There is a lot of vandalism of our assets by well-meaning VAs.
Most don’t realize that when they post a piece of content under my name or the client’s name, they are representing that person.
Imagine taking the microphone away from Rihanna while she’s singing on stage, but you don’t know how to sing. And you’re deaf, so you don’t realize that your singing doesn’t sound the same.
This is what happens when VAs work on content without understanding the context.
Whenever you touch any piece of content, always ask yourself WHY someone should see it and WHO specifically should see it. You must know the GCT (Goals, Content, and Target audience).
One way the #1 VA mistake hurts us is when a VA processing one of our videos, or a client’s videos, does not understand the GCT of that video project. This leads to bland summaries that don’t get views or engagement, even though the original video itself is powerful.
The same applies to the articles we create from videos.
Unintentional Vandalism: The Cost of Misunderstanding Content and Brand
Recently, we’ve had some people attempt to work on my personal brand.
These are not bad people; they are great VAs. They’re well-meaning and want to do good work. They’ve gone through some training and have a bit of work experience and knowledge about digital marketing, but they’ve struggled to make a significant impact on my personal brand.
We have a document called the personal brand manager, and they don’t know what it is. They don’t know the different people involved, the specific terminology we use, or the underlying concepts. They don’t even follow me on Facebook. So, it’s not that they’re bad people; they simply don’t have enough understanding to effectively represent me in personal branding.
If you look at my personal brand, or anyone else’s for that matter, depending on its sophistication, there could be a lot of content.
In my case, we’ve collected a significant amount of content over the last few years. We’ve processed it through all the stages of the Content Factory. Much of it has been done by myself because we practice “Learn, Do, Teach.”
So, if I want to tell other people that it takes 15 minutes to take a raw video, process it, script it, and post it to a webpage, then I should be able to demonstrate that I’ve done this many times myself. I can’t simply delegate tasks that I’ve never done before.
And if I’m going to give advice on “how do you speak on TV,” “how do you speak at a conference,” or even “how do you run a Facebook ad,” then I need to have that expertise myself. If I lack expertise in the topics I am teaching, it would violate the “Learn, Do, Teach” principle.
If someone tries to teach something they have never done themselves, it’s like a fat person trying to give weight loss advice. It’s not that their advice isn’t good. It’s probably good advice. But they’re not implementing it themselves, which means they’re not credible, and they’re repeating what someone else said.
Anyone who gives an opinion or advice on how to do something should be an expert practitioner on that topic, even if they are highly confident in their opinions. If not, they make the #1 VA mistake, which will likely always continue to be the #1 VA mistake.
Personal Branding and Topic Wheels: Insights for Virtual Assistants
Let’s see what personal branding actually is.
For business owners, their “personal brand” is largely about their network. It’s not what they say about themselves.
Some people think that to build their personal brand, they must constantly talk about themselves and their accomplishments. They want others to know what they do so they can hire people, drive leads, grow their business, and build partnerships.
This might seem logical, but it’s not how it actually works.
This is because people, in general, are selfish. They care about themselves. They care about what a certain business or person can do for them. They don’t care about someone else’s accomplishments.
When someone just talks about themselves, others think they’re a douchebag. However, when others in their network talk about them, that is what actually builds their credibility.
Even if someone creates a hundred pieces of content per day, they still can’t outperform what their network can do for them.
We organize all this content, whether co-created or not, into different topics in a topic wheel. A topic wheel maps out ‘who a business owner knows’ – their network – with ‘what they know’ – their areas of expertise.
If someone is an introvert, this organization can start with topics they are passionate about and then associate those topics with other people who share the same passions (an inside-out approach). If they are an extrovert, they can start with the people they know and map that to their expertise (an outside-in approach). This is how you establish a strong personal brand.
When we look at the six stages in the Content Factory process: a figurehead produces the content, and a virtual assistant processes it.
Producing content is the highest value use of a business owner’s time, which also includes building relationships and traveling. However, they should never handle the processing, which should always be done by virtual assistants. This allows the figurehead or business owner to have time for activities that generate more revenue for the business.
But when you, as a virtual assistant, are going to write under the figurehead’s name, you better have excellent grammar. You also must understand the different people that are in their network and why they are in their network. You must understand what themes or topics are important to them and know what is their “why.”
When you promote content for a business owner following the Content Factory process, you must be aware of their audience as well as their business strategy – their goals, content, and targeting.
In our case, the goal is, we want to create a million jobs. The content is all the training that helps us achieve that goal of creating the jobs, whether it’s the specialists or the VAs. And the target is anyone who wants to participate.
In this ecosystem, some people want to get a job, while others want to hire one of the VAs who’s been trained in our system.
Why Understanding a Brand’s Core Mission is Essential and How to Get There
If you don’t understand the structure of my personal brand, you can’t work on my personal brand.
If you don’t know who Grant Cardone, George Leith, Newton Lee, or Karen Freberg are, there’s no way you’re going to be able to work on my brand, even if you’re really good at tools like Photoshop or Premiere Pro.
And that’s the problem that I’ve seen over many years: people will hire a VA saying, well, I’ve got this folder of all of my speaking and articles and archives of all this stuff. But then they wonder why it’s not what they expected, when that VA starts mindlessly editing and applying templates and doing the thing that in their mind seems to make sense.
When the virtual assistants don’t know who the business owner is, or what they care about, or what their mission is, this causes a very obvious kind of problem. It’s a violation of Learn, Do, Teach. You can’t teach someone something you haven’t done yourself many times.
