Virtual Assistant - How to get started with blogging

1. Intro to the blogging course: Hi, welcome to how to get started with blocking full virtual assistance. This course is designed for virtual systems freelancers, people starting out. And I'm going to go through a range of topics that's gonna be really useful. I'm Tony Townsend. I've been a virtual assistant for about three years. I've also been doing a lot blogging with different companies. So I'm just going to share with you some tips and tricks that I've learned over the past few years. In this course, I'm going to explain what blogging actually is. Why blog helps your business. For virtual system business, it's going to be vital. And the elements of a blog post, how to write good quality posts is really, really important. How to know who your audience is. Going to provide some post ideas for the top virtual assistant careers out there. We're going to look at how to promote your blog, the importance of SEO, and how to analyze your blog stats. So all these topics are, hopefully they're gonna be worthwhile. And let's get started. 2. Intro to what blogging is : So we're going to look at the intro to what blogging is in this lesson. So first of all, what is a blog? You probably had it, but his definition. So a block is basically an online journal or informational website with the latest posts appearing first at the top. So this is the basic standard for all blogs that you go on. You will always find the most relevant, more up-to-date content. Always been at the top. If you use the filters, same thing, that the top of the page will be the most current stuff. But yeah, that's basically what a blog is. You've probably asked yourself this question was actually the purpose of blog. Why, why, why do I need a blog? So with every blog is so important to understand what the purpose of that is. If you're going to be designing your own blog, it's important to understand what the purpose of it is. There's no point writing whatever you want and then nothing really makes sense on it. So you could be writing about one topic and then another, but they don't relate and then people go wrong. And they weren't stay on your website. Which is actually the main goal. You want people to stay and go. Oh, this is really interesting, is passing knows what they're talking about or they're doing this or that. And I'm really want to know more. That is the overall goal of a block. So here are a few of the most common. So Pepsi's of a blog. A blog can be used to promote or sell products. So for example, if they've got a product, you could be sharing what the benefits are. Explaining. More relevant to. The more information you give, the more Google will rank it, this blog. So try and make it as long as possible, really informative loads of keywords, that type of thing. I'm relevant to your product. So that's one reason or another. It's shared experiences. So you might find this travel blogs or no, mom first-time mom blogs. And it's a great way to kind of share what you know, what you found out. Any tips, tricks, that type of thing that you think people would love to know about. So people love doing those kind of things. It's just nice to share what you've learned. Another one is to attract new readers. So if you do loads of blogs and you love writing out topic, it's a great way to get new readers onto it. The main reasons for blog or the next three, Bill traffic to your site. Build a brand and show off your expertise. These are kinda like the main ones you'll find. As a virtual assistant, it, this will be very, very important. You want to build traffic to your website. Because once they're on your website, then you can solve up scouts, sell your expertise, your services, who you Rob, and then that can lead to potentially lead as a client. Building up your brand is so, so important. People will go with brands they recognize. Like if you went into shoe shop or anything like that, you'll pick a brand that you're more likely. You, you've heard overview. You recognize the logo or something, you're going to know what that brand represents. That brand could be like a quality. Yeah, I know what that is. But you might see something else to really know that that brand I don't, I'm not familiar with as much and you probably won't go to them. So it's really important way of building a pure branding. And lastly, showing off your expertise. This is really important for virtual system, especially if you're in a field where you can talk about topics in your area of expertise. Because it shows that you've actually understand the topics. You understand what it is. For example, social media like if you do blogs on TikTok and they're really useful and people are like, Yeah, yeah, that's a really great, great tip and trick. And they're gonna be like, oh, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about because I'm writing it down there, explaining to me in a way that I understand it can be useful in that way. So from this lesson, what I would say is if you're going to start block, then it's important to understand firstly, what you want, the purposes. So probably write it down just a sentence. What it is that you want your blog to be about, what you want it to do. Basically, what will it be doing for you? I always think it's important that it should have a purpose anyway, because at the end of the day, you are spending a lot of your time during blog posts and things. You want it to have an end goal, like for example, a product, a service, an actual reason to exist, basically, spend some time doing this, write it down, and jump onto the next lesson. 3. Why a blog helps your business: In this lesson, we're going to look at why blog helps your business. So this is a very important lesson, I think. So to start with it because it builds relationships. So a blog is just a great way to create relationships with your potential customers and your existing ones. So when we say this is basically showing your passion, your expertise, through what you're writing about, for example. So it's a great sign point to have discussions around a certain topic. Especially on social media, is quite a good link to blogs and it's a great way to share your blogs. But by sharing an article about a specific topic, it can reach the right audience and then that audience might reach out. So there's a bit of a linking system going on by blogging. The ways you can build that relationship is by making sure that you always consistently and frequently blog. And make sure that what you're writing about, you're passionate about. People can tell when you write about a topic and you just, it's very robotic, doesn't flow very well. So people understand, um, but as well as this, say for example, you are a social media virtual system. You write some topics that our clients interested in actually is a really good way to sway a person's opinion about you. So if they were on the fence to start with a light blue, I need virtual assistant, but is this the right one? And then they see in your blog that you've been writing about every issue that they're asking you to do. There might be swayed to Congo actually, yeah, this person knows what they're talking about. They, they ever seen know what they're doing. This might be a good fit. So then that leads into being a potential client. So this is one of the best aspects of blogging. The next reason a blog can help your business is it drives traffic to your website, which is