Voice Actor: You’re listening to the Traffic and Leads podcast, where we examine what is and isn’t working in online marketing. Now, please welcome your host, online marketing expert, One Click Lindsey.

Lindsey: Hey everybody, it’s One-Click Lindsey with the Traffic & Leads podcast. Today I’m interviewing Miss Barbara Turley with thevirtualhub.com. During this interview, we talked a lot about VA’s, the importance of consistency in digital marketing that ties right in with VAs because, honestly, folks, you can’t do this all yourself. And it’s so worth it to find a VA, and you can go out to Upwork, you can contact Barbara, you can ask me for my personal recommendations to farm out a few hours a week for your digital marketing to make sure that you are keeping consistent because, especially for those of you who aren’t putting a lot of money behind paid traffic, consistency is key in order to succeed at digital marketing. It’s the final letter in the click technique. It’s K for keep going, and it is so important.

So that’s my challenge to you guys this week. I’m not going to do a marketing minute or anything like that. My challenge to you is to make some time to work on your business instead of in your business. Figure out a couple of hours a week that you could farm out to somebody, something that you don’t need to do. And start freeing up a little bit of time in your business on these tasks so that you can start working on your business and being consistent in your digital marketing efforts. That’s my message for this week. That’s what I’m going to go out and tell you to get done.

So before we hop into this interview with Barbara, I have to do a quick commercial. My name is One-Click Lindsey. I’m at traffickandleads.com. We’re really good at generating traffic and leads. So whether that be Facebook ads, pay per click, SEO, landing pages, webinars, all of those things that encompass digital marketing, you can contact us and we can absolutely help you. I also have an entire team dedicated to web development. That’s not my department, that is Ian’s department, but we have it. So if you need help with web development, we can also help you with that.

So that’s my commercial. One more thing: if you guys want to build a strong online marketing foundation, I have a 5-day free boot camp that you can get signed up for. Every day I’ll send you an email and give you a strategic lesson on how to build a strong online marketing foundation so that you can continue to be successful or start being successful bringing more traffic and leads to your small business.

There you go, folks, that’s my commercial. Let’s hop into this interview with Barbara.

Hey, Barbara, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being on today.

How to Hire a Support Assistant for Internet Marketing

Barbara Turley: Hey, Lindsey, thank you for having me.

Lindsey: Yeah, so why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about what you do?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So I run a company called The Virtual Hub, and The Virtual Hub, we specialize in digital marketing-focused virtual assistants in the Philippines. So we help business owners all over the world to tackle all of the massive to-do lists that are involved in getting traffic and leads online, for example, or just in running and scaling your business. And actually, it’s a very cost-effective solution to have an offshore team in the Philippines, and we supply well-trained, well-managed, and great VAs from there.

Lindsey: Yeah, that makes sense. So what kind of things? So when it comes to generating traffic and leads, of course there’s a lot of things you can do as far as content marketing or landing pages or e-mail marketing. What things—like where does your team pick up that maybe a strategist or a consultant would come in handy? Or do you also have those? Like who comes up with the strategy, and is your team just implementing it, or where’s that line?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a brilliant question, and I’m so glad you brought that up because a lot of business owners actually get really confused about where that line is. So first of all, we just do virtual assistants. We don’t do strategists. I have lots of friends who are strategists. I’m sure you do, and there’s lots of them out there.

But typically where the line is drawn—so if you’re a business owner listening to this, you either need to have a digital strategist or you need to be your own one. And it’s really, you’ve got to have that right if you want to be successful with a VA in the digital marketing space. Because here’s the thing: as most people know, when you’re trying to get traffic and leads, as you said, there’s keyword research, there’s blog optimization, there’s traffic to the website, there’s Google Adwords—or sorry, there’s Google Analytics—there’s landing pages. I mean, the list goes on of all the things to do.

Your strategist is going to map out for you what that looks like. So they’re going to talk to you about what your end goals are, and then they’re going to look at, well, here’s all the collateral that we need. We need a lead magnet, we need a landing page, we need somebody doing this recurring task list of analytics every week or keyword research or whatever. They’re going to map out the strategy that you’re going to use. So are you going to use content marketing, or are you going to use Facebook ads, or maybe both, for example?

