Writing is an essential skill to market your VA business – whether it’s writing sales letters, posting blogs or sending newsletters, they all drive business to your door. But what if you are (like me!!) rated creatively poor? Or maybe your brain is just frazzled from 4 hours non-stop audio typing?
Like our SVA Inspiration Tool we’ve put together a few tips for finding content for your newsletters and blogs below.
The best way of making sure you always have fresh content is to write around the calendar – what’s happening?
Christmas. Valentine’s Day. Bank holidays. Tax deadlines. Global VA Week (14-19 May). Summer holidays. Back to school. National Freelancer’s Day (21st Nov). Industry Events. Your birthday… whatever you like! Basically if you can plot relevant dates into the diary it gives you a framework to insert articles around.
Do you already have some information written?
Your website or marketing materials will be full of information you can expand upon. A response to a customer query might well be something that other people would want to know more about and you can put the info on your blog. Perhaps you’ve launched a new product or service which you can tell your list about? Or maybe you are offering a special discount to smooth out the seasonal peaks and troughs in your business?
What are other people saying?
No – I am NOT telling you to sign up to all your competitors’ newsletters and nick the content!! (And if I find any VA on my own Virtually Sorted list, I will ban them from SVA permanently –believe me, it’s very dull for me to enforce, but necessary after some nasty cases of plagiarism!)
But look at the types of things people are talking about on Twitter, look at what seems to be interesting your client prospects on business forums – social media, Pinterest, marketing list generation… You know your market best.
Has someone written something which you feel you should respond to? Perhaps it’s a newspaper article saying that all VA work will be offshored. Maybe it’s another VA who has declared that only the way they work is relevant to the business market. Or a new release from Microsoft or Apple which you want to write a review of. Perhaps there’s some interesting factoids about the industry from the UK VA Survey you’d like to use in your marketing materials (we’re always happy for you to use the info as long as you let us know and credit it properly!!).
Personal Info
No – we don’t want to know what happened to your foot when you banged it against the bathtub! Yuck, yuck, yuck. But a little more about you on a personal level will give you a personality behind your brand. My biggest ever number of responses to a newsletter remains my surprise wedding announcement a few years back – it’s not particularly relevant to the business, but people loved the story and the pictures.
You might want to do a Q&A with different team members or perhaps post a bit more about your own life if it’s going to a closed list rather than publically posted on a website.
Silliness
I love silliness, most people enjoy a giggle in their inbox. Perhaps not the Lolcatz but something a bit more professional – a silly cartoon, an urban dictionary definition, a picture of your office before and after a client visit… (or is it just mine that gets MUCH tidier when people are in?)
Whatever you post, make sure you have copyright permission – as a newsletter distributor or website host, you are the publisher and could be done for copyright infringement without the relevant permissions!
Checklist of ideas:
- Your website
- Other marketing materials
- The VA Diary
- Customer queries or questions which you’ve answered
- New products or services
- New books, software or products you want to review
- Sales/discounts/special deals
- Twitter – look for trending topics to see what people are talking about
- Great websites you’ve found
- LinkedIn groups
- Urban dictionary definition
- A Day In The Life of a VA in pictures or just a schedule
- The newspaper – local, national, business news or industry news
- Surveys or statistics (The UK VA Survey can be quoted as long as you ask permission and it is credited)
- Q&A with staff
- Your business ethos or ethics
- Funny photos or cartoons – remember get permission from the copyright holder!
- An infographic
- How To Guides – how to insert a photo into a Word doc, how to do a mail merge etc.
- The SVA forum – loads of ideas here to spark ideas about what to write about