really important anyway. Because if your blogs purpose is to sell something, then it's a great avenue of getting people onto your website. So all you have to do is make sure that your content is easy to read. It's interesting, it's informative. This will build up your SEO with your website. So when I say STRS, basically this is basically your ranking on Google. So if anybody Goos a specific topic, you're going to go up and up and up and up and that list. So most people tend to always search the first day to vow fat. I say first 23 pages. On a Google search, usually you're going to die is your main goal, is to get to that point. And by building up that traffic, google start realizing who you are and then you'll go up and up that page. So it's a great way to have a great recent tab blog for your business. So I mentioned SEO minute ago. Blog boost your SEO. Seo stands for search engine optimization. So what this means is that when somebody searches online for specific question or topic, SEO be the reason why your content is found so high in the search engines. So in the image you can see when you have searched the term, all of these links appear with a little blurb underneath. Your main goal for your website is to get to that point where you are very high up on that list. Probably be on page 5678. People aren't gonna go that far. So this SEO is really, really important. So these are the three sort of reasons why a bulk can help your business. 4. Elements of a blog post: In this lesson, we're going to look at elements of a blog post. So this is basically the structure of any blog posts. First of all, we're going to look at the common elements. So in every blog posts they should have the following. Engaging title. Something quite captivating, useful subheadings, informative body of texts, graphics that are interesting, relevant. The graphics can be stock images. They can be ones that you've good sign specifically for the blog. There can be pictures of you. They can be little video clips or diagrams. So any type of graphic there's interesting, relevant is important to app, a clear call to action. So on the left you can see sort of like a bit of a structure. So you call to action doesn't necessarily to be at the bottom. It can be in the middle. I'd advise probably doing them in a few places. Not everyone finishes a whole blog. So it's important to put in a few places internal and external links throughout your time. And good message description. So we're just going to break those elements down and we're just going to go through them a little bit more detail. And engaging title. This needs to be captivating, pulls people learn. This is the most important aspect of any blog. As it actually draws people in to find out what you're writing about. Try and keep them quite short and use your keywords. On the left, I've thrown a few examples, so you've got 12 simple steps to writing engaging, catchy titles. But as you can see, the boldness of the last part of it is captivate and your eyes. But the fact that says, simple, It's got catchy, it's got those key positive words. Account draws you're in. They've got titles like six incent confidence boosters. So the word instant, Rajiv. Oh, yeah, I want to immediately, you know, you want that right now. It's using the right wordings to kinda pull people in. And then you've got catchy headlines, turn eight numbers, pretty good to use in blogs as well. It's a great way for people to think, oh, actually this scroll quite low information at like 12 simple steps. Since six is quite high, number 208. So using numbers, It's actually quite good way enticing people. So next, the first paragraph is quite an important one. In this first paragraph, you're going to want to use keywords the same in your title. So keep blogs about productivity than you would probably use that in your title to show people this is what it's about. Then in the first paragraph, yet again, you'd use the same word that you integrate it in what you're talking about. So in your first paragraph, you're going to be doing a bit of a brief summary of what the blogs about anyway. So that would will be brought up, but it's pointing to put it in there. Just for SEO reasons. It's a way that basically Google picks up what you're talking about, What's your blog about, so that your searches will go higher up ranking basically, so people find it a bit easier. So basically that's the reason why we use certain keywords. And finally, in your first paragraph as well, you need to have some sort of hook. So basically you can summarize the blog. But if you're not really sure, if the reader isn't really sure what's in it for me, they're not going to really read on, but if you're explaining your first paragraph, you'll get till understand how to do such and such and such. Then they're like, alright, okay, that's what I want to learn and they'll keep reading. So this is the first paragraph. Then we'll go on to use for our subheadings. Subheadings are great way to break up your text to make it really easy. A lot of people skim read. So they will actually just go to certain subheadings and read those paragraphs that they might not want to read the whole thing. But that's fine because they're interested in what you've got to stay still. And it's also a great way to navigate to impose some sections that the only matters to them. So like at the top of a blog, you might have it so that people click link and they'll just go to the heading that they need. So it makes it a little bit easier navigating wise for your readers. And it also helps boots search engine optimization, SEO again, this is just another way for Google to pick it up. So you'll have a title. And the subheadings are classes heading 2's because like a smaller heading. But as you can see on the left, I've done example of sign-up for business account number one. You can bullet point them. You can do them just as boulder titles. You can do them as numbers, as long as you can see that they are a subheading, you can solve it the way you want to. So the next part is the informative body of the text. Your first paragraph we've explained is about being compelling. But what you also need to understand is it's really a good idea to think about using that first paragraph on your social media. Now, because social media is a huge thing, but this will save you time when you're trying to entice people to read what you're about. You can use the texts from your first paragraph because it's basically summing up the entire thing in a few sentences on social media, so it's worth doing it that. But the rest of the texts, you need to make sure that it's very informative. And you use site and keywords throughout as well. So you don't need to put tons and tons and tons of keywords into there, but you need it in every paragraph if you can, or use a selection of keywords that you know about. So it's important to do this. Graphics are a huge part of any blog. Anything you read, there are pictures, everybody loves pictures. It's a really good way to break out certain points to illustrate some things like, for example, we've got diagram of a chance. So you might be talking about statistic and he'd go, There's your example and people like, Oh, that's really people like to visually see what you're talking about. Sometimes it's important. Do you also want people to stay on your page as long as possible? Google tends to measure this time that you spent on, the more time people spend on the