How and When Influencers Should Hire Employees

If you’re a full-time influencer, it can be overwhelming to manage yourself, your time, your brand and keep the amazing content flowing. So, is it time to hire an employee(s)?

A PA or a manager can help keep you in check. Although you may need to ask yourself a few things: can you afford it: travel, salary, work perks, do you want the responsibility as an employer? Or are you just feeling a little overwhelmed with the workload? Sometimes a hire may seem like the ultimate quick-fix but isn’t always going to benefit you in the long-term if additional costs are going to be a strain.

First things first

You need to understand whether you are really busy or you just have busy periods around certain events. For example, do you have a constant stream of emails inviting you to events, meetings, dinners, awards, or brands contacting you to work on a new piece of content? If this resonates, and you’re spending all of your time replying to these emails and doing business admin rather than operating the business with your primary goals in mind, help is out there.

Remember that your business is your business, and when someone else comes on-board, they may not necessarily share the amount of dedication and passion for the business model as you do, so you’ll need to set tasks. Of course, you’ll be the creator of your content, you’ll know how this works, how much it is engaged with and what works best but tasks such as sales calls, bookings, emails, calendar management and so on can easily be managed by someone else.

OK, so now you’ve established that you’ve got a need for hiring help, but how exactly do you go about it, and, who do you hire? If you’ve got the budget, and you’re certain you want to take on the responsibility of having an employee, then here’s how you can get cracking.

1. Hire a virtual assistant

It can be difficult and a massive commitment to take on a full-time employee who you’ll need to carefully consider, pay a competitive salary, and provide with on-the-job perks. If all of this sounds too much, then you may want to consider hiring a virtual assistant instead. They’re still real people, but you essentially outsource all the aspects of the ‘person specification’ to an external company who specialise in this kind of thing. They can manage your emails, manage your calendars, book your appointments, help to host your meetings and events, help with social media management, scheduling posts, call handling.

2.     Hire a freelancer to grow your business

Whilst you may think that you can do everything it takes to run a successful blog, you probably can’t. Not because you’re not talented, of course not, but because you’re one person and you simply don’t have enough time to do each task as effectively as possible whilst producing quality, timely content. After all, that’s what you’re best at and why you do what you do. Your followers and subscribers don’t follow your blog because of your SEO efforts (whilst this is pretty key in a blogs’ success, it’s not what they’re there for), they follow to read about your lifestyle, beauty, fashion, travel, about you.

Hiring a freelancer can free you up from doing the million things that it takes to run your blog. It might be that you’re not really a photographer or photo-editing pro, so you’d like someone to run that side of things, or you get stuck in the midst of Google Analytics, so you’d love someone to sort your SEO out a treat. Whatever it is, there’s a freelancer for you, and they’re out to make your job a whole lot easier!

 

3.     Collaborate!

Sometimes it’s not all competitions over who has the most views, your fellow bloggers could be the key to your success. Why not team up with a fellow blogger, perhaps in a different field, photography perhaps, and do a monthly collaborative blog? Share between your respective blogs and you’ll get some cracking content out of it, for only half the job. Who would’ve thought of that!?

Of course, if you’re working with other freelancers or employing somebody in some form, you’ll need to budget appropriately. Does your blog turnover enough money to support it? Then you’ll need to figure out who does what so you don’t end up overpaying or underpaying. Overpaying will wreck your budget, and underpaying could potentially wreck your blog!

If you are a blogger and you employ somebody already, or you’re a freelancer working for a blogger, why not leave us a comment below?