But even in our company today, we see the same issue.
Understanding a brand before you work on it goes very deep. You should know how someone is “connected” with the brand you’re working on. Consider the following examples of people in my topic wheel: John Jonas, Larry Kim, and Karen Freberg.
John Jonas is the founder of onlinejobs.ph. He has hired many VAs and can speak credibly on the topic because of his extensive experience over the years. His platform, onlinejobs.ph, has 2 million VAs. Now I know a lot about VAs too. We offer various training programs and have hired many VAs ourselves. However, if I want to boost my authority in a specific area like hiring in the Philippines, there’s no better way than creating content with John Jonas.
If I want to talk about PPC, I can, because I’ve spent a billion dollars on it. But Larry Kim has won Marketer of the Year awards from Search Engine Land, US Search Awards, and PPC Hero. He’s the founder of WordStream and has 2% of Google’s global ad spend and 2% of Facebook’s global ad spend. That’s a lot of money!
Saying “Larry Kim carries some authority when it comes to online marketing” is an understatement. Larry Kim and I have done all kinds of stuff together over the years. I’ve interviewed him, he’s interviewed me, and we’ve spoken at many conferences together.
I’m not saying this to boast. I’m saying that I don’t work on my personal brand.
By being with Larry and elevating him, I grow my personal brand. By being with Neil Patel or others like Karen Freberg, I’m growing my brand.
Dr. Freberg is likely the leading educator among college professors on social media, PR, and public relations. She has a best-selling book, speaks at all the major conferences. And she’s constantly saying great things about me – not because I bought her gifts or anything like that, but because we believe in the same thing. So, if I want to reach universities with our program for current college students and professors to start agencies, what would add more authority to my personal brand?
I could say, “Hey, I’m going to create a lot of jobs by hiring young adults who are still in college because I have this amazing program where many people are making a lot of money.” Now, compare this with Dr. Freberg talking about our program and the students who have gone through it.
Do you see how this is much more powerful than me talking about what I do?
Your credibility comes from whoever is most relevant, not necessarily who the highest authority person is.
My entire brand is built on co-created content with these individuals, and I actively manage these relationships. It’s not just about taking photos with them at conferences every three years. I genuinely know these people, and we spend time together.
What am I doing to promote my personal brand? Nothing.
I’m just helping this agency grow. Am I processing my content myself? No.
So, the whole model of personal branding, which is “look at me, I’m so important,” doesn’t matter.
A virtual assistant working on someone’s personal brand and processing their content, must understand all these stories and relationships that make up that personal brand.
Can you imagine working at Apple and someone comes up to you and asks, “Hey, can you tell me about the iPhone?”
And you say, “What’s an iPhone?” How would you feel about that?
That’s what we have going on.
We have people on our team who don’t even know what a “Lighthouse” is. Some don’t know what the Dollar a Day strategy is. They are unfamiliar with the things we teach. I don’t care how good you are at WordPress or SEO or whatever. You must first understand the brand, which means knowing its Goals, Content, and Targeting.
The High Cost of VAs Not Practicing Active Listening
We have experienced a lot of pain because of people who don’t believe in someone’s brand.
We got chewed out for this with our client, Darryl Isaacs because the VAs working on his content didn’t understand that Darryl and his father started Isaacs and Isaacs 30 years ago, or that there’s a whole mission behind that. They didn’t realize that it wasn’t just two guys who started a law firm – there was a whole deeper story.
And so, the VAs were just willy-nilly posting stuff. Not only was their content poorly written and full of grammatical errors, but this wasn’t even the main issue. Anyone can correct grammatical mistakes using tools like Grammarly or ChatGPT.
The real problem was that the people working on Darryl Isaacs’s content didn’t care about Darryl Isaacs. And it showed through.
It always shows through.
In 2015, Darryl had an accident in which he nearly died, and the doctor said he would never walk again. He decided that if he could walk again, he would dedicate his life to helping others.
But the VAs working on his website and location service pages were just generating and posting garbage, without caring enough to learn about Darryl first. They didn’t take the time to understand how he runs his company. They didn’t pay attention to how much we talk about Darryl Isaacs, how he’s ‘The Hammer,’ and how he’s committed to giving back.
When Darryl called me two weeks ago, he basically said, “Dude, you and I are good friends, but you need to improve your quality. We need to up our level here; we can’t afford these kinds of mistakes.” He said this much nicer than I could have, but that’s basically what he said.
When you hear me saying things like “Let’s follow Learn, Do, Teach,” it’s not because I’m mad or trying to be critical. I say this because the people working on a particular brand think, “I just need to improve my Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator skills. I’m just a designer who changes logos, fonts, and other superficial aesthetic elements.”
The number one thing is you must understand the brand. You must always start with Goals, Content, and Targeting (GCT). When you fail to understand GCT or refuse to understand it because you are confident about your skills, you make the #1 VA mistake. You show that you are either not able to (or are not willing to) practice active listening.
Whenever I have to intervene, it’s a sign of failure.
Failure to Perform MAA: An Extension of the #1 VA Mistake
One of the extensions of the #1 VA mistake is not being able to do MAA (Metrics, Analysis, Action) to measure both their performance and its outcomes. If you continue to process content mindlessly, without considering its effectiveness or optimizing it to drive results, you fail to add any value.
Again, this happens because you don’t fully understand the content itself.
You’ll see that the #1 VA mistake is also the #1 mistake of all humans who are unable or unwilling to be logical. This is a critical failure when it comes to any performance-driven activity.