higher-quality they think your blog is. So the higher your ranking goes. So these types of things, these little things, take a huge part in what you saw, how important your blog is in the traffic and that type of thing. So it's important to get these things right. So when you're doing visuals in your blogs, try and make them consistent styling. You don't want to go from black and white to color to to kind of like a brown, black background, a bit warped and you're like, oh, you know, the style is a bit off. You want to try and keep it consistent. Trying to use high-quality graphics as well. If people come on your website and the pitches are distorted, the trust level goes down. So you need to show that the quality of what you're writing and your visuals is important to your readers. It gets that impression that people get shorter way when they go on. Next. Clip. Cool to actions. Done a few on the left-hand side just to show you examples. Don't just write your blog and leave it. A lot of people do this. They, they love writing, but sometimes a blog. Blog just kinda be like, Oh, okay, you've just written this. But what was the point in it? You haven't really giving your audience anything to come back to sometimes. So this is why we say you need some call to actions. So when we say this, basically you're just trying to get encouraged them to either download something, they can sign up to an e-mail, reading the blog. So you can see on the left-hand side, there's like these, like the orange box with some wording and a button so they can clearly move on, make it very easy for them to do it as well. So they don't have to hunt around for the links or anything. Make it really Morpheus if you can. But it's just a great way to just kinda grow your audience as well. And it's a great way to get emails as well. So if you're trying to build up your email database, if you're doing it through blogs quite a lot. This is a really good way of doing it because you can put those call to actions every so often on a blog at the bottom in the middle. Why they should do it. And it can continue the journey and keep building up those relationships with customers and clients and things. So it's really important to think about this as well. So external and internal links or has to be one of the most important thing. It's a great way to double up on your page views. And it keeps people on your, on your actual website quite well as well. So first of all, internal links will keep the people moving around your website via external, I think is a great thing. But don't do too many to show you understand your topic. And you're providing them more resources, you're giving them more reading material. You know, things that are useful if these links, they start clicking through and they go, oh, you know, really thing that was a useful link. But I found that through another website, they're going to go back to our site garage. She's really good at giving good advice. So they're more likely to come back and make sure the external links aren't just put in. Just because you think I need a few, I haven't had any make sure they're as relevant as possible. So when you're trying to talk about topic, try and give some examples of resources and stuff. Or even at the bottom, put more available resources and then put some links, make it so they understand that if they want to learn more about this topic, he, you go, if you can't put the accent Dan, or links in your copy, if it doesn't quite fit. So that's not always possible and sunblock, so that's probably one tip I'd use. Final good Meta descriptions. So this is really important. This is basically what everyone see. You can see on the left-hand side. You search for something and this is what happens. You'll see a blue line with the title. You've got the website link, and then you'll have this snippet, snippet of information. This is called the methods description. So this is what you will put on your blog. So when you post it in the settings, in the background of it, you change this to wherever you want it to be. But you need to make sure that this text is captivating. It's only the first few sentences. So it's not nasty your essays and stuff or anything. But this is what people are going to see. So it's really important that you think like how when someone searches for you, they're going to see the first-line texts and be like, Okay, this is what I'm looking for. If this doesn't explain what the blog is about, most people will just skip it. So it's important to have a look at it. But in most bugs in a field, setting out your blog with a summary at the beginning. It does explain what your blog is about, then that's a good thing to use. But hopefully this lesson has helped you a great deal on giving you some ideas on how to structure your blocks. 5. Writing a good quality post: In this lesson, we're going to look at writing a good quality post. What are those aspects? So first of all, when you're writing any blog post, it's important to think about, is it valuable information? Are people going to come away from it and think, Oh, that was actually really useful. People read blogs for the most part to learn something that can help them in their business, their life, solve an issue. So that's kind of the reason why they go to any blog posts. The content in a post should be relevant and helpful for your reader. You want to read it to get away from it and have the answers basically answered in this block. So when you're writing blogs, think about what information you're giving people. You don't want to be filling a blog up with loads of information, so irrelevant that they can't go, I don't want my reading this or they stop halfway through and at the bottom is actually the answer to the solution. So you want to try and structure in a way that you've tried to give them little bits of valuable information throughout the things that make them want to stay on your blog and probably look into what else you're talking about so people see the value and information. So that's probably one of the biggest aspects of making a really good post. Next, know your target audience. So before writing any blog post, you need to know who you're writing it for. So if you're writing a blog about fishing, you want it to relate to people interested in fishing. You don't want to be right about fishing and targeting people interested in museums like there's no relevance. So there are things that you've got to think about. Are you writing about for people who are beginners? So you might find that your language is a bit different in the fact that you might have to explain terminology or you might keep it quite basic. Or if you are going to be writing topics for more expert level, you need, your time will change. So you just need to think about who it is you're writing for. So that the reader will feel like that's, that's for them. They understand it. You know, it. It's something that they find valuable. By understanding this, your blog will reach the right audience a lot easier. So throughout your blog you'll be using keywords, you'll be categorizing certain way when you promote it on your social, you'll be leaning towards a specific audience anyway. But it reaffirms it basically. So it's important to have the audience in the back of your mind from writing any blog post. So one of the biggest aspects of writing a really good quality blog post is, is it easy to read? There is nothing worse than a blog post that you