7 Buzz Activities You Should Not Do Yourself
It is easy to get caught up in all the social media tasks that you have. If you are successful, your list of tasks keeps growing every day.
What are 10 things you should outsource to a virtual buzz assistant?
- LinkedIn Approval - If you are openly linking to people on linked is, as I do, it is silly to be approving those links yourself. You could get a lot more mileage if you have that approval and polite email reply outsourced.
- Asking Bloggers to Write About You – If you are researching blogs in your industry and sending them a polite request to link to your site or write about your product, do not do this work yourself.
- Reciprocal Connections – I tend to follow people that follow me on twitter if they are active. I also approve friendships in many networks and return the connection. But I do not need to do those things myself.
- Light Blog Writing – If you want to have more blog posts, consider hiring a virtual buzz assistant to write a daily summary on industry news – in addition to your regular posts.
- Account Creation – Do you need help creating and managing your many social network accounts? Don’t do it yourself unless your time is worth next to nothing.
- Interlinking – All your accounts and sites perform better when they occasionally link to each other. An assistant that is managing these accounts for you can also link to a few resources every day.
- Correspondence – View Yaro Starak’s piece on this. Reducing your activities to critical business building activities is best for you in the long term.
Keep in mind I am a huge fan of creating great relationships. But given the choice of a few stronger 1 on 1 relationships vs. more free time to create more great content for all readers, I will usually take the free time to write. And a good assistant will forward me the connections that make sense.
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You really think that you should outsource your own blog posts? I’ve used a variety of hired / ghost writers before, most are expert at being able to output words without actually managing to “say” anything. That’s assuming of course they are actually coming up with something unique and not copied and pasted or just spun content.
Perhaps I’m just unlucky, but in my experience you spend so much time checking the work of hired authors, you might as well do the work yourself. Guidance on how to get, manage and retain good cheap authors would be useful. Or is “Good Cheap” an oxymoron?
Thanks Andy.
I do not think you should outsource your blog. And I do NOT think you should hire the cheapest writer you can find.
I do think it is possible to have a more steady stream of content if you outsource parts of it. I love blogging and I do not outsource it. Most businesses I know cannot keep it up regularly and they have to outsource it.
I always approach outsourcing as:
1) It will take a lot of effort up front on my part.
2) I am going after good, ongoing relationships, not one time projects.
I formed the Virtual Buzz Assistant network so VA’s could specialize in a few activities like blog writing and make a higher rate because they are worth it. http://virtualbuzzassistant.com
I hope that helps. Think of them as adding interesting news and such while you are still writing the meaty posts.
Your problem is probably more around cost. I know a very popular author (best seller) that said she does not write any of her books. She dictates audio and a team actually writes the book for her. I am sure it is not cheap, but she makes enough to justify it.
Great article. I couldn’t agree more.