43 Tasks Every Blogger Can Outsource To Be More Productive

Here are 43 tasks you can outsource. Editorial Staff at ShoutMeLoud is a team of writers led by Harsh Agrawal. ShoutMeLoud is an award winning blog that talks about living a boss free life with blogging. They cover about WordPress, SEO, Make money blogging, Affiliate marketing. Image courtesy of leowolfert via Bigstockphoto.

Stop trying to do everything alone.

Being a jack of all trades could actually make you less productive.

There are many different things we need to do as a blogger & a marketer, and we can only be in one place and doing one thing at a time.

For serious bloggers, you need to outsource several tasks immediately to save time and increase output. Getting professional hands on some of your work will give you better results and help you earn you more money in the long run.

There’s nothing truer than the words of D. C. Moody:

• “I’d rather get ten men to do the job than do the job of ten men.”

When outsourcing work, don’t make one man do the work of thirty people since you wouldn’t be able to do that yourself.

Instead, try to get as many competent hands as possible to outsource the tasks to (within the realm of your budget), with each individual handling his/her area of specialization.

43 Tasks You Need To Outsource To A Virtual Assistant

Here’s a breakdown of the various categories of tasks you can easily outsource to a virtual assistant to save time:

• General Virtual Assistant
• Content Creator
• Audio/Video Editor
• Web Developer
• SEO/Web Marketer

ROLE: GENERAL VIRTUAL ASSISTANT

The job of the General Virtual Assistant involves mainly attending to:

• Emails and scheduling management tasks
• File storage and organization tasks
• Administrative and blogging tasks
• Email marketing

Email & Scheduling Management Tasks

Having a General Virtual Assistant will help clear your mailbox of junk mails and have unattended emails taken care of.

They will:

1. Answer customer service emails, tickets, and take care of chats.
2. Schedule appointments.
3. Manage calendars.
4. Filter emails and manage spam.
5. Build databases and update contacts or CRM.

File Storage and Organization Tasks

Sometimes, you have different tasks to attend to at the same time, with distractions here and there. This makes it almost impossible to function effectively and efficiently. But with a virtual assistant, your job can become better organized and more productive.

They will perform these tasks:

1. Data entry: MS Word, Google Docs, etc.
2. Prepare PowerPoint/Keynote presentations.
3. Organize Google Drive/Dropbox.
4. Convert, split, and merge PDFs.
5. Create and manage spreadsheets.

Administrative and Blogging Tasks

Updating your blog with fresh content can be a herculean task. Apart from updating it with fresh content, there are a lot of other administrative tasks that the virtual assistant can help you to accomplish.

They include:

1. Online research.
2. Managing social media tasks.
3. Formatting blog posts and adding images and tags.
4. Managing projects between you and members of the team.
5. Posting and schedule Facebook Insights.
6. Scheduling and managing tweets.
7. Uploading videos to social media and video sharing sites.
8. Sending invoices to clients.
9. Promoting your posts on social media channels.
10. Moderating comments on the blog.

Email Marketing

An email list is one of the most valuable assets for any marketer. Sometimes you get so busy that you are not able to maintain regular communication with your list. Outsourcing the job of email marketing to a virtual assistant will remove this pressure from you. If your email marketing campaign is well run, you can rest assured that you will make more money.

An email marketing GVA will:

1. Add and remove subscribers from your mailing list.
2. Create and schedule broadcast emails for the purpose of promoting blog content.
3. Edit/proofread emails.
4. Create email newsletters.
5. Edit autoresponders and follow-up emails.

ROLE: AUDIO/VIDEO EDITOR

Outsourcing your audio/video editing to a virtual assistant will free up a lot of time for you. Though outsourcing A/V editing is a relatively new practice, it has helped a lot of blog owners and marketers in becoming more productive.

Your A/V editor will do the following:

1. Basic editing of your audio files.
2. Add intros to your videos.
3. Remove background noise.
4. Set up podcasts on iTunes.
5. Insert podcasts into blog posts.

ROLE: CONTENT CREATOR

One thing that keeps bringing new visitors and ensuring that the old ones do a repeat visit is having fresh content on your blog. As a marketer, you may not have all the time in the world to update your blog with new content as regularly as necessary. But when you outsource this job to a VA, you can be sure that your blog is always attracting engaged readers.

As a content creator, the virtual assistant will do the following:

1. Create content/blog posts.
2. Write press releases.
3. Market articles.
4. Write newsletters.
5. Guest blog or ghost blog.

ROLE: SEO/WEB MARKETER

Google keeps changing the rules of the SEO game almost every day. The “updating your blog with fresh content” practice is evolving daily, and as a result, new strategies are introduced frequently. A lot of research is needed to know what works and what doesn’t. Having excellent content alone cannot guarantee that your posts will get enough traffic. Outsourcing your SEO tasks to a virtual assistant will do you a whole lot of good, especially if SEO is not your strong suit.

The SEO VA will:

1. Research keywords for your blog posts.
2. Analyze your competitors.
3. Perform webmaster submissions.
4. Create backlink building campaigns and outreach.
5. Submit to social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumble Upon, Delicious, Triberr, etc.
6. Prepare monthly reports on keyword ranking.
7. Comment on other blogs.
8. Participate in forums.

Outsourcing To A Virtual Assistant

There are still other tasks that can be outsourced for better performance. It’s up to you to decide what you can/can’t do in a reasonable amount of time. Ultimately, you need to focus on your strong areas and outsource your weak spots to a professional who can do them better and quicker than you.

To make things work the way they should, create a team that has at least one professional in each area. This way, you’ll have a team of high-quality professionals each producing high-quality work in their area of expertise.

This is how you will make your blog an efficient, powerful machine!