Now, when you map out that strategy—you may do it yourself—then what falls out of that usually, and anyone listening will know what I’m saying here, what happens is that a strategist can often leave you with a massive task list. And then what happens is you get overwhelmed as a business owner because you have no time to actually do the work to implement the strategy that they just came up with. So this is where VAs step in. They take the task list, and then either your strategist can work with the VA or you do to get the task list implemented and keep things moving so you actually get the results that you want from the strategy. Does that make sense?

Lindsey: It does. So essentially what we would come to your team with is, I need a lead magnet that talks about this, or will you guys write the lead magnet, or do we have to provide you with the text and you make it pretty now?

Barbara Turley: When you’re dealing with VAs, I would like the other line you want to draw. So let’s talk about what VAs do, what they don’t do, OK? They’re not writers, OK? So again, a writer is quite a specialist thing. Yes, they’re also not graphic designers, but these days most VAs are quite savvy with design, so they can use Canva and stuff like that. And most of us are not looking for a real hot graphic designer. We just want something that looks good and is on brand.

So VAs can do that bit. Writing, I would always recommend you either do it yourself or you pay a good copywriter or a good writer, even if it’s blog posting. And then the VA does all the other bits that are involved in getting it up on your site or producing the ebook. So they can create an ebook, they can get it all formatted properly and get it looking good for you, but they’re not going to write it.

Lindsey: That makes sense. That makes sense. So what makes The Virtual Hub different than, say, like an Upwork or a freelancer or those other sites that we’ve heard of?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So our key difference—and this is sort of one of the reasons I think I started this business—I noticed that the majority, a lot of people out there, really struggle to delegate. They actually find it difficult. So you either go on freelance or Upwork and you hit a home run and you find somebody who’s amazing straight away, and then you’re a master delegator yourself, very good at creating processes and systems, and it all flows beautifully.

Now, that was kind of the experience I had myself in the beginning, but I rapidly discovered that I was just naturally quite good at that. Then I had a lot of business coaching clients a good few years ago, and I sort of tried to get them to do the same thing, and most of them struggled. And I saw the pain that some people go through with trying to, first of all, recruit—like they just churned through so many people, didn’t pick the right people, didn’t have any process set up.

So the first step of what we do at The Virtual Hub is we help clients who come to us and don’t have time for all of that. We help them get set up in the right way. We help them map out their tasks and get everything set up before a VA arrives so that they’re ready. But the other key differentiator is I noticed as well that a lot of VAs, particularly in the Philippines, have massive resumes that say they do everything, but they’re not actually trained properly in anything.

So our business looks—VAs are with us for sometimes up to three months before they’re ever introduced to a client because we have our own in-depth, intensive training programs. No matter how much experience they have, we put them through our training on digital marketing, and it’s created by me. So we have our own proprietary training program. We do big platforms like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, HubSpot, Active Campaign, and we’re really big in those particular platforms, particularly Ontraport and Active Campaign. Loads of clients get their VAs to tweak the funnels and play around with Zapier and get all your integrations working properly, all that sort of thing that you don’t have time for.

Lindsey: Yeah, OK, that is so cool.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So we also have a help desk. So it’s an ongoing thing. We have full offices in the Philippines and everything. So I’ve got specialists in the office that actually are there on hand to help when a VA goes, “Hey, my client’s just asked for this. I know what it is, but I haven’t done it before.” So we’ve got guys that just jump in and help. So you don’t just get a VA, you get an ecosystem behind that VA with us.

Lindsey: Awesome. That is awesome. And how does it compare price-wise?

Barbara Turley: I think we’re pretty cheap, actually. I think in the US, our pricing—we have three levels of VA. So Level 1 is like your general admin VA. Those are $8 US per hour. Now, we do have a minimum of 20 hours a week, but so it’s 8 bucks an hour for that. Level 2 is more like your social media, managing the content on your blog, optimization, that kind of thing at 10 bucks US, and our Level 3 guys are $12.00 US. Those are the guys doing Zapier, HubSpot, Active Campaign, Ontraport, etcetera.

Lindsey: I love it. Yeah, those are very, very competitive for a highly trained VA. Love that.

Barbara Turley: We just think it’s a sweet spot. My vision is not really to churn lots of people. Like I said, I was a business coach before. I have a two-fold vision, which is really I want to banish overwhelm for small business, and I want to see them get out of the gates successfully. And I also want to create dynamic, next-level careers for some of the smartest people in the Philippines that are looking to get out of the call centres and all that call stuff. And they’re really smart, and they want a new career. And that’s what we create. So it’s a big vision, a big mission of mine.

