How to Outsource Your Substack Tasks

Get more done with less stress

Hey there, Karen here,

I hope you’ve had a productive week.

Last week a fellow Substacker was blown away when I said I use a VA - a virtual assistant - to help me with the repetitive tasks needed to run my paid publication.

He wanted to know how I did it. So I guess you might want to know too.

But first, what is a VA? It’s a person who works for you remotely, performing repetitive tasks so you can focus on work that needs your full attention. You can hire a VA to manage your inbox, do social media posting, schedule appointments, create images and more.

Why use a VA?

When you have a VA you spend less time on day-to-day ‘busy work’ like sorting through emails and more time doing things that will help you achieve your Substack publication goals… things like building relationships with other creators, writing fantastic posts and connecting with new readers.

Having a VA reduces your workload and saves you from burnout and overwhelm - that’s the theory anyway.

The downsides of using a VA

I love my VA, Jane, and couldn’t do without her, but there are some major downsides to working with a VA, and quite a few pitfalls for the unwary. My partner, a self-employed IT professional and software developer has had so many bad experiences with VAs and remote workers that he could write a book about it.

His main problems with virtual assistants came down to reliability and quality of work - many of the remote workers he hired stopped turning up after a few weeks. Others were delivering low-quality work and he found himself having to re-do their work.

Before I hired Jane I was worried. Could I trust a VA enough to do the tasks I wanted to outsource? Would it be safe to give another person access to my online accounts and email inboxes without risking my security? And could I trust a stranger to do high-quality work without having to check on them constantly?

I was also worried about the time it might take to find and train a VA. This turned out to be a significant investment, but one that ended up being worth it.

Is a VA worth it?

Hiring a virtual assistant is time-consuming and adds cost to your newsletter business. For many Substack creators, the cost and effort of having a VA could easily outweigh the benefits. But for me, a VA is definitely worth it.

A VA is worth it if you’ve been operating your newsletter as a business for at least 6 months and there are things you find yourself doing over and over each week that you feel like you could do on autopilot.

On the other hand, if you haven’t dialled in your newsletter-creation and newsletter-promotion activities, and are still changing what you do from week to week, it won’t be worth it. In this scenario, a VA will be a burden, not a blessing, as you will constantly have to change what you want them to do, and train them on new tasks and new priorities.

Finally, VAs are only worth it if the benefits outweigh the financial costs. For most people, it only makes sense to have a VA if you pay them less than what you earn per hour.

What my VA does for me

There are many tasks a VA can do. Mine helps me with my paid publication. I pay her for 4 hours of her time each week, though I believe that she completes all her tasks in less than 4 hours some weeks.

She makes reports from emails that go to a shared email account. The reports are collated, curated lists of content that has arrived in the inbox that week. Jane filters out the duplicate and irrelevant information and creates four weekly reports, so I only have to read four emails instead of a few hundred.

She makes a list of free webinars from invitations sent to our shared inbox, which I publish for my subscribers.

She also summarises subscriber notifications from Substack so I can get a weekly overview of trends, unsubscribes and paid subscriber messages without having to deal with endless notifications.

Jane has a few other tasks that don’t have a weekly deadline, such as updating a post index web page, making and scheduling draft posts and making short YouTube clips from excerpts of my audio posts.

How to mitigate VA-related risks

As I mentioned earlier, allowing a VA access to your inboxes and publication can be scary. And of course, you can’t be sure that the quality of their work will be exactly what you hope for every time.

But there are things you can do to mitigate the security and quality risks of using a virtual assistant.

To get high quality, reliable work from your VA, the most important thing is to recruit the right person in the first place. Give candidates a series of tasks to do in the application process, such as ‘Reply with the word Substack in the subject line’ and ‘In the second paragraph tell me what makes you smile’, and then ruthlessly cull any candidate who doesn’t follow your instructions perfectly.

During interviews and onboarding you also need to stress how important reliability and quality is to you, and tell the applicant that you are looking for someone who is willing to ask questions if they aren’t sure of something.

If you are choosing a VA from a country or culture different from yours, do your research. People from different countries have different work ethics and expectations and it’s good to be forewarned of any potential areas of misunderstanding before you hire.

Create an operations manual for your VA to follow, to prevent disagreements about expectations, and so they don’t need to get in touch with you every time they have a question.

Arrange tasks and work submissions so there is a review step before something goes live, at least in the beginning. For example, Jane makes two thumbnails for each YouTube clip in Canva, and I can tweak the designs myself or tell her which one she should use for the clip.

A review step ensures that content published under your name is high quality, and it gives your VA confidence that you are happy with their work.

Make a plain language contract that sets out your expectations and covers issues such as payments, vacations, provision of technology, confidentiality of information and the like.

It’s worth knowing that if you hire someone from another country your contract might not be enforceable, but that’s okay. The contract is a really a communication tool to make sure you and your VA both understand what is expected and have a formal agreement to refer to in case of questions.

If you want your VA to have access to emails, set up a new email account with shared access. I use and recommend protonmail, which doesn’t care if two people are logged in from different locations. Set up forwarding rules in your own accounts so that emails you want your VA to see go to the shared account. That way you don’t need to give access to your personal email accounts.

If you want your VA to do work inside your Substack publication, such as adding images to posts, scheduling posts, or updating pages, the safest way to do this is by asking them to create their own Substack user account and adding them as a contributor, with private status.

Contributors can edit posts and start Chats, but cannot access publication settings.  Team members with private status are not visible in your publication, so no one but you will know they have access.

Where to find a VA

I found my VA using OnlineJobs which allows business owners to connect with virtual assistants in the Philippines. I paid a membership fee to list my job and meet candidates in a secure, controlled setting.

There are a number of North-American Substack creators who offer virtual assistant services on the side. Message me directly if you’d like recommendations.

My top tip for working with a VA

I’ve had my VA Jane for two years and she’s a valued part of my business. In addition to being ultra careful with my recruitment process and setting firm expectations up front, the one thing that I think has really helped me enjoy a great experience with Jane is our weekly meetings.

We have a regular 10 minute video meeting every Friday afternoon. There’s often nothing much to talk about, since she submits her work by email, and because I always request new tasks in writing, but they are still important.

Our meetings allow me to keep her up to date with my plans for the publication, so she feels like she is part of the team. It’s also a good opportunity to give positive feedback about her work, and thank her for her efforts.

I also use our meetings to check that she is comfortable with her workload, ask her if she wants to learn a new skill or take on a new task, and chat with her about upcoming vacation plans.

Final thoughts

Outsourcing repetitive tasks is a great way to free your time for publication-building, and can help reduce overwhelm. A part-time VA is a great way to outsource. You can hire someone to work just a few hours per week and train them to do the work you need.

Successful outsourcing relies on setting well-defined expectations up front and keeping the lines of communication open. If you’re at a point in your Substack journey where you are doing the same things each week and want to spend more time on growth and strategy, it is definitely worth considering a VA to help you.

---

Okay, that’s it for this week. I hope I showed you that working with a VA can be safe and enjoyable. Let me know if you’ve got questions. And have a great weekend!

Karen

Cover image: Freepik