ideas and experience.  They often become readers as well.

If you are wondering how to promote your blog, this is just the most obvious ways.  You want to think in terms of one reader at a time and not get caught up in trying to get thousands.  For example, I frequently get bursts of 100′s of extra visitors via StumbleUpon.com, but they just stumbled upon the blog and are not likely to become a long term reader.  One person that is going to keep coming back has far more value to me.

Lastly, you can see that promoting a blog is a lot of work.  If you are trying to do everything, you have a long hill to climb.  Consider outsourcing some of the writing and some of the promotion.  It is free to submit your project here at this site and get quotes on help.