Scale your writing

Step-by-step Playbooks
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Contributors

@andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert @paul-boag

Business Benefits

Create content efficiently and meet your content goals.

Document your content lifecycle stages, from ideation and keyword research to publishing and archiving.

The classical stages are:

  • Ideation, topic and keyword research.
  • Choosing the content format.
  • Creating the outline or brief.
  • Creating the first draft.
  • Reviewing and approving the content.
  • Creating the visuals.
  • Adding the content to the CMS.
  • Quality check.
  • Publishing, choosing distribution channels, distributing the content.
  • Analyzing the results and optimizing the content.

Create content SOPs (standard operating procedures) for the lifecycle stages that require detailed instructions.

Produce a checklist of tasks that need to be done for each of the stages above. For example, what exactly is involved in checking quality, or how do you select good visuals?

Add your content ideas to a content calendar to give your team a single view of projects, tasks, ownership, and statuses.

Use a tool like Airtable or Notion for the calendar.


(Image Credit)

Include:

  • The working title.
  • Content-type (format).
  • Outline or draft URL.
  • Deadline for sending the outline to the writers.
  • Deadline for the draft.
  • Publishing date.
  • The person responsible for writing the content.
  • URL for visuals.
  • Status.

Assign each content topic to a funnel stage or search intent and a target audience or vertical, as per your content strategy.

This helps you keep an overview of which funnel stages are less covered, and which audiences or verticals are underserved.

Schedule your content 3-6 months in advance to identify and consolidate similar tasks across projects.

For example, if keyword research is a common task across projects, dedicate an entire day to the task for multiple projects.

Create templates for the main types of content that you plan to publish.

For example, you may want to have a template or outline for:

  • Blog articles
  • Case studies or customer success stories
  • White papers
  • Product pages.

Create templates for your visuals as well, to maintain consistency and stick to your brand guidelines. For example, you may want to create a set of templates for social media and another set for the visuals inside blog articles.

Put processes in place to ensure high quality content.

As well as a quality check stage, only write on topics you feel confident writing about. With other topics, either hire an expert in that field or interview experts.

Create briefs or outlines for the content that you plan to produce in the upcoming 2-3 months, to give the writers enough time to create the content.

Your brief should include the working title, target audience or vertical, desired conversion, the target keywords, the outline, the word count, and who you want to outrank. Include considerations like visuals, sequence, and references. For example, an on-page SEO guide can look something like this:

Chapter 1: On-page SEO basics

Chapter 2: Optimise your content for SEO

In first 100 words, title tags, H2s

Chapter 3: Optimise tile and description tags

Frontloading stuff from https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo

Visual of meta description tag template.

Hire specialists who can do one job well, so that you can scale up production faster than working with generalists.

Professionals to consider hiring include content coordinators, designers, editors, developers, data miners, social media promoters, performance analysts, and SEO experts.

Repurpose your published content into different formats.

For example, a white paper can be turned into a series of videos, a sequence of blog articles, an infographic, or a drip campaign for qualifying your inbound leads.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:25:28Z