Its another weekend. and its another really great opportunity to learn and create new things. I'm looking forward to continue to work on the roll out of my wife's website, and for us to also spend some quality time together. It'll be nice to fit that in amidst our constant hectic weekends. Gymnastics for the little one, cleaning, cooking meals for Stef for the week, and all the other things that seems to eat up a weekend.
Its hard to find the time to start something when you're working full time. I've been afforded the opportunity to get my little projects started without a job in my way for now. Its been a real boon. It's allowed me to learn, to experiment, an to really take my time with a lot of the aspects of the growth and implementation of my blog, and my you tube channel. It's been a really fun time. and even without a job in my way, I still feel like there's not enough hours in the day. I still have the channel art to fix, a real posting schedule to solidify for this site, optimization to set up for both...the list goes on and on. and then there's the projects that I've started that I haven't even had time to roll out. It can get a little overwhelming if you try to bit off too much, too fast. But I have this time available to me, and I want to make the best of it.
So how can my wife possibly start a website when shes working 50+ hour weeks? well, the plan is fairly simple. She won't. and you don’t have to either even if you don't have an unemployed husband. it all depends on the money vs time dichotomy.
Something that Is abundantly apparent to me now that I’ve worked on websites and the like for a few years: There is either time spent or money spent, there is no alternative. You either spend time creating your own content, attracting your own customers, and making your own sales, or you pay someone else to do it. The ideas, though, those still come from you.
The work flow as we see it for my wife's website will give her full reign of product creation and for blog posting. she'll focus on creating the content and that's it. I'll handle all the back end stuff: the editing, the posting, the social media, the SEO and all of the other uninteresting garbage that websites do to attract users. I'll be brainstorming with her on these ideas and helping her develop them, but the content will be hers.
So many people nowadays start websites like this: they simply have an idea, and might start a simple blog (like this one) and then spend their time creating content, leaving all of the back end stuff to a "virtual assistant" who will generate the website, post the posts, do the SEO , and so on. It leaves the creator plenty of space to create if they can focus on that more entirely. I think that for us its a great plan.
There are plenty of folks who won't don any of it at all, as well. You can just have the idea for a website, understand its basic outline for products or SEO or what have you, and then outsource it all: from content creation right down to back end. It costs money to have people write blog posts for you, but people have it done all the time. And the funny thing is that it probably doesn't cost as much as you thought. Virtual assistants are cheap, relatively speaking, and it gives you a lot of flexibility because you can choose the one at the price and skill level that makes the most sense to you. There are a lot of websites that offer up different levels of VA's and at varying skill levels. For instance: if you're looking for a VA to build and maintain your website, then English skills wont be too important, and you can probably hire a very talented person from another country to do this work for you, and oftentimes at much lower prices than hiring the computer geek down the street. For blog post writing, or content moderation, you might want to select someone with better written English skills. The choices are completely up to you, and the wages vary from $2-5 an hour all the way up to competitive American hourly wages for very skilled VAs.
This gives even the busiest person the ability to see their vision come to fruition. Its really a great option. So with Stef using me as her VA, she'll be able to start her own online business without having to spend the countless hours in a dark room lit by a laptop screen learning how to set up a website, or worrying about whether or not her website is SEO optimized, all using me as a kind of pretend VA. It'll be great. unfortunately for me the pay is a lot worse. This will allow my wife the creative freedom she needs to write what she needs to write, create what she needs to create, and sort out the details as we work through everything. I'll be a little busier than normal setting everything up, but It'll be a really fun experience. In all, she'll have a nice clean website to present with her content all over it and I'll have created a really nice website.
If you would like to learn more about VA's and other generally awesome ways to create your own websites, go check out www.fourhourblog.com
Until Next Time.
Keep your eyes peeled on Sunday. I'm contemplating putting up a podcast of our brainstorming process for our website on the blog here. If you guys want to hear it comment below and tell me what parts you wanna hear us yab about.
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