struggled to read. Is because the font is too small, the paragraphs are too long. Wordy at British trade off, doesn't it? So a few ways to make reading a book easier is to, first of all, use bullet points for you. Can. If you are listing same things, break it up. Use shorter paragraphs. Readings you'll find are people who scan. So when they see big chunks of texts that that doesn't interest them, they'll come off sometimes. If you have short paragraphs is easier for them to skim read and get to where they need to be. Trying to use subheadings as well to break up your text where you can, just so that people understand what the structure of your blog is about. I'm going to sort each paragraph, understanding what the topic is gonna be about. So that's important. Use images throughout. I would say, don't use too many because I sometimes find that too many images for the sake of just putting the images like stock images in is a bit too much and you just find yourself scrolling to pass all these images and you're like, oh, where is the content? It's almost like it's hidden by these big images. Use images, for example, if you're using lots of graphs or you're doing screenshots and things like that, that's fine. Try and size them so they're not taking up the entire screen though. So try and make sure that people don't have to scroll too far. Another thing is left, align your texts. So the most common way of actually aligning it, most people tend to try and stick to either left or mid, middle. But the problem with middlewares, if you do find it's harder to read it. So there's been studies and research taking part and left aligning text is actually easier on the eyes because most people read left to right. And having that structure of a clean line on your left-hand side, it makes it easier for people to read and digest it. So it's important to align your text to left. Titled. Don't need to be at. Text Germany, it's a good idea to do that. Finally, if there's important ones trying both the text-based or use italic or use underlining or quotes and things. You can take them up paragraph and use them separate. Because when you're reading through a blog post, if there are important things that you think people really need to use, a valuable information that people need to know what you think people are going to take this away with them. This is the final solution to this issue. Here you go. Make it stand out, try and try and make it stand out. You can even use color if you want. If that's what suits your sort of theme of your blog. But Bolter, good way of doing it. Or if this certain keywords or if you're using terminology, you could use bold as well, so that those particular things can stand out and people might take a note of it, that kind of thing. So it's a really good idea of trying to make things stand out. And finally, this is the biggest thing I would say to writing a blog. Write what you know and you love. This is so important because readers can always tell when a writer knows what they're writing about. And if they interested in topic, if they're reading it and it's so dry, there's no personality. Intertwine the blog. They'll just be like, Oh, they've copied and pasted it, or they'll just get that sensitive, or will this person doesn't really know what they're talking about? Redis can see that you know and understand a topic when you put your personality entwined into it. So it's important to actually have an interest in what you're writing about. A fever as well. If you're not interested in the topic, is going to be ten times harder trying to write something that you have no interests. Where something that's kinda like, you know, about, you're just going to find the words come a bit easier. You know, you can add your own, twist the things, your knowledge, expertise into it. The readers will take that from it. Try and make the two topics that you'd like to write about as well. So two things that, that will reach the right audiences for you as well. So it's probably a good idea to kind of spend some time thinking about those topics, your audience, and the things that you think, Oh, I've got some expertise or put the three together and think of a list of topics that can be your starting point for writing a blog is just figuring out what things you want to write about. So hopefully this has helped you a great deal. And hopefully you get that list together. And so you can start writing that first block. 6. Stuck for post ideas: In this lesson, I'm just going to give you some ideas. If you're stuck for posts that you trying to think, I don't really know, wok rice bow. So I'm just going to go through a few ideas for some of the top virtual assistance of roles there are out there. So the first one I'm going to look at is bookkeeping topics. So here's a general idea of some topics you can think of. And it's just to get those ideas and those cogs and your brain kinda go and go. Not actually, yeah, I know what I could write about this. So first of all, you can start looking at the benefits of using a virtual bookkeeper. You want to draw people in going, whoa, why should, why should we outsource to you? So this is a really good blog posts start making drive different traffic into it. The next one is like looking at the types of tasks you are doing. So there's 14, 14 bookkeeping task. You might do 20, you might do ten. It kind of adjust it to how many you do, but you can explain those tasks and the software you use as well. So it gives people an insight into what you do. The other topics you can talk about is why bookkeeping is pointy business? You can, the next topic will be about, you know, time for bookkeeping. Well, hire veterans as soon and then explain why you so great and why can help people and things like that. And so you're trying to promote yourself in these types of blocks. You can then do different kinds of blogs if you want. So you can talk about cash-flow, profits, expenses, things that show your expertise. So 2's topics that you understand in great detail or you know, runoff and you can maybe research the rest or you can come up some ideas. But generally you're going to pick topics that are going to show people who you are, why they should choose you knew your expectation knowledge. I'm providing people insights into certain things. So e.g. you could even do some downloads, PDFs, that type of thing, give them resources to get them thinking about actually a virtual assistant bookkeeper. So it's just basically just trying to figure out topics. So I've come up with a general list after looking around to see what kind of topics other virtual assistance in this area looking at. So here are a few. I will be putting together a PDF with these ideas. You should be able to download that peace of mind. You can go back-and-forth and hopefully this will help inspire you. So social media virtual assistant topics, this is a fairly straightforward one for me in particular, because I specialize in social media and marketing. There are so many ways you can go with this. You could go down the route of tips on social media. You could talk about the benefits of certain things. You can focus on one particular platform and specialize in it. So you could be a Pinterest experts. You can do so many different topics by that, or you can generalize. So e.g. there's topics on here, the top ten tasks for a social media virtual assistant that you can do. You can talk about the signs that you need, some things