Lindsey: I love it. OK, let’s talk a little bit about your personal Traffic & Leads generation strategy. How do you guys get customers for The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So we do run quite a big organic traffic strategy. So you’ll love this, obviously, with the stuff you guys talk about. So we have a writer and we have two VAs that work on this on our marketing team.

At the beginning of the process is that we do keyword research on the keywords we’re trying to rank for. And we come up with our topic lists, of course, based around what people are actually searching for online, what questions they’re asking. And we try to answer those questions through our blog content. And also I have a podcast called the Virtual Success Show, in which we answer some of those questions there as well.

Once it’s written, then we optimize that for the keywords. So we’re using Yoast, for example, on our WordPress site. We use that extensively, and we try to just make sure that the post is going to—Google’s going to like it basically for that particular subject. Then one of our other VAs actually makes it look Google-friendly. So for example, you don’t just whack a post up online—you’ve got to format it correctly. There’s got to be the proper tags on there. There’s got to be nice images that have the proper alt text, etcetera. Meta tagging, all that sort of thing is done by them.

Then obviously we spread it out on our social media. So here’s a big thing: our other VA who manages more on our social media takes the content and then goes through it and takes out five to seven, depending on the content, tips and quotes from the content, creates them into Canva images, and then repeatedly shares that piece of content over and over again in different formats, in different ways across different channels.

The other thing they do is they create a content upgrade. So sometimes we’ll put a little infographic, or they’ll take the five points out of a podcast and put it into an infographic and make that into another blog post and share that around social media. So it’s just this whole cycle of taking one piece of content and making sure that we actually leverage that piece of content, repurpose it as much as we can, and really get the use out of somebody who wrote a piece of content for us because our writer is not in the Philippines, so they’re quite expensive. So that’s just an example of what we do in that area.

Lindsey: So you’re saying that essentially you drive traffic to your website through organic SEO and organic social media. Do you do any paid social media or paid traffic at all?

Barbara Turley: We do. We also have a paid traffic strategy. Now, the VAs are not going to run that for you, so let’s be clear. Facebook ads, Google Ads campaigns, all of that sort of stuff—I would get a specialist to do that for you because, with content marketing, 20% of it—the writing of the content—80% of it is mapping it out and the distribution of that content online. It’s the opposite when it comes to Facebook ads. With Facebook ads, 80% of it is the strategy and the copy and the audience targeting; 20% of it is creating an image for the ad, getting it up on Power Editor, and fixing all those bits. VAs can help with that stuff, but you need a very strong ad strategist to come up with the ad strategy for you.

Lindsey: What I like so much about what you’re saying right now is how clearly the lines are drawn between a VA and a strategist. Like I think a lot of times, especially, for me, because I’m asking you all these questions, those lines seem so gray. So people would hop into a relationship with you thinking you’re going to create Facebook ads for them. But it seems like you are just completely very clear on what you guys will and will not do, and it’s fantastic.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And look, I have, I’ve experienced it myself. So I know that I made decisions a few years ago to be very clear about this because clients will go, well, maybe my VA likes writing, maybe. And I go, you can try what you’re—I think for your blog, I think you probably need somebody who is a professional writer. So I would always recommend getting a Western writer. Now, I do actually have one girl who is a brilliant writer on my team in the Philippines. But I think she’s an outlier, to be honest. I would never sell this to a client because I just think it’s too difficult to nail that offshore. And I think it’s worth it to pay a proper US writer or an Australian writer, UK, whatever you want to do, and then use your budget to get a good writer and then get a solid VA in the Philippines who can do the tinkering and all the grunt work that needs to be done in the background.

Lindsey: I love it, and if you spend that much time and or money writing a blog post or doing a podcast or whatever your main piece of content is, it is so worth it to hire a VA to make sure that content is shared appropriately across a ton of channels. You put in all that time and money, so you need to properly elevate it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, they can even do things like with my podcast, all I do is record the podcast and drop it in Dropbox, and there’s an entire process that I’m not even involved in, and it just shows up on our website. The transcript is done, the snippets are done, the infographics created. I approved a couple of things along the way. Well, it’s a great way—my podcast has been turned into so many pieces of content for us. Even, we’ve even taken a topic and said, well, actually maybe we can give this topic to our writer as well and ask them to do a different spin on it with more stats and things like that. So we get a great leverage out of a 30-minute session that I’ve sat down and recorded.

