We all like the concept of scaling content creation.
You publish more pages, rank for a ton of keywords, and as a result, you grow faster
what seems to be less effort.
But there are two huge problems that often come with this.
#1. As you publish more content, the quality tends to degrade.
And with around 7.5 million blog posts being published everyday, it's tough to stand out
with mediocre content.
And #2. It can get expensive.
But that's often because a lot of companies build systems in a very inefficient way.
So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to scale content creation with maximum
output and cost efficiency all while controlling the quality of your content.
Stay tuned.
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What's up everyone?
It's Sam Oh and before we get started, I want to note that today's tutorial isn't so much
about SEO or marketing like our other videos.
But I want to take some time to talk about systems and management because the efficiency
of our marketing is usually dictated based on these things.
So if you'd like to see more of this type of content, let me know in the comments
because your feedback is always appreciated.
Alright, so first, we need to talk about two reasons why scaling content is super important today.
Because it's not easy to do it well, it's not cheap, so in order for you to succeed,
you have to understand why you're doing it.
So #1. On average, it takes somewhere between 8 to 60 touchpoints to make a sale.
Meaning, someone has to interact with your business whether that be via content,
word of mouth, a sales team or whatever before they'll actually buy something.
And of these touch points, helpful content is probably the easiest, cheapest and least
intrusive way to reach a mass audiences on a consistent basis.
And #2. Your competitors are probably doing it.
And if they are there helping and serving your audience then prospects will probably
choose them over you.
Now, in order to understand how to create a scalable content system, without massively
degrading the quality of content, we need to look at the basic process of content creation.
So, you'll usually start with an outline that's based around a topic you've discovered when
doing keyword research.
You'll write the draft, edit it, get any media together like a featured image, social images,
custom images, videos or whatever, and then hit the publish button.
Now, you might be thinking in order to scale this process, you just need to add more rows
running in parallel.
But that's probably the worst thing you can do because you're assuming that each person will
produce articles with the same level of quality and operate at the same level of efficiency.
It's unrealistic because people are different and so are the different tasks in the system.
Plus, if you're hiring individual people full time to do all of these steps is going to be
way more expensive than it has to be.
Instead, you want something that resembles an assembly line, where each person in
the workflow is working in the same direction, with the same guidelines, at a balanced pace.
And when this happens, each person is contributing to what becomes a well oiled machine.
Now, while this might not seem like a crazy improvement at first glance, there's a lot of
things that go into each part to make them efficient.
So let's walk through each step and go through some tips to maximize efficiency all while
controlling your quality lever.
Alright, the first step is to set up your system for project management.
Now, this is what your team will be using on a daily basis to create content.
And its purpose is twofold.
#1. It systemizes the workflow for your content creation process;
and #2. It gives everyone on the team a high level view of the status of any post at any given time.
At Ahrefs, we use Kanban boards in Notion, where each card represents a post or video.
Now, we start by assigning a post to a member of our team.
And when they've done their part, they'll leave any necessary comments, reassign
the card to the next person in the process, and then move it down the assembly line.
If you want to create something similar, you can use project management tools like Notion,
Trello, or Airtable.
And the main columns you'll want to create are outlining, drafting, editing, and publishing.
Now, if your organization has other steps you want to add in, then feel free to.
For example, we have a pretty heavy feedback and review process.
So we have two columns for that in our Notion board.
Alternatively, you can use Google Sheets to create a similar effect where you'd have details
about each post and update the stage fields as it progresses through your pipeline.
Bottomline: there's no reason not to set this up even if you're a one-person show.
It'll help you stay organized and have a solid foundation for a future content system.
Alright, the next step is to create SOPs.
SOP stands for standard operating procedure.
And these are detailed documents and videos that explain how to carry out a task
from start to finish.
Now, SOPs are absolutely critical for 5 main reasons.
#1. If someone quits or you let them go, SOPs make it super-easy to hire and onboard new help.
#2. They ensure that the writing style and formatting are consistent across your site.
#3. They help to get tasks done faster.
Reason being, as you identify inefficiencies in your processes, your SOPs should get updated
with the modified methods.
And this also keeps everyone in the loop and your content consistent.
#4. It saves you time from answering the same questions over and over again.