you're going down that promotional route to getting people thinking about, why do I need a virtual system? What can they do? The tasks that they can help me with? Is it affordable? You know, will it help my business card, that type of thing? Then you can go on to kind of go on to more generalized topics or social media like bookkeeping. This is a good avenue showing you, I expect tease. Your blogs are probably going to be maybe slightly a bit longer, 4-1200 words. Because some of the topics might be quite, quite lengthy. I mean, especially if you're talking about something like Pinterest house, get good followers. There might be a lot of waste doing this. So yeah, these are just some general ideas. There are so many ideas that you can come up with. But you're Gemini just showing the content is basically focused on social media. Because that's what your focus is. Here's a few ideas for that. Seo virtual systems is another popular sort of roles get into. So it's probably not as common as the rest of them. Social media, you probably had a bookkeeping is quite specialized. Seo is very specialized as well. It's a very, very popular role. You can, if you can show your expertise in this, this is a good kind of role to get into the types of topics you can go in this end, you could, you could go down the avenue of what it is. You can actually do your services. So you can go down why they should hire you, what you can do for their business, and then you can do topics on what it is for beginners. So you might have an audience that doesn't actually understand SEO. They don't understand the purpose of it. You can explain it in details. But this can be like linking back into getting clients because once they understand it, they might see the value in you. You're showing your value-based screen. It's the same as everything else. You're looking to. Show you our expertise and choose topics that relate to a search engine. So of topics you just basically you're looking at things that are going to draw people in to understanding who and what you can do. So that's another popular area to get into. The next one is customer service. This is, your blogs are all going to be customer service based. Basically. You're going to look at basically looking at why, why, and how a virtual assistant can improve customer service. Basically, why they should hire you, what you can do with the business, how you can save them money, the level of supports your expertise, your skills, um, those types of things. Generally you're going to find that you're gonna be promoting yourself quite a lot more. The types of topics that you can lead down is about how to provide good experience tips for customer service. Communication. Level of topics. The topics generally if customer service our hearts come across. Sometimes there will be more of a self-promotion that you can offer like lazy tips and guides and things that could be useful. How to be productive. You could go down a few other avenues when it comes to this, when it comes down to customer service. So it depends on what you want to be pushing, what you can offer. Depending on what you can offer. You could go down the software or you can give them your experiences and stuff. You can make it quite personalized because customer service is quite personal role. That's kinda like a good starting point if you are a customer service virtual system. And the next one we're going to look at is another very popular on data entry virtual assistant. So this one's kind of a bit similar to customer service. Topics, are probably going to be more self-promotion. So you can look at the benefits of hiring. You. You could look at why it cannot be business, the types of subsidies you offer, the importance of it, the types of industries you work in, and how data entry in, say, medical or different areas. So it's probably a bit more niche. You might find that you weren't blog as much about these topics, but you could do a lot of promotion about yourself, maybe case studies about what you've been up to lately. But it's good to do some research on the types of topics out there. By the way, these are just a general look guides, but there'll be plenty out there that you can find, but you just need to see what others are kind of leaning towards when it comes to topics and think of your own really. Another big thing since pandemic hit in 2020 is e-commerce virtual assistants. Everything is now becoming very easy to get online. So more things like shops and things online are becoming a big thing. A lot more people are like, I'm not really sure what I'm doing. So this is another avenue of topics you can choose from. So you can actually explain about why you need one, why you need to e-commerce virtual assistants, why they should hire you? What kind of things you can do. How it helps grow your businesses. All the aspects of people, what they're trying to figure out themselves. So e.g. you could basically explain how to set up an e-commerce shop in using Shopify, e.g. you can explain all these kind of things. But you can explain, maybe you can do call to action ends up going, by the way. Haven't got the time, hire me. I would find that some of the topics for this in particular, you might find that you can use a lot of coal to actions. Some of the other topics that you find through any of the types of virtual assistant. Definitely use cuz reactions to everything. Especially if you're doing dyes and things, definitely, definitely put some in there. Yeah. With the e-commerce e-commerce route, you could probably do lots of case studies on clients. You could probably do about the industry of e-commerce, showing that you understand the trends and things. So there'll be lots of new things coming out when it comes to this. So this is one that you'll have to stay on top of, especially if there's new platforms that come out. So you'll have to kind of grasp them as well. So this is a very growing one, but there are loads of different topics she can come up with. And this will reach different businesses as well. Because e-commerce is that there's a range of shops. Small businesses will be thinking about going on to it. Small, but there'll be other handmade businesses or the bigger ones that hadn't really thought it, they might need experts to help grow. What else where you come in. So this is quite a good kind of virtual assistants topic list that you can sort of think of. The spend some time really looking into the words e-commerce and using those keywords around that word and shopping and that type of thing to see what you can find To help inspire you with topics. And the last one is, this is just for all virtual system. I think it's really important to have a general list of what virtual assistant is looking at. E.g. we've got here ten effective stress management techniques from entrepreneurs. Want to avoid three nouns. Burnout finds a virtual assistant just different ways of printing across what virtual assistant. Because not everybody knows what one is. They might nonstandard, but the word outsourcing as well. So those two key words are very familiar to us, but not to everyone. So it's important to do blogs on the general area as well. So e.g. why is the visual system is important? But then you can relate this into what you do as well. But that's why it's quite good. It's quite general. What are the benefits? How to hire you or how to find the right virtual system and how to work effectively from home are just a few examples of topics that you can think of. So you could do top, it's on productivity, working from home. Stress management. There are loads of avenues when it comes to this kind of topics. Try and intertwined these widths, specialist blogs like your expertise, your knowledge, why they should hire you? Because this is what will captivate your audience. This is what will get you hired more than likely. But yeah, these are all general guidelines. These are just topics that I've found. So do your own research. Don't stick to just the ones I found for you, but I hope they inspire into thinking the kinds of blog posts that you can write about. So hopefully this helps. 