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Visually attractive blog posts often incorporate video or photos.
Problem: You have one or more great blog posts but need videos and photos to make them visually appealing. Finding and uploading your own photos and videos can be time consuming.
How a Virtual Assistant can help:
- If you already have a collection of your own videos you can share them with a Virtual Assistant in a, say, a Dropbox folder. The VA can then upload, tag and publish them to your YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler accounts.
- If you do not have your own videos she can research videos that are suitable and applicable to your written post and embed them.
- Your VA can search sites like Stock.Xchng and EveryStockPhoto, and flickr.com for creative commons photos to insert into your posts. She can upload them directly to your media library for you to insert into posts, or she can insert directly into posts following guidelines you establish.
Why: Many people are more visually inclined and photos / videos make your post more attractive to them. Additionally, If you write posts that are “How To” in nature visual learners will appreciate being able to see the steps in action. Those same videos, published on sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler will also increase your visibility and provide other bloggers with ways to link to your created content.
How are you handling all these chores? Are you looking for photos, images and videos on a per-post basis? Or do have a stockpile of cool videos and images that you can draw from as necessary?
Michelle Mangen is owner of Your Virtual
Assistant in Venice, Florida, providing virtual assistance
to small business owners who realize their time is better spent on
high value, high ROI tasks. Visit Michelle at
Your Virtual Assistant.
Sadly I am a poor little church mouse who can’t afford to hire an assistant, virtual or otherwise.
I find it relatively easy to keep all my personal video and image files organized. I also use special software that integrates with WordPress dashboard that let’s me search for and find Creative Commons licensed media that I can incorporate into my posts with nothing more than a mouse click.
A virtual assistant eh? Well I’m sure I could use on for some of the more mundane tasks that I perform from day to day as a blogger, but for now I will have to do.
Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella´s last post ..Comments Are The Pebbles You Toss In The Pond
Blog Angel –
Thanks for stopping by and posting a comment.
Do tell what you are using for WordPress to insert photos? I’ve tried Zemanta, Insights and recently started trying out Photo Dropper.
Michelle Mangen´s last post ..Weekly Round Up No. 7
I use both Zemmanta and Photodropper when I’m in a hurry. I also often use free images from Stockxchange and quickly modify them to suit with either Gimp or Skitch.
Just a cautionary note to people using “free images”: When using images from Flickr or other free sources it is very important to follow the credit requirements as per the author and license information. Failure to display the requred credit can get you into legal copyright issues.
Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella´s last post ..Do You Have What It Takes To Successfully Run Multiple Blogs?
The licensing thing is something I pay very special attention to and I appreciate how Stockxchange gives very clear instructions. I can get lost for hours on Stockxchange when I am looking for pictures. I’ll go for one or two and then end up realizing I’ve spent hours there!
I have never been a fan of Gimp, something about it just frustrates me. Haven’t heard of Skitch but will check it out. I resize mine through Picnik.
Michelle, thanks again for writing up this series. I think we’re in a radical rewiring of the economies of the entire West, and Virtual Assistants are in the vanguard of the new economy rising from the ruins of the old.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Focus on one blog or juggle several blogs?
Dave:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present here on your blog.
I agree that this is a radical rewiring. With so many communities now also adopting “virtual offices” I see an increased and continued need for Virtual Assistants.
You can save a bunch of time when uploading videos by using just one service which not only handles publishing to many video sites, but also provides analytics so you know from a single dashboard levels of engagement.
http://www.tubemogul.com
Dave Thackeray´s last post ..How to sell
Dave:
TubeMogul is great, I haven’t used it but have looked at it and have a number of friends that absolutely swear by it!
Good timing on the post, Dave! Just found out today that my term job is not being extended. The day job runs out on June 30.
I think I’d be a damn good Virtual Assistant for clients who need to free up some time. Thanks for the chance to spread the word. :-)
Hugs and butterflies,
~T~
PicsieChick´s last post ..If not for you, would my story even exist?
You need to connect up with a wonderful lady I met (in real life – it was sooo fun!) a couple of days ago. Her name is Rhianne and you can find her on Twitter @LadyBizBiz. She runs a VA company and although most of her people are geographically local, I’m sure she’d help you if she could. I’ll send her a DM too if you’re interested. She’s a genuinely warm lady. I know she wouldn’t steer you wrong :)
Eleanor Edwards´s last post ..Calling all artists & writers: Christmas with @TylinaVespart & doing a happy salsa thanks to @DanielleLaPorte
Thanks, Eleanor for the gracious connection. I’ve followed her and look forward to chatting with her soon.
Hugs and butterflies,
~T~
PicsieChick´s last post ..If not for you, would my story even exist?
Eleanor – thanks for stopping by and giving PicsieChick a lead. You must be a connector type person as well. (I am a junkie for making connections).
PicsieChick – def check it out. There are a lot of great organizations that you can join. Personally, I opted not to get any training. I figured that my real life “corporate” experience in upper management gave me many of the tools I needed to succeed.
If you start now (even while economy is still sucky) you will def be on a path to success when economy turns around.
I say go for it!!!!! Twitter has been great for me in obtaining new clients because I am good at building relationships. I know I could do/get more by fully utilizing LinkedIn and my Fan Page as well.
Transcriptions and VAs.
Sorry to hijack the thread but I need a VA purely to work on podcast > text transcriptions.
I don’t have a huge budget but going the VA route seems to be a logical step for this.
How much could I expect to pay for this service?
Again, apols for distracting from the core mission of this article but it just ‘felt right’. ;-)
Dave:
Not hijacking at all. Transcription will vary based on several factors:
1. If you want word for word or just general overview.
2. Speed of the speaking (fast speakers tend to take more time as you have to “rewind” to make sure you properly captured everything)
3. Names (there is the “danger” of names being spelled incorrectly due to so many variations in spellings nowdays).
A transcriptionist VA pal of mine has told me that one hour of spoken word typically takes 1 hour on the overview method. Word for word can take up to three hours.
If you need referrals to Virtual Assistants that do transcription I can refer you to two that I would personally recommend as I’ve used them for clients of mine and in both cases my clients were very pleased with the results.
Dave:
I just realized who you are….you and I are connected on Twitter. Didn’t you ask me about UK VA’s on Twitter a week or two ago?
Michelle @mmangen
Finding a good photo for a post can be a very laborious thing to do but it can make all the difference for the reader experience.
Jorgen @ Personal Branding´s last post ..How Chris Brogan Stays Productive with Egg Timers
Jorgen – the photos most certainly can have a huge impact on the visual appeal of a blog post.
I am going to have to check out your post that is attached with CommentLuv. I’ve been using an egg timer for several months now to help keep me on track and I haven’t seen Chris Brogan’s post so I’ll def have to check it out.
Thanks for stopping by here to comment. I really appreciate it.
I think that a good task for my VA would be doing the meta data for the pictures that Dave talks about, My difficulty is that most of the time I don’t get what he is talking about. Maybe I ask him to translate Dave.
Ralph:
I have one website that I use more as a “project” than anything and with the alt tags on the photos I continually get found ~ most likely by image searches ~ for one of the pictures (and I often find it’s downloaded too from my daily emails from GetClicky).
If you use a lot of pictures that are useful to your niche then having the alt tags is probably more important.
By no means though am I am expert!