Do VAs need to blog? No. You don’t need to do anything. This is your business – you can run it exactly how you want. But… If you want more eyes on your business, more chances of being found on Google, and more opportunities for AI to pull your website through as an answer, then […] The post Do Virtual Assistants Need to Write Blogs? appeared first on Catherine Gladwyn.
Do VAs need to blog?
No. You don’t need to do anything. This is your business – you can run it exactly how you want.
But…
If you want more eyes on your business, more chances of being found on Google, and more opportunities for AI to pull your website through as an answer, then your website needs to do more than just sit there – and blogging can help.
Some people think blogging is dead. Others think nobody reads blogs anymore. And some think it just takes too much time.
But they’re wrong.
Because blogging can absolutely help bring in more clients – and more money.
There are so many benefits to blogging, and I’m going to make this as easy as possible for you to get your head around.
Even if you think you “can’t blog”…
You can blog off with those negative thoughts, because yes – you can blog.
Will I get clients even if I never blog?
Plenty of VAs get clients without ever writing a blog.
But don’t close this one and skip off just yet, because what I’m about to share could completely change how you see it.
If you want more eyes on your business, want to show that you’re in this for the long game, and want to position yourself as the expert, blogging is a very easy way to do it.
Yes – easy.
So if you want more visibility, more trust, and more clients, blogging can absolutely help.
And all of those things can lead to more money.
Blogging is simply another form of marketing – but unlike social media, it sticks around.
When you post on social media, that content is often gone within 24 hours. Sometimes less. But a blog stays on your website. It doesn’t disappear. It’s searchable. It keeps working in the background.
And with the rise of AI, blogging has some huge benefits there too.
So the better question probably isn’t:
Do VAs need to blog?
It’s:
Could blogging help Virtual Assistants get clients?
Yes – absolutely, when it’s done right.
We all know that know, like and trust are three important things potential clients need to feel before they’re comfortable investing in you, and blogging can massively help with that.
Blogging helps build trust – it shows you know what you’re talking about. It helps people get to know you – by sharing what you know and writing in your tone of voice. And it helps with the “like” element too, if you really add your personality to your blogs – because they do not need to be dry.
But we’ll get to that in a minute.
How blogging can help your website get further up Google
Google likes – no, actually, Google LOVES – fresh content, because regularly updated websites can signal that your business is active, current and relevant. It’s worth Google’s time and reputation to promote your website and send searchers to it.
We like to know content is up to date too. If you go to a website to check something like a shop’s opening hours, you need that information to be current. But if their home page is still promoting an event from two years ago, you’re likely to think, “Hmmmm, maybe they’re out of business. I’ll try the other shop.”
So if your website has been sat there with the same five pages untouched since 2020, but your competitor is answering current questions every so often in the form of a blog, Google is far more likely to reward the competitor.
Now, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to blog every week until you’ve written about every possible topic thirty times. It just means that adding helpful content every so often gives Google more clues about what you do, who you help, and what topics you know about – so you’ve got a better chance of showing up in relevant search results.
How blogging can get AI to notice you
So we’re working smart here to attract more clients by using some very up-to-date methods. Blogging has been around for a long time. AI hasn’t. But blogging is one way of using AI to benefit your business.
More people are now asking questions through AI tools, and what AI often does is pull a summary from websites.
If someone asks an AI tool or search engine a clear question, it will often pull from websites that have answered that question clearly.
If you use Google as your search engine, you’ll already have seen Featured Snippets at the top of search results.
Featured Snippets come from websites that Google finds and chooses based on how well they answer a question and how helpful they are.
So it’s that snippet your blogs could be featured in if they’re answering common questions. Imagine that.
A lot of people don’t even go past those snippets. They take that answer, click a link from there, and off they go.
And it can drive soooooo much more traffic to websites.
That is probably one of the biggest benefits of blogging in the world of AI.
And you’ll already know, if you’ve got my course, Train AI to write your social media content, as if it’s you – yes, I know, I could’ve come up with a shorter title – that if you’ve implemented it properly and thoroughly, blogging is going to become a doddle.
Because – and I’m going to whisper this – AI can help you write your blogs.
How to use AI to write blogs
No, don’t roll your eyes at me just yet.
And no, it won’t churn out the same thing for every VA. And no, it won’t sound like a robot. And no, everyone won’t be able to tell – once you’ve trained AI properly.