7. Promote your blog for free : This lesson we're going to look at how to promote your blog for free. So you've done your blog and you're thinking, Oh, I need people to see this. So I'm just going to go through a few ways to help people find you. So to help get your blog notice. Here are a few places to look and to promote. So you could do e-mail marketing on your own social media channels. Try the website medium, social bookmarking sites, and online forums. So I'm just going to go through some of these because I think some of these you might never have heard of. Some you're quite familiar of. And I'm just gonna go through them now to just explain. First of all, e-mail marketing, this has got to be one of the most effective ways to write your blog. And it's a good way to promote, to convert visitors if it's done right? So first of all, you need to have an email list for this to work. But you can do that. I'm gradually or finding different ways of doing this. But once you've built that list up, people understand who you are and what you're about. This is a great way of doing it. To go, here's my latest blog posts and people are like, Oh, what's this, Bob? And they'll grow on. So when you're creating an email, try and make it personalized to your audience. You want it to have a captivating subject line. So when people get it, they go, Oh, what's that about, Jimmy? Not like, oh, latest blog. People weren't open that sometimes you just need to be very clever with this. Spend some time looking at subject lines is probably a good idea, especially if you're on a certain topic, you can make it quirky. You can relate it to maybe a national day perhaps, or a funny story or just, just think of ways just to get people to open it. Because once they've opened it and they're interested in it, they'll follow through and they'll click through to the blog. But yeah, when you are writing out your, sorting out your e-mail, template, trains promote the blog as in a way that either they're gonna get some valuable information or it helps the user solve an issue. So you want them to want to open it. So given that reason to open it, to understand, also, I always find him e-mails. It's important to kind of add in other things as well, like not just blog post, maybe pass topics, or you could do promotions or PDFs as well, so that the image feels like it's not just all about your blog, but there are, there is more vital information. So the more valuable the e-mail is, the more likely they'll click on through. On your social media channels is probably one of the best ways to keep blogs out there. It gets the most exposure quickly inefficiency, and you can share it on multiple platforms. It has so many benefits to doing this. It's free to do. It's a wide audience and it's a great way to build relationships. Majority of the time, social media, people that are on there that follow you, you follow them. You are all in this industries that people are interested in. So content is going to be hitting your ideal audience. Importantly, to do this is when posting to any channel, make sure that you include the link to the blog. So make double-check it's the right one. Use hashtags that are relevant and try and use really high-quality images. So I tend to do, say for example, Twitter do maybe five posts, but very different styles but within my branding on the topic. So you could do like a snippet from the blog and then schedule them out. So you don't need to just do one post and think, I'm done. You can do multiple posts, spread them out within a royal couple of months. If you like. Pinterest, if you run it, you can do like say 1015 if you want, unscheduled them as in one as well. It all depends on which platforms you are currently width. But it's a great way to kind of spread out what you're talking about. So the next thing is, I mentioned medium. Medium is an online publishing platform where you can post your blocks. It's just a basically a place for blogs to sit. Really. Many freelance writers post that logs on the site, so it's kinda worth doing. Check it out. See what you think. If you've got the time to, it might be worth doing it. It's just another source to get traffic to your website. So if you only six social media than that's the only orients that we'll see it. The more places you do it, the more likely it's going to get seen. On similar to kind of social media. When you're doing this, make sure that you pay attention to the tags that you do in your posts. It's basically you just want to tag it in a way that people understand what the topic's about. It's very similar to Twitter, hashtags and things. And so you need to use the same thing. But other than that, it's a great opportunity to do it. It's worth doing, and it's a free site. So you can see if you can use it. If you have the time to do it, maybe it's worth having a look into. So yeah, that's medium. Social bookmarking sites. You may have actually had some of the website names, but you didn't know what they were. So social media, social bookmarking sites are great place to shade blocks. When your content is listed or share through bookmarking site, it can result in a very big increase in to your traffic. And it's another avenue basically of getting your blogs basically out there. So same as medium. You've got the time to look into these great, see which ones work for you. But here's just a few things. So read it you may have heard of is quite the popular one. Stumble upon straight mix. It's now called mix, but it was formerly known as stumbled upon. It's worth having a look into pocket and scoop it. Are other social bookmarking sites. Do your own homework when it comes to this, these are for the top ones at the minute. There are some other ones that might be worthwhile looking into. These are the ones that I would personally checkout fast. But it's worth doing. The more you spread out your blogs, the batter is, if you're only doing it once a week, doing a blog post, you could just copy and paste that onto all these various platforms. But it's just another way to reach different audiences. Know everyone's on social. Not everyone's a medium, not know everyone's on here. So your audiences are gonna be either spread in different places. So the more you put it in different places, the more likely it's going to be found. And the last place that you can kind of look into promoting your blog is online forums. Joining online forms allows you as a blogger to share your knowledge, your expertise. It's a place where people love sharing what they know. So it's a great place to share your blog. So try and look at forms such as Blogger hub, digital point, blogging Form Libraries. I'm per block blogger. So these are kinda like the ones that I came across that were quite popular. Spend some time. So the key