- So David, I wanted to do something really cool
and interesting today.
Everyone always ends up saying like,
"Oh, we produce so much content."
Which we do.
Just on our own blog, we're at seven a week,
plus a podcast a day,
plus three or four videos a week,
and then with all our other blogs and client blogs,
I think we're doing around like, a 150 to 200 a week, right?
It's something crazy like that.
Now, you once had this concept.
Because I was talking to you, and I was like,
"Dude, if Ford can keep cranking out cars,
"why can't we end up just cranking out content
"and just putting it on the assembly line?"
And you ended up creating the assembly line for me.
What was the process that we used
to create assembly lines so we can just produce
as much content as we want?
Because if I asked you, in 30 days from now,
could you produce 1,000 pieces of blog posts a week
that are high in quality, what would you say to me?
- Yeah, I can.
- Exactly, right?
And what does it take to do that?
- Okay, so, the way I look at it is because like,
when you have to create a lot of content,
there's multiple people involved.
For example, one content creator
only can create probably right about
three or four pieces of content at most per week.
So what you're going to do if you're creating 1,000
is you're working with probably 20, 30...
Whatever the math is.
Like, divide by three or four.
- 333.
- Yeah, 333.
- 20 would be nice, but yeah, 333.
- Yeah, so what happens is... - You're Asian.
You're supposed to be good at math.
- Yeah. I'm working on it.
But the thing is how do you make this process fool-proof?
So if you look at the process,
what happens when you have a blog post
when you work with content creators,
you have a piece of content that comes out.
First they outline it.
First you come up with a topic.
Then you assign it to the writer,
and the writer writes it, outlines it,
and after he outlines it,
you have to approve it and then edit it.
Right?
Then you can send it back, okay, write this.
And after they write it,
then you have to approve it,
and maybe they'll make some additional edits.
- You know what the funny this?
Everyone always tells me...
I was working with a buddy the other day,
and they're huge.
They're trying to figure out how to spend $20 million
a year on inbound marketing without paid ads, just organic.
And they have the process of hiring full-time writers,
which you and I strongly disagreed with.
And we never do it,
because we know the moment you hire a full-time writer,
what's production max output
that they're gonna end up doing?
- Very bad, and what happens is,
they'll only work...
Because they'll start thinking it's a nine-to-five.
- Exactly. - They work from nine to five.
A lot of times, I notice that people,
at least for myself,
I'm more productive if I kind of set my own hours.
Because I know when I'm productive, right?
- Yes.
- I'm least productive between like,
let's say, 2:00 to 4:00 PM because I get drowsy.
So for me, it's--
- Dude, you sleep during the day.
- Yeah, I'll take like a one-hour nap.
- You miss meetings.
But you're the only person that emails me at 3:00 AM
that night because, during work, you're like, "Hey!"
I then get like five emails from you.
When I wake up at 5:00 AM,
I'm like, "Okay..."
You work the weirdest hours.
- Yeah, but because I can concentrate, right?
But what happens is like, let's say afternoon,
I'm not productive.
Instead of me sitting there for three hours
trying to pretend like I'm working,
what's more efficient?
Take a nap.
- Of course.
- That is how writers work.
That's how they be creative.
And also, during the daytime a lot of times,
for a lot of creative people,
you get a lot of interruptions.
You can't be creative when you have those interruptions.
You need at least a three-hour block of uninterrupted time.
Actually, Paul Graham from Y Combinator talks about this.
There's two types of schedules called manager's schedule
and creator's schedule, I think.
And what happens in manager's schedule,
they're more higher-level like you, right?
- Yep.
- So you have a lot of meanings, a lot of calls.
But for people who are creative,
who are developers, designers, writers.
- Odd hours.
- You need at least three hours
in one block of uninterrupted of time.
It's really hard to have that during the daytime,
especially for freelancers.
So, normally, a lot of times,
it doesn't work out when you have them full-time,
when you work nine to five,
when interruptions are happening the most.
- And we end up paying writers, what is it,
like 10 cents to...
- Depends on how good.
Yeah, 10 to 20.
- Yeah, 20's high.
I never see bills for 20 cents.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's mainly lower than that, right?
A lot are like 13, 15.
I would say the average
is somewhere between 10 and 15 cents a word.
- I think depends on what content we're trying to do, yeah.
- That's true.
The super technical ones, I do know we pay more.
But, yeah.
Most of our clients, it's a lot less technical stuff.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And then we also find all our writers
from jobs.problogger.com, and that's mainly it, right?
- Yeah, that's mainly it.
Also, another good way to find a good writer
is look at writers who have their authorship on other sites
and just contact them.
Because they're already doing a good piece of content
that you want to, and you like,
and then just contact them and see what their rates are.
- Yeah, there's two writers that come to mind,
Jayson DeMers and CHAH-RAH KOHL-...
I don't know how to say his last name.
KOHL-NECK-EE?
I don't know.
He's Indian.
But they do a smart approach in which they don't
just recruits their writers from Entrepreneur and Inc.
and stuff like that.
I know, with CHAH-RAH, he's really slick in which
he goes and finds all these writers that write
in all these other places that have a big following.
So then, when they write content for him,
they can also promote it to their following
and then it just goes so much more viral.
Because everyone's like,
"Ah, he wrote the content."
And that's it.
And I'm like, "Well, you can't forget the marketing
"and content marketing."
I'm like, "You write content.
"I don't care how amazing it is.
"It doesn't mean it's going to do well."
But his cool strategy is, if you hire writers
who are already popular and have a following,
whatever they write, they're going to do
the marketing for you.
So, even if you're paying 20 cents a word,
it's actually a lot cheaper than hiring shitty writers
because these guys also do all the marketing.
So, you don't have to pay for the Facebook ads
or any of that kind of stuff.
- Exactly. Exactly.
And then, for the Trello process,
one thing to make sure...
I really get inspired by the KissMetrics.
- Yeah.
- I keep it really simple, right?
There's like all these extra features in Trello I don't use.
Like, you can change colors.
- Yep.
- I see some people that kind of will do that.
I don't do that.
I just create columns.
Every person is responsible for a column.
- That's right.
- Your job is to make sure whatever is under your column,
you move it to the next.
And then, the other person's job is to clear the column.
And you cannot mess that up, you know.
- Yeah, you can't.
And it's really simple and it's scalable.
Like I said, if we want to produce a thousand pieces
of content a week, we could.
We already produce hundreds and hundreds, so.
It's not that much harder to scale.
Well, cool.
Now you guys know how we produce content.
Feel free and follow the process.
Jack our Trello boards, you know,
do the same thing.
You can even go to jobs.problogger.com
and find the writers that we're using
probably on there for a lot of our customers' stuff.
It works.