And #5. It allows you to eventually remove yourself from the process while still maintaining
full efficiency.
And I could give you 10 more reasons, but I'll spare you the rant.
The bottomline is that you need to create SOPs for each task so things are done the way you
want them to get done.
And these will help with quality control too.
Now, in order to create SOPs in such great detail, you need to learn and document
the steps for each process.
Meaning, you or a team lead should learn how to do keyword research, create content briefs,
write content, edit it, and upload it to your CMS.
So for us, we have SOPs for writers where we cover style guidelines, content guidelines,
and more.
And then we have an SOP for an editor where we cover how they can best do their job.
And for a task like content briefs and keyword research, Josh, the person in charge of our
blog, is still doing this.
But you can bet your bottom dollar that if and when someone takes over these tasks,
they'll be thoroughly documented.
Alright, the next step is to prepare your content assets.
In addition to SOPs, you'll need to do keyword research to build a bank of topics and create
content briefs for writers before you assign them topics.
Now, I won't get into keyword research because we have tons of tutorials that walk you through
how to do it, but I do want to talk about the importance of content briefs and how
to create them.
So a content brief is basically an outline you'd create for writers on what you expect
to see in your piece.
And briefs are usually accompanied with an SOP.
Now, the reason they're important is because writers aren't necessarily
familiar with SEO copywriting.
And when you're scaling content, search engines are definitely a place you want to get traffic from
because it's free, consistent, and passive.
So by creating a brief, you can actually guide the writer to create something that's better
optimized for search - especially in the area of matching searcher intent.
So if I wanted to outsource a post on a topic like "what are high quality backlinks," I'd start
with a working title, ask for an intro where I'd basically reiterate what we have in our
SOP, I'd have all my heading tags filled in to guide the flow, and I'd make notes under
each section if there were specific areas I wanted discussed.
Now, what this does is it helps writers to create an article in the structure we expect to see, it
formats the HTML with proper heading tags, it helps the writers to produce content quickly,
and it saves the editor a ton of time from editing posts.
And all of these benefits come at the cost of spending around 15-45 minutes per brief.
Now, if you're not an SEO, we have a full video on SEO copywriting, so feel free to
watch that tutorial and create your own SOP from it.
Alright on to the most difficult part of this whole process and that's hiring.
So coming back to our flow chart, you can see that you'll need someone to do keyword
research and create content briefs.
You'll likely need multiple freelance writers.
You'll need at least one editor, and then someone to upload and publish your content
to your CMS.
Now, you might be tempted to go and hire one person for each role.
But as I mentioned before, people work at different paces.
And if one person or group of people work significantly slower or faster than another,
then you end up with bottlenecks in your system.
So if efficiency is your goal, you'll want to hire based on creating an equal flow in your system.
For example, let's say that a junior SEO spends 1 day per month to do keyword research.
And on a weekly basis, they can comfortably put together 15 content briefs or approximately
three per day.
Then that means, in order to reach an equal flow and have a smooth-flowing content system,
you need to have enough writers who can keep up with this person.
Now, assuming each freelance writer, on average, can write two posts per week, then you'd need
7-8 freelance writers to keep up.
Now, onto the editing stage.
If one full-time editor can review and edit 15 posts per week or 3 per day, then we're
in a good cycle.
And assuming the uploader can upload 25 posts per week or 5 posts per day, then you'd only need
them for part-time hours.
The system is in almost perfect flow, reaching almost its maximum potential.
So now we have a general idea of how many people we'd need to hire and of course, you
can adjust these numbers based on your organization's goals, processes,
and productivity levels.
Now, hiring an SEO, an editor, and an uploader is pretty easy.
You just put together a job post, publish them on various networks, interview people who
seem to be good candidates, hire, train and move on.
Now, the tricky part is hiring freelance writers because a) you need a lot of them; b) you'll
probably get the most applications for this position; and c) writing is probably the most
subjective part of this process.
So let me walk you through a system we've used to filter through over 350 applications
in around an hour.
Now, much like the other job listings, you'll want to create a detailed job post about the position.
And you can post these on sites like Problogger jobs, Upwork, LinkedIn, your website's job page,
or wherever.
But the key part to this application is the way writers should apply.
And that's through a Google form.