things you need to look into are basically where are you going to put this? Got social media platforms, great. Maybe schedule out when you're going to do post for that. Have a look at social bookmarking sites. So typing the word into Google, and it'll come up same with online forums that will come up. If you're in a specialist area, it worthwhile typing in those keywords into Google and see what they come up with. Because there might be a specialist online forums that you can share your expertise into. And it can actually give you an idea of get you into new clients and things like that. So we can open a lot of opportunities to use. So these are all the ways that are free for you to tears so it doesn't cost you anything. Probably just your time reading. But it's worth just trying to figure out what works for you if you can do it. If you find that forms is working great, just stick with forums. But if you finding a few, few elements work great as long as your blogs are getting found. I really hope this has been really useful, but definitely spend some time looking into what kind of avenues work for you. 8. Importance of SEO: So we're just going to go through the importance of SEO. I've explained throughout this course basically what SEO is about, the benefits and things like that. But I just want to drive home how important it is. So why is blogging so important for SEO? It's a huge part of SEO for many reasons. So basically when you log, it helps increase your credibility, build up your relationships, and it's a great way to engage with your audience. Blogging is giving opportunity to reach your audience in a way. So the higher-quality your blocks are, the more likely people are going to discover them. So this relates to SEO in that way of basically when you do a Google search and the quality of your blog is really good, good, high-quality images. Google thinks it's really good, It's very fast. All the boxes that Google are looking for, when you search for what your blog topics about, it's more likely going to be higher up on the pages when you're searching. And that's what you basically are hoping for. And that's what businesses are doing. A lot of businesses now are doing blogs now because they understand the importance of it. When it comes to the search engines. When they're looking, if anyone's looking for that particular business or if they're in a specific niche, then they know that they're gonna get discovered more than war. They blog because it's content, content relate to them and it links back. So everything kind of links back to our business. So that's why it's so important. So what is blog SEO? It's all about optimizing our blogs content on the site architecture and the HTML code for the search engines. So I personally use a Wix website. So HTML coding is nothing to do with me. Some people will get into it if you know it, it's great. It's just that basically you can use certain features, basically in the backend of a block. Basically, you don't need to worry about that at all. But what you do need to think about is when it comes to blog SEO, is it will include your on-page optimization, installing plugins, improving page loading speeds, and internal linking. So I would spend some time just looking into blog SEO just to get a full rundown of basically everything. This is just the basics. This is just basically saying what, what kind of the background of it is basically about? What it is is Google ranks and things, blogs and page loading speed is one big one. Your pages too. So most people will come off it. And to Google, that's not high-quality. So that will get ranked quite low. But there are so many aspects to consider. But you don't need to worry too much about certain the backend of it. So some of you, depending on what platforms you can work on, like I use Wix mice, Pretty straightforward. The back-end of things and the SRO sign things that I can see. The analytical side of things too. Figure out if my page has got good SEO. But they're all tools online to check this. So there are ways of figuring out if your SEO is really good or really bad, and then you can work on it from that. But this might be a little bit more homework for you, or you might need extra help for this. But all depends on your skill level. Optimizing your blog posts. For SEO, there are certain things that you can do to make sure that your page is fully optimized. Posting fresh content regularly. It shows that your businesses constantly running. Google loves new content. So positive for that. So it's important to just do like a planner and plan out your topics so that you can at least know that you're pulling out all the time and I'll leave it at months and months. If you're consistent enough. That will help your ranking. Using keywords. Throughout. I've mentioned it a few times in we were talking about the structure of blocks. That's another thing you'll need to look into certain keywords to help with search terms. So you need to look into what kind of keywords are useful for your blogging basically. But you can do an online search for that as well. At the end of this entire course, I'll be presenting document with some helpful links and things to help with your SEO. So there'll be websites, links on there to help you just sort of figure out how to work out your SEO for good. And two keywords. So don't worry too much about that. Or you can just do a Google search on your own and see what comes up. Back linking is really important. The more you back, back link, external links, internal links, and branch out where you post your blocks. The more traffic drops your website. Google likes when things kinda like in ink. So even if you can't, external links to other websites do internal ones, at least. Images and videos are really important. Same, Google loves content and it knows images are quite likes them. So try and make sure that the images, videos aren't too big in size as well, because it will slow down the speed of the page. But it's really good to do that. Call to actions are really useful. Best way of doing it. Google will pick up on certain things like this. Add a message description to your blog. So as you can see on the left and down like a little example. But for me on Wix, I go into settings and might be similar or some platforms, you go in and you just go across until you find the word message description, and then you fill it in with your first paragraph usually. Or you can change it to whatever words you want. As long as it relates to the blog. Basically, it's just telling people what to expect. But use your keywords in that as well. Make sure your post is easy to read as well. As you can see on the left-hand side, there is an analytical thing. Basically showing the readability of a page. And if it's saying like, for example, the paragraphs are too long, there are certain aspects of it. It will put off Google. It will just think it's not good quality if people can't read it, which is right, you don't want your content to go out there and you've wasted all this time. You want it to be really good. It's really important that people can read it. The last point to be fully optimized is categorize your posts. Basically, a Google will go through your website and it will see the links between, say, your blog and then a category. And then it will look in that category. And if their blog posts in that category, it, it kinda likes the facts is organized. It shows that there's some structure to your