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Being an independent artist means you do a lot of the work related to your music career yourself. You don’t have a record label with automatic support backing you. You have to build your own fan base and your career from scratch. While it’s a lot of work and can be overwhelming sometimes, the great news is that you have total control over what happens with your music career and most importantly who’s on your team. The internet can offer many wonderful things to independent artists including a wide range of talented virtual assistants.

Benefits to hiring a virtual assistant include having a fresh pair of eyes on your music and promotions efforts. Another person can give you ideas on how to tweak your message or your tactics to be more efficient. You will also find yourself being more organized since you most often have to streamline jobs, create instructions and templates for them to use. You can hire a virtual assistant for your music on an as needed basis. For example in the off chance you didn’t earn enough money last month to cover your virtual assistant, you can have them take a month off or a week off. It’s totally up to you how much you will spend and how many hours your music virtual assistant will work for you. Also, if you find a music industry virtual assistant who has experience in working with musicians and/or record labels, you might be able to make use of contacts they have previously made or career tools and tips they’ve picked up on along the way.  The obvious benefit of hiring a music virtual assistant is the time savings you will enjoy by having someone else do daily tasks for you. That way you will have a lot more time to do music, spend with your family, and whatever else you want to do.

Here are a few things a virtual assistant can do for your music career…

Scout for Sponsors

Getting a sponsor for your events, tours, or music in general can be a huge help financially. But the hard part is doing the leg work to find the businesses that would be interested in sponsoring you and who the decision makers are at each business.  A virtual assistant can help you do this in half the time.  Set some parameters in place such as the types of businesses you’d be interested in pitching to, the size and location of the business, etc. Have your virtual assistant do the search for you. You can also write up a sponsor letter template and have the virtual assistant send out the letters customizing them to each recipient. You won’t have to worry about any negative responses because your assistant will field those for you. Depending on how well you write the sponsor letter and what you ask for, you’ll get back all the positive responses and have a list of potential sponsors to choose from. If you’ve never worked with sponsors before, try starting out slowly by trying to get sponsors for local events.

Look for Press Opportunities

 

Hiring a virtual assistant to look for press opportunities is a great idea when you’re going on tour. Press opportunities can be super beneficial when it comes to touring but it’s so hard to set all of that up when you’re busy booking, advancing, and promoting all the shows on your tour too.  Having an extra person on your team who can focus solely on PR related tasks would be super helpful. A music virtual assistant can find radio stations willing to feature you, reach out to blogs and media outlets for press or even look for related community or networking events you can be a part of during the day before your show to help promote your show that week or evening.

In general, a virtual assistant can become a permanent fixture on your general PR strategy by doing periodic tasks such as searching for online radio stations and podcasts for features, looking for magazines and blogs to review your music, looking for meetup groups you can potentially get involved with related to your music, and many other things.

Help you With Booking Tasks

Often times, booking tasks can take up the bulk of your workload. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone looking for venues on your behalf? All you have to do is set up a booking pitch template and have a virtual assistant use resources like Indie on the Move, or even a search engine to find venues that would be a good fit for your music and send out an e-mail to them. Just think you wouldn’t even have to pay a booking commission if they find you a gig since you are paying them a flat rate for administrative work.

Get Airplay on YouTube Channels

YouTube can play a huge role in earning you royalty revenue if you have your music distribution set up for that kind of thing. I’ve been distributing my music through CD Baby and they have a setting feature that allows you to track and earn revenue from song plays on YouTube as well as other online streaming sites. So with that in mind, trying to get your music played on YouTube as much as possible will not only help you gain fans and increase exposure for you, but it can earn you money. But who has time to search YouTube channels and find relevant stations that would be a good fit for your music? Finding the time to search for these stations and to pitch your music to them can be difficult.  But you can easily get a virtual assistant to do it for you.

Social Media Posting

You can also hire a music virtual assistant to help you keep up with daily social media posts to keep your current fans engaged. Your assistant can simply schedule one post per day based on rules you pre-determine. When you have stuff to add you can either add it yourself or send it to your assistant to add.  There are so many distractions on social media, you usually will end up spending more time on it than you meant to.  Hiring a virtual assistant to do it for you will increase your daily workflow productivity like you wouldn’t believe.

Data entry and organization

Sometimes you just need to organize your stuff. As an independent artist, you more than likely have a slew of mailing lists, spreadsheets, logs, contacts, and the list goes on of things that need sorted and organized. What about adding new contacts to your mailing list? The other tedious thing all musicians face is having to add shows to their website and the various calendars that post their shows. Yes, this too can be done by a virtual assistant.

Standard Follow-up E-mailing

If you have standard form e-mails you send out, then a virtual assistant for your music can help with that as well. Standard e-mails can include things such as show announcements, after show follow ups with new fans and venue contacts, or even personal customized postcards and letters you send periodically to fans. It’s busy work that can be done by someone other than you.

How to Find a Virtual Assistant

Virtual Assistants are available in droves these days. The trick is finding one that fits your needs and personality without having to spend a large investment doing it. I recommend starting with Fiverr. Their platform is super easy to use and you can find a virtual assistant on Fiverr for your music starting at just $5. Start off with small tasks and work your way up to larger tasks. Work with multiple different sellers until you find a few that you like. Check out my article, 8 Best Fiverr Gigs for Musicians to Save Time & Money to get some tips on how to find the best gigs on Fiverr and get the most bang for your buck.

Other ways you can find a music virtual assistant is to search offers on Craigslist or post your own job offer. You can also try Amazon Mechanical Turk. Workers on this platform are called Turkers and they are willing to work for as little as $0.01, but I must caution you to be weary of paying this little for work. You certainly don’t want to overpay, but you also don’t want to underpay. You may end up getting what you pay for. That goes for Fiverr and Craigslist too. Upwork is another great platform you can search on for a good virtual assistant.

How to afford a Virtual Assistant

If your budget is tight (and trust me, you’re not alone) you might have a difficult time scraping up change to pay for a virtual assistant. No worries. The great thing about having a virtual assistant is that you can hire on an as needed basis. Maybe you just hire one for a week or just an hour to help you with a specific task. It all depends on what you can afford. Start off by setting a budget.  Ask yourself what can you realistically afford. If that number is $0, then come up with a feasible amount you can shoot for earning next month to cover the cost. Give yourself a goal and a deadline and try your best to meet that goal. Let’s say you really need a virtual assistant to help you 5 hours one week a month? Decide how much you are willing to pay per hour and shoot for earning that extra income each month. You can take on a side job, do some busking, book another gig for yourself, try running a new campaign to sell more music to new fans, or you can cut back on some of your monthly spending and use that savings to spend on your virtual assistant. Anything is doable, you just have to think creatively and be willing to execute good ideas.

[bctt tweet=”Anything is doable, you just have to think creatively and be willing to execute good ideas.” username=”IndieArtistsDIY”]

+5 Easy Side Hustle Ideas For Musicians

Overall a virtual assistant for your music can be a game changer. The key is to be very specific and detailed with your requests and make sure you communicate your needs clearly.  Delegate jobs that are easy to do and don’t require a whole lot of strategy. Jobs that require a lot of thinking and strategy should be reserved for you or someone you trust. But meaningless jobs, data entry, scouting, and sending form letters can be done by a good virtual assistant. It will help you in tremendous ways and give you a better quality of life.

What other tasks can you think of for a music virtual assistant? Have you tried one in the past? What has been your experience? Let us know in the comments section.

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Some of the links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission (with no additional cost to you). Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers.

 

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