Hi!
Last week I shared my income report along with my $20,000 of expenses for the month.
I had several replies from people asking to know more about my team, and what they do that’s worth $13,000 per month.
I love it when you guys let me know what you’d like to learn from me, so today, I’ll share details about my team and the tasks that I outsource…
Aside from myself, I have eight people that help to run my business. Their hours range from a few per week to full-time.
Here’s what they do.
1. Commercial director
Earlier this year, I hired my husband to be the commercial director for my business.
Previously, he was working as a commercial director for a marketing agency, so he already has all the skills for the role.
His task is to double the income from the business, without needing to increase website traffic.
He’s in charge of brand partnerships and affiliates and is always looking for ways to improve what we do.
He also manages my email inboxes, so I only have to deal with the vital ones. What a game-changer that is!
(I still read every email sent to this NSL address and reply to as many as I can get to).
His skills are the opposite of mine (he’s very organised and doesn’t mind video calls), so he fills in all the gaps I was missing.
One of the best perks is that my husband now has unlimited annual leave – so we can travel together more!
The flexible workday also means he’s free to help with the kids more, so I can concentrate on work when I need to.
Dream team!
2. Content manager
My content manager has been with my business for years, and we worked together for many years before that.
He not only writes and updates articles, but also puts together the travel email newsletter, shares content to social media and does video editing.
He does a fantastic job and I’d be truly lost without him.
As a freelancer, he usually charges an hourly rate.
However, there are some ongoing brand partnerships that he manages where we split the retainer 50-50 on the condition that I have minimal involvement. This works great for both of us.
3. Editor
My editor has two tasks:
He improves articles before they go out to make sure that they read well, are factually correct, free from errors and follow our style guides.
He also works on updating old articles.
I have over 1,000 articles on my travel blog and we update and improve them all at least annually, or more often if the information changes.
I found him when I wrote an article for an industry magazine. I thought my submission was perfect, but he made it so much better with the editing that I reached out to ask if he was taking on more clients!
I pay him an hourly rate.
4. VAs
I have two virtual assistants.
They do tasks such as uploading articles in WordPress and adding images.
I have a few articles that need updating weekly, so they take care of those too.
They also manage any regular reports that require entering data into spreadsheets.
Again, they’re paid hourly. I trust everyone 100% – they just fill in a spreadsheet with what they worked on each day and how much it cost.
If any of my team find themselves doing repetitive, easy tasks, I encourage them to pass those on to the VAs as its more cost-effective.
My VAs live in the Philippines and I found them through Online Jobs, which is widely accepted as the best place to find assistants in the Philippines.
5. Facebook Assistants
I have two Facebook assistants – one for my travel Facebook page and one for Vegan Wins.
Like me, they both live in the UK and are huge fans of the niches, which is important. I found them via social media.
They create posts with Canva, schedule them with Strevio, and invite people to like the page. This takes them 2-3 hours per week, each.
For Vegan Wins, my assistant has recently also started to draft articles and is doing a fantastic job of that.
She covers the latest news using Ghost Craft. These articles take only 10-15 minutes as the info is already there in press releases.
She also uses Reddit data to create blog posts with Hypertxt.
6. Pinterest Assistant
My Pinterest assistant is someone who I met while travelling, so she’s well into the niche as well.
She spends 5-6 hours per month running the Pinterest account for my travel blog.
We only get about 3,000 visitors per month from Pinterest, making about $250 from display ads, so this covers her time and the cost of the tool we use – PinGenerator.
I don’t really make any money from Pinterest, but it also doesn’t take any of my time.
If we offer a multi-channel package to a brand, we can throw in Pinterest as an extra and they seem to like that.
So that’s everyone.
For one-off tasks, I also hire agencies to help, but these are the people who are involved in the business from day to day.
I avoid giving deadlines wherever possible and everyone is free to work whatever hours they choose – I’m a pretty chilled boss.
For communication, we use WhatsApp, and we use a combination of Trello boards and Google sheets to manage our workflow.
I hope you found this interesting.
If you didn’t, thanks for sticking around to the end anyway!
I’m currently working on getting email working for a couple of my newer sites.
I’m trying to automate as much as possible because email newsletters can be a real time suck if you don’t.
I’ll update you on how that’s going next week.
Love
NSL