website. So it's really important to make sure you categorize and tag sort of key things in that block. But this is, this is just a basic overview. So I wouldn't worry too much about some things. The only things I would say is about the points that I've just showed you here. But they're really standard. We've gone through them quite a few times about the images, the call to actions, the keywords, and a lot of it anyway. So it's just kind of making sure that you've got a checklist in your head or even writing it down. Of all these kind of things. If you do want to learn more, I would look into this. If you really want to look into it by doing a Google search about making, you can look at readability. You even test urine readability levels on certain blogs and things like that. There are tools everywhere online for finding out this information. But I think it's important as long as you understand how to do this when you create a blog. If you have it in your brain, every single time you do it, it will just become a routine. So you'll never be like, Oh no, I didn't do that. But you just get into everything going. Oh, yeah. Definitely need a call to action here and here. You'll get used to it. I hopefully this has helped. If you do want to find out more. There are plenty of websites tend to use the terminology of blog SEO. And it will drive you to more posts and things like that, that like spiny things in a lot more depth. If you want to. If you're not, if you're just starting out, this is just a general guide, but this would be your main points. Basically. You don't need to worry too much about everything else. It's only say like 67 months, you're not really seeing driver of traffic, then you probably need to look into why. But hopefully this has helped. 9. Analysis your blog stats: So this is the last lesson. We're just going to look at analyzing your blog stats, which is going to have a look at how useful this is. Why blog analytics matter. So you might have been putting blocks out for while and you're not really sure why how much traffic they're building or anything about it. This is what analytics come in. Basically, they monitor how many people go, how long people stay on websites and blogs and what pages and that type of thing. So all of this information is really valuable. The data can be used to create a better user experience for a website visitors. So for example, if people are going onto your blog and then coming off very quick, it could be done to redesign thing or the layout. Or if you look on there might be looking at on their phone and go, I can't read that. So it's just a good way of learning what works, what doesn't, and why, and then putting those things into practice. So that's really the most important part of analytics when it comes to blogging. So I'm just going to go through probably three of the big aspects that you need to worry about. They're very easy to understand, so don't worry. But the first thing we're going to look at is overall visitors. So when you look at your analytics on whatever platform you use, if you're going to link it to Google Analytics or you just use the websites one, It's entirely up to you. You will understand what your overall visitors are so you'll be able to see the stats quite easy. So you can do it for like the whole month. See what's happened. This is probably the one thing. Metric you look at, pretty much overall, everything else. So there is because you just want to know how many people want to come to our website. So you'll also have a look at the numbers on that, increasing, decreasing. Then you can kind of work around all well, that could be in a number of reasons for this. Maybe you're not posting is often or they're not keen on the topics or the site links. So basically, this is quite good way just to track. If you're traffic is building or if it's not, then you can work out the reasoning from there. You want to keep increasing your visitors. The more likely, the more times they see the content, then my take up your services. So all kinda links. But this, That's pretty straightforward to understand. The next thing you'll probably look at is what posts are being read more? Which ones are popular? Which ones are getting more views, people staying on them. So this is quite an important one because it gives you a better understanding of the types of topics. Do you need to write more topics on certain things that people are really interested in. And then you've got other ones that can drive people from these posts that are very, very popular. In other blocks. One's getting really low traffic, but the restaurant, you can use that as a funnel to get to the rest of them. In theory, you can change your call to actions to link to them. Understanding what posts are working is really good. It's really useful to understand. And it's good for you as well because it can prompt you in terms of what you're gonna be writing out about that month, or understands what your audience is interested in as well. So if you're doing a lot of things to do with how to and that's driving a lot of traffic, then you can jump on that and do more how to pose over doing normal sort of content. So it does help a lot. The last one that is probably quite important as well. What size is sending you the most traffic? This can help you work out where you get more traffic from, which can help you decide where to put your efforts. If you're looking on Facebook is sending loads of traffic, that's great. That means you can spend more time on Facebook. If you're generally getting traffic from various places, then just keep going. Or you can work on doing more blood person's certain things and certain channels. So you will see on referrals that's the sort of channels. It won't be like social media. It will have breakdowns of what channels. You can see where your efforts are going. It also is a good source data to understand as well in the fact that they can show you issues. So for example, if you are doing a paid out on Facebook, you're not getting any traffic to the website. But people are clicking on the link. There might be a link problem or it could be that people aren't interested in that topic, that type of thing. So it's a good way of understanding where your traffic is coming from and then trying to work out what you need to do to keep going. Keep the momentum going basically. So these are the three key areas if you are starting out blogging and stuff. These are the three areas that you need to look at. You could even write a note each month, kinda analyze what's working, what's not to help you. But yeah, this is just a general overview anyway, if you do want to learn more, definitely look into there are definitely training courses and things like that to go into more depth or those guides and things that you can just look into and explain it. If you're using Google Analytics, there is some training you can do, which is really easy to follow. So you can better understand things. But if you are just starting out, I would, I tend to do this. I stick to the stats because all I want to know is if I'm getting visitors, which posts are doing really well and where I'm getting referrals from. So that's all the information I need. But you might want more, but that's where you can go and do a Google search. But hopefully this has helped massively and will help you put your blogging blog strategy into place about what you're going to be doing and helping to grow your blog.