Once Claude or ChatGPT have been trained – and it only takes an hour with my course – you can ask things like:
- What questions do people commonly Google around my services?
- What are the common pain points people have before they work with me as their Virtual Assistant?
- What objections stop people from working with a VA, or even outsourcing in general?
Because those are the things your potential clients are thinking, saying out loud, and Googling.
You can then ask Claude or ChatGPT to:
- Write me some bullet points for a 250-word blog on this pain point
- Write me a 300-word blog answering this question: [insert question] that my potential clients regularly Google
- Give me some things to consider so I can write a blog reassuring potential clients how safe their data is when working with a VA
I know, right? Blogging just got a lot easier.
But – caveat – you cannot just copy and paste what AI gives you and call it a day.
Especially if you haven’t trained ChatGPT or Claude properly. Otherwise, it will still have elements of robot, or the odd phrase you would never dream of saying. AI isn’t 100% accurate all the time either. And if it sounds generic, robotic or unhelpful, Google is unlikely to reward it.
Why you must train AI before you use it
You must train AI to sound like you, otherwise it will be obvious that it doesn’t – even to people who don’t know you.
I recently had a reply to one of my emails and it made absolutely no sense. It had the wrong words in, random comments that didn’t fit, and I genuinely couldn’t work out what they were trying to say – so I ignored it.
They then sent a follow-up email that sounded a million times different, and very AI.
That’s exactly why you need to train it.
I appreciate that trying to identify your own tone of voice can feel hard. I struggled with it too. So, as part of the course I mentioned above, I’ve included a quick, fun quiz to help you work yours out.
And actually, it’s quite enlightening.
Social media isn’t enough
Your social media posts are great, but blogs can put you in front of a much wider audience of potential clients who may never have found you otherwise.
Remember – you own your website. You do not own LinkedIn, and you do not own Facebook.
You’ve got zero recourse if you lose your Facebook account for kicking off in too many groups, or something like that.
If that happened, and you’d already been driving traffic to your website by answering common questions and pain points, you’d be a lot less likely to panic
But if you haven’t, I know you’ll be waking up at 3am in a sweat.
How many words and images do blogs need to get noticed by Google?
When I first started blogging back in 2016, I fell head-first into the rabbit hole of:
- You need this many words, or your whole family dies.
- You need this many keywords.
- Your images can’t be too big.
- You’ve got to credit the whole world if you use a picture.
- You need metadata.
- You definitely need bullet points.
- But not too many bullet points.
And everything needs a heading, and the heading needs to be exactly what somebody’s Googling. And apparently your blog definitely won’t get noticed unless you put a picture of an elephant’s bum in it too.
But it can’t be just any elephant.
Fkg hell.
Some of the nonsense out there is absolute rubbish.
A good blog is simply a useful answer to a question your ideal client is asking or thinking.
There is no need to overthink your blogs.
Keep thinking about that AI response. It just wants the answer to a question – and the more succinct that answer is, the better. Because everyone wants things now, don’t they?
So you don’t need:
- long, rambling posts
- corporate waffle, unless that’s how you naturally speak
- thought-leadership crap
- or to write for writing’s sake, because like I said, you do not need to blog every week
And you don’t need to overthink your tone of voice either.
However you talk, however you want to express yourself, whether you want humour in there or want it to be completely serious, whether your idea of professional looks different to somebody else’s – brilliant.
Go with your tone of voice. Be completely yourself, because that’s what attracts like-minded people.
When you’re writing a social media post – or a blog – you need to ask yourself one of three things:
How?
Why?
So what?
Here are some examples:
- I save you time and money – how?
- I offer inbox management – why?
- I’m organised, reliable and efficient – so what?
A lot of VAs are taught to bang on about how we save clients time and money, but it’s actually quite hard for people to picture how.
How does paying someone else save someone money?
You need to put a picture in the reader’s head.
So when you type, “I save clients time”, imagine me asking you, “How?”
You could say things like:
- You’ll stop losing hours to diary admin.
- You’ll stop manually chasing emails.
- You’ll stop answering DMs at 10pm.
- You’ll stop worrying that you’re missing important enquiries, and you’ll be able to focus properly on growing your business.
That’s much more relatable.
Let’s look at another popular line.
“VAs can save clients money.”
How?