Lindsey: I love it. OK, when small business owners or entrepreneurs are ready to take this online marketing journey and they understand the whole you need to opt in, you need to build your list, you need to nurture them through emails and webinars and all this stuff, what do you think the number one misconception is for the small business owners and entrepreneurs when they’re on the very tip of their journey starting?

Barbara Turley: What do you think the misconception is when they’re starting out? I think that it’s going to be—they just have to—I think they just think that if I have a lead magnet and I have a landing page and an email funnel that I’m going to get flooded with people. And unfortunately, online is actually good looking, it’s great when it works, but it needs a serious amount of focus, and you need to try things, and most things are probably going to fail. I love it. And you need to accept that. And I think, I got a great tip. I think it was—I can’t even remember who it was. In a podcast I heard him say stop expecting marketing to work because 99% of the time it fails.

Lindsey: I love that so much.

Barbara Turley: Yes. And it really blew it open for me because I thought, yeah, just because you put a lead magnet out there doesn’t mean people are going to sign up for it.

Lindsey: No. Or like it or buy from you. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And you need to look—and I’ll be honest with you, I did a massive product launch. I did the whole Jeff Walker product launch formula online four years ago. I put so much money and effort into it. It was about five years ago, and it was beautiful. Like the branding was brilliant. The whole thing failed. I sold three—I think I sold three of the products—and I went into a massive depression. Oh, you did? Yeah. It was terrible. And then, but from the ashes of that disaster, I had a lot of business coaching clients at the time, and I just started recruiting VAs in the Philippines for them because they kept asking me about it because I had one. And then I was like, oh, I’m getting more—getting asked more for this than I am for business coaching. Maybe I should do this business instead. And I pivoted within a month. I just changed TAC completely. And I started selling something that people needed, and that just sold like hotcakes. So I think just stop expecting it to work and hustle. Just keep going.

Lindsey: I love it. Wow. And thank you so much for sharing that story. And honestly, I love that quote because it’s so true. I mean consistency and continually trying till something works. Like that’s the name of the digital marketing game. And I do digital marketing for people, and even I do this day in and day out, I can’t say with certainty that a particular campaign is going to succeed or fail. Like you just don’t know.

Barbara Turley: We are organic. I think that the organic stuff I was talking about—I mean you need a minimum of 12 months of really driving that strategy hard before you’re going to start seeing traffic online, from writing blogs and all—at least a year, if not 18 months, I would think.

Lindsey: I would totally agree. I totally agree, but it does work. Can you speak to that?

Barbara Turley: Yes, definitely it does work, and you need to be consistent. You need to stay on schedule. So if you have a podcast and you say you’re doing it weekly, you have to have that thing up weekly. If your blog is weekly, Google wants to see you being consistent, and they rank you better if you’re being consistent about everything you do. And then you have to look at your analytics and see where we are failing. Are we hitting the mark? So it’s all about this kind of—there’s a lot of metrics involved, and there’s a lot of VAs that can help you with this. They can show you the reporting, they can put slides together to show you how it’s going. They won’t give you an analysis of what you should do, but they’ll do the grunt work to help you figure out if it’s actually working or where you’re going with it.

Lindsey: Yeah. Do you mind if we talk a little bit more about your experience when you tried launching that back five years ago? Is that OK?

Barbara Turley: Happy to share because I know a lot of people—I mean, I just felt so down after it. I think it’s a big problem out there.

Lindsey: Oh, yeah, because digital marketers, we make it seem so easy and like, if you just set it up, then people will come and they will buy, and you’ll be swimming in money by the end of the week. What do you think your biggest mistake was there? Looking back at it, what do you think?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so I did everything, like I’m a real studier. So I was like the perfect student, and I did everything that I was told to do. So I even went out and did a kind of a beta test and asked people if they were interested and what they thought about this programme. Did all of that, right? And everyone was like, yeah, that’s amazing, except the mistake I made. I think if you’re about to launch a programme and you’re just starting out and you don’t—and I had no real experience in this digital sort of thing, right? I was like, OK. So I think what you should do, and what I should have done, is I should have taken the people who said that they thought that was a great idea, and I should have said, why don’t I do a beta program and I just do it on Skype, do it live, get six people together who are willing to pay money for it.

