The Savvy Entrepreneur

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Welcome to this edition of Weekly VA Marketing Tip! This series is specifically designed to help virtual assistants avoid marketing insanity. Every Monday, my posts will prompt you to accomplish one specific marketing action to promote, brand or position your professional virtual business.

Implement these tips each week and I guarantee you’ll sustain your marketing momentum, increase credibility and visibility in your field, build stronger relationships, boost your ‘know, like and trust factor,’ get more ideal clients looking for you, and have a consistent marketing game plan for your virtual assistant business.

You might even start to like marketing!

Turn It Into A Blog Series

Now that you’ve written a Top 5… or How To… article and shared it with the world, you’re ready to leverage that one article into a blog series.

You may be wondering: Can’t I just post my entire article to my blog?

Of course you can! It’s your article and you can do whatever you want with it. In fact, I post my articles here all the time.

However, my goal is to help you branch out and spin off all your marketing efforts into as many streams as possible — without it just being a copy ‘n paste, verbatim, repeat version of your initial piece.

Breaking your article down into a multi-part series allows you to chunk the original article topic into a specific, narrowed topic of its own and go into detail.

The goal is to demonstrate your expertise. Your article proved you have overall general knowledge of your topic and a broad understanding of your audience.

A blog series will allow you to break each main point down, delve deeper and really show your audience you know what you’re talking about — that you are the expert.

You’re showing you not only have “breadth,” but you also have “depth” as an online administrative professional. Your target market will start seeking YOU out, as opposed to someone else.

Turning your article into a multi-part series also helps you gain consistency in your blogging, even if just for the length of your series.

So, how do you turn your article into a blog series?

Say, for example, your article heading was:

• How Real Estate Agents Can Use Social Media To Get Known Locally

And let’s say the main points of your article were:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook

You need titles for your blog posts.

I would call my blog series Using Social Media To Gain Local Real Estate Clients and separate each point with a colon (i.e. Using Social Media To Gain Local Real Estate Clients: YouTube). OR I may create 3 blog headings:

• How A Real Estate Agent Can Use YouTube To Get Known Locally
• How A Real Estate Agent Can Use Twitter To Get Known Locally
• How A Real Estate Agent Can Use Facebook To Get Known Locally
• (Come up with as any blog titles as you did main points in your article.)
  

Again, I am NOT a headline expert and the point is not to come up with the MOST compelling title (although it helps). I’m just saying: Don’t get stuck with trying to make it perfect… Get it done!

Write one blog post per title  you came up with. Open Notepad and:

• Write your first blog post. Save it.
• Write your second blog post. Save it.
• Write your third blog post. Save it.
• (Write as many posts as you did titles.)

You don’t need to write a 500-word article if it’s not coming to you. Come up with 3 tips for each blog post and write a few sentences per tip.

1. Open your blog program.
2. Copy and paste the title and text you came up with for your first blog post.
3. Choose (or create) an appropriate category and come up with a few tags.
4. Enter links and images if you like.
5. Spell check/Proofread.
6. (Hold your breath) press the Publish button (or schedule it to go out this week).

Repeat steps 1 to 5 for each of your blog posts, only instead of publishing them this week, schedule them to be published 1 week apart.

As a final step, promote your link on Twitter and watch it get retweeted!

Don’t put it off! The return on this marketing strategy far outweighs the effort you put into it. And I promise, it gets easier the more you do it!

Let us know how you do!

Have an awesome week!