You could say something like:
If you’re spending two hours a day in your inbox instead of doing paid client work, what is that costing you because you can’t focus on the profit-making tasks?
It can take a little while to get into the habit of asking yourself how, why, or so what, but eventually – over time – it does get easier.
And, like I keep saying, if you’ve trained ChatGPT or Claude properly, you can ask it to help you do this too.
How a blog can become recurring social media content
A blog is not just a case of: write blog, post link to blog on LinkedIn, and never revisit it again.
Oh no.
Your blogs can be broken down into mini social media posts.
You can take key points from them and use those as standalone posts.
Let me use this blog as an example. I could pull out snippets like this and turn it into a social media post:
How blogging can help your website get further up Google
Google likes – no, actually, Google LOVES – fresh content, because regularly updated websites can signal that your business is active, current and relevant. It’s worth Google’s time and reputation to promote your website and send searchers to it.
So if your website has been sat there with the same five pages untouched since 2020, but your competitor is answering current questions every so often in the form of a blog, Google is far more likely to reward the competitor.
Can blogging help your website get further up Google?
Google likes – no, actually, Google LOVES – fresh content, because regularly updated websites can signal that your business is active, current, and relevant.
So if your website has been sat there with the same five pages, untouched since 2020, but your competitor is answering current questions every so often in the form of a blog, Google is far more likely to reward the competitor.
Take a look at my blog and I’ll explain a little more…
How to use AI to write blogs
No, don’t roll your eyes at me just yet.
No, it won’t churn out the same thing for every VA. No, it won’t sound like a robot. And no, everyone won’t be able to tell – once you’ve trained AI properly.
Once Claude or ChatGPT have been trained – and it only takes an hour with my course – you can ask things like:
- What questions do people commonly Google around my services?
- What are the common pain points people have before they work with me as their Virtual Assistant?
- What objections stop people from working with a VA, or outsourcing in general?
Because those are the things your potential clients are thinking, saying out loud, and Googling.
Take a look at my course here…
You could even ask ChatGPT or Claude to create the snippets for you.
All you’d need to do is paste your blog into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to:
‘Break this down into three posts for LinkedIn’
or
‘Turn this into an Instagram carousel.’
But do check what it gives you. Never just copy and paste it straight out. It might pull out the most boring bits.
What blogs could you write as a Virtual Assistant?
You’re going to be writing blogs that:
- answer questions your potential clients might be asking or Googling
- address pain points
- remove objections people have about outsourcing
Some blog ideas could include:
- What does a Virtual Assistant actually do?
- How can a VA save me time?
- Why would I need inbox management?
- Do I need to give my VA my passwords?
- How much does a Virtual Assistant cost?
- What can I outsource to a VA?
- Should I work with a VA or an employee?
Another thing you could blog about – and this might surprise you, because it surprised me too – is how to do some of the services you provide.
I put that off for a long time because I didn’t think it would benefit me.
But it can.
So if you know a hack for making someone’s day less stressful, like slotting breaks before and after calls, share that. Teach them through a blog.
I know that sounds mad, and you’re probably thinking:
“Hang on a minute. If I teach a potential client how to do something themselves, won’t that lose me clients?”
No.
In fact, more often than not, it does the opposite.
It shows that you’re the expert. It proves that you know your stuff.
And then when they try to do it themselves, they often realise they still don’t have the time, or the tech skills, or the patience to keep doing it.
So they come back to you – because you’ve already shown them that you know what you’re doing.
Six tips for writing the best blogs as a Virtual Assistant
- Make sure each blog covers one subject and doesn’t go off on a tangent. People open a blog because they want the answer.
- Avoid showing the published date if you know you’re not going to post regularly, because a visible gap can make your website look unloved.
- Answer the questions your potential clients are likely to be Googling, thinking about, or worrying about.
- Address the pain points your services solve.
- If the blog says it’s going to answer a specific question, make sure it actually answers it.
- Do not just copy and paste what ChatGPT or Claude churns out, because it won’t sound like you.
Blogging really doesn’t have to be this huge mountain or a massive chore.
It can actually be a pretty easy thing to do that pays dividends, especially in the world of AI.
And if you want AI to help without making you sound like a LinkedIn bot wearing pointy brown shoes, have a look at my course: Train AI to write your social media content, as if it’s you.
The post Do Virtual Assistants Need to Write Blogs? appeared first on Catherine Gladwyn.