Here’s the thing: people will say that they love your idea, but it’s the people who put the money down and say I not only do I love your idea, but I want to pay you right now to do it. Yeah, that’s a beta. A beta test is not asking people, it’s finding people who will pay you to do it. And I spent too much money getting the website and the branding and making everything perfect. And I did a massive Facebook ads campaign, and I literally blew up a lot of money. And I think it would have been better for me to do—even locally in my own community—I should have gotten 10 women together. It was a wealth programme for women. I’m from an investment banking background. I had all the credentials, everything. But I should have got 10 women together that were willing to pay money to do it, and I should have taken feedback from them, and I should have done it that way and not been so eager to do the big online thing as a testing phase. I should have tested the product more first.

Lindsey: So you think it was a problem with your product and not a problem with your marketing? You think it was like no one wanted the final product?

Barbara Turley: I think there were two problems. I think the final product had too much stuff in it. So this is another lesson. I had seven steps to wealth success, which is great. People did love the videos and all that, but I was talking about so many different areas in the product that I don’t think—the problem—people were like, yeah, yeah, I want to deal with my wealth path. But right now, well, the problem I discovered after—the people I was targeting were female business owners, but they were too early stage. And the problem that they actually were facing is yes, they wanted to create wealth, but in the future. Right now, all they wanted to do was get out of the trenches and get their time and get a little bit of money in. So there wasn’t enough impetus for that audience to buy that product at that time. That makes me think the targeting was wrong, and I think the product—so the product market fit wasn’t right. Actually, product market fit—that’s key to get right.

Lindsey: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Barbara Turley: From that I discovered that what they would pay for today—so the same audience—what they ended up paying for and literally like falling over themselves to pay me for was for me to go and help them to recruit VAs, train them, and help them to get success with outsourcing. So I discovered that from the ashes of disaster. So it was good in the end.

Lindsey: Yeah, because you have this great business that is working.

Barbara Turley: Now I have 100 growing like crazy. So yeah, but it was a good lesson, and I share it because I think it’s really important for people starting out to understand that when you meet someone who has a successful business, it’s never linear. There’s always a story behind that. And we all go the same journey. We all fail in things, particularly digital. It’s hard.

Lindsey: I love it. Wow, Barbara, you’ve been so transparent. I’ve truly appreciated you being on the show. Before we go, I’m going to turn the time back over to you. Take your time, let us know again how to find you and anything else you want the audience to know.

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Internet Marketing

Barbara Turley: Sure. So you can find us over at thevirtualhub.com. We also have a couple of really cool gifts for everyone. So if you go to thevirtualhub.com/traffic and leads—and I think that’s going to be in the show notes in there—there’s a couple of things you can—we’ve got a download that you don’t need to sign up for or anything. It’s purely just the five reasons people fail with VA’s now that are going to tell you what you actually need to do to get success. So you’ll realise why you may have failed in the past for those people that maybe have hired VA’s in the past. And then if you turn those five steps around, it’ll turn into how you get success. So it’s a really good little thing for you to download.

The other thing we have is a scalable business success formula. So kind of a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about today, I’ve actually got an E course there that you can sign up for that talks, yes, about VA’s, but it’s more about how do you actually create something that’s scalable and then use VA’s to help you to do that, or on that page as well, you can book a call with us. We’ve got two strategy consultants. You get a free outsourcing strategy consult with one of our guys. We’ve got someone in Ireland who talks to all our clients in the US, and we’ve got someone in Australia who deals with Down Under where I actually live.

So if you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is always the best place to find me. I’m just Barbara Turley on LinkedIn, and you can also listen to my podcast where I share a lot of things about how to get success with VA’s and just business in general. I’ve got an amazing co-host on that show who’s a business coach, and that’s at thevirtualsuccessshow.com, or you can find that on our website as well, thevirtualhub.com.

Lindsey: Awesome. There you go, Barbara. Thank you again for being a guest on the show. It’s been a real pleasure.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me.

Lindsey: Here you have it, folks, another awesome episode of the Traffic & Leads podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please leave us a review on Facebook or wherever you’re listening to this episode of the podcast, or at the very least, can you at least tell a friend about it that you’re learning awesome digital marketing advice from One-Click Lindsey on the Traffic & Leads podcast. That would be absolutely fantastic. And finally, make sure you join me at theclicktechnique.com. It’s a free five-day boot camp in order to build a strong digital marketing foundation, and I will see you there.