Virtual Assistants Can Write Too

The cat is out of the bag now – virtual assistants provide copywriting services! What’s more, there is a significant demand for exactly this type of virtual assistant. You are the living reading proof of this fact. If you bothered to read this far, it is likely you are either

• a VA who offers or thinks about offering content writing services
• or someone looking for a VA with content writing skills

If a virtual assistant has a knack for writing and enjoys it, she will offer it as a service regardless of what various online authorities say VA should or shouldn’t do. Besides, content writing is a natural extension for many in-demand virtual support niches, including SEO, social media marketing, list-building, and of course blogging.

Now, let’s look at the practical aspects of shifting some or all of your content writing to a virtual assistant. It is really a “everybody wins” situation:

• A business owner gets lots of great content fine-tuned for online distribution;
• A freelance writer, partnered with a virtual assistant, shifts some of the less-creative work onto her shoulders while improving the quality of writing;
• A virtual assistant branches out into a new high-demand niche with lots of opportunities for value-added services.

So I am not saying “dump your freelance writer and let VAs handle it all”. Instead, look at the opportunities to shift some, not all, of the writing tasks to get the best value for your money:

Keyword research

Keyword research is very important to the success of your online marketing campaign. But sifting through hundreds of long-tail keyword phrases is very time-consuming and tedious. And this is just the kind of task best-suited for a virtual assistant.

Actually, virtual assistants can research more than just keywords. Why not have them monitor online conversations and trends to help you come up with topics for your content.

Content Optimization 

Writing for the Web is different from writing for print media. The sentences are shorter. The paragraphs are also shorter and there are more of them. Since most online readers skim through an article or blogpost, subheadings and lists are used extensively to assist with this skimming.

There are other important considerations, such as placement of primary and secondary keywords, keyword frequency, content length, and title optimization.  A virtual assistant specializing in Internet marketing and copy writing will be able to fine-tune your article to improve its online performance.

Content submission and promotion

A great article collecting dust on your computer’s hard drive is a waste of time, money and opportunities. You’d think that once you or your freelance writer put it together, the work is done. Except, of course, now it needs to be submitted to an ezine or an article directory. And then – re-written so it can be submitted to another directory. And so on. Plus, once an article is submitted, it has to be promoted and that takes time.

Again, it is not hard, just time-consuming and rather boring. So the multiple-submission step gets skipped. And so does the promotion step. That’s a waste of a perfectly good article! And again, it is something that a virtual assistant can help with. 

Content re-writing and repurposing

An article has to be re-written for each new submission. Otherwise you run into the duplicate content issue. That’s not good. Should a freelance writer take care of the re-writes? Not at all. Once an article is ready, a virtual assistant can take over and do all the time-consuming re-writing.

While she’s at it, you might also consider asking her to repurpose the article. After all, why commission separate writing projects – an article, blog posts and a newsletter feature. Instead, get one done – an article. Then transform it into a couple of blog posts (since articles are usually longer than posts) and just about any other type of online content.  

So next time you are looking for a copy writer, consider using a virtual assistant. And if you are perfectly happy with the writer you’ve got now, consider using a virtual assistant for all those time-consuming pre- and post-writing tasks.

Technorati Tags: virtual assistant,  article marketing, copywriting

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