And there are three main advantages to using a Google form when hiring freelance writers
or for any position where you'll get hundreds or even thousands of applications.
#1. You won't get spammed with emails.
And this usually results in annoyance and you end up missing out on potentially good
applications because you just mark emails as read.
#2. Google Forms has a direct integration with Google Sheets.
Meaning, every time someone fills out the form, it'll automatically get fed into Google Sheets.
And this allows you to create scoring mechanisms to automatically qualify or disqualify candidates.
For example, one of the questions in our freelance writer form is: "Define SEO and
explain its importance in 50 words or less."
So we created a formula to count the number of words.
And if it's over 50, then we won't even see the application.
And #3. You can test writers' knowledge, skills, and styles at scale.
And we do this with both paragraph questions, which requires manual review, and some multiple
choice skill-testing questions which automatically gets graded.
Alright, once you have a pool of vetted candidates, you don't want to just hire them and send your
content briefs.
These people have just passed a sniff test.
What I highly recommend doing is to send them a paid writing test.
And each writer should get the exact same test so you can get an apples to apples comparison.
So what we'll do is send a sample content brief and any relevant SOPs.
And each writer will be asked to write a somewhat fragmented article that's
similar to what we post on our blog.
We'll then review their work using a set of criteria that we're looking for which we call
our "quality writer guidelines."
And having these guidelines in place allows us to fairly assess each writer's skills, style,
and ability to follow instructions.
Now, for the writers that pass this test, they'll be sent a content brief for an article
that we plan to publish.
And we'll send them as many so-called "beta articles" before we actually commit to making
them a regular writer for our blog.
The process isn't short, but it ensures that we uphold the quality of our content which
is super-important for us.
Now, just because your system tells you that you should have 10 people to work on your
site, it doesn't mean you should go and hire 10 people today.
I highly recommend that you start as SEO, editor, and/or project manager and focus on
hiring solid writers first because that's usually the hardest part to fill.
And once you have a team of writers, you can look to fill other roles which shouldn't
be as challenging.
Alright, so now that you've created your SOPs and hired people for tasks you're not involved
in, the final step is to optimize your processes.
Now, as your system runs, you're going to find imperfections and inefficiencies.
And just as you would do regular maintenance for a vehicle, you'll want to do the same for your
content system.
For example, if multiple people in your team ask the same questions, then that's a sign
to document it in your SOPs.
Or if you find an inefficiency in your system, speak with the people who are involved in
those stages and brainstorm how you can make them better.
Now, the final thing I want to show you is what this system looks like in action and
how easily it can be scaled.
So let's go back to our previous example.
If we have one SEO who can produce 15 content briefs per week, seven writers who are outputting
two articles per week per writer, or 14 in total, one editor that can edit 15 posts per week, and
a part-time uploader who can upload five pieces per day, or a maximum potential of 25 posts per
week, then we have a total of 14 published articles per week or two per day.
This is quite a lot for a single blog.
Now, let's add another SEO in here to create content briefs.
We now get 30 of them per week.
We'll actually add nine new freelance writers, for a total of 16 freelance writers or 32
articles per week.
And now we're actually going to offer one of our best technical writers a full time
position as an editor.
So our output now drops to 30 articles per week and we have two editors that can edit
all of them.
Finally, we employ the uploader full time and either pay them overtime to work another
day's worth of uploading, reprioritize their workload, or bring on another person who
can upload our posts to WordPress.
And we're now publishing 30 pieces of content per week which is six posts per business day.
And if you want more, then just do the math and hire more help as needed.
And at this point, you should be able to act as project manager just to make sure that
everything is continuing to run in a smooth way.
Now, as you add more steps to this process, it'll slow down the output which is totally fine.
But a way to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks is to prioritize appropriately.
For example, if you create custom graphics for featured images, I'd recommend doing that
at the content brief stage.
This way, your designer has sufficient time to create your graphic, get feedback, and
make any necessary revisions.
Now, while this system should make sense conceptually, it's not as easy as it looks.
It takes time to find good writers, train multiple people for multiple roles, and
to build a team that really works well together.
So if you want to get started with this system, I again highly recommend that you try all
the different steps until you've really mastered them.
Start slow, build out, and with enough commitment and hard work, you should be able to build out
a scalable content system that works for you.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable
SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one.