At the heart of every great content marketing campaign is high-quality content that connects with readers and solidifies your brand as a thought-leader. Without the right team of writers even the best content strategies can fall flat. We’re sharing 4 tips that will help ensure your writers produce quality content every time.
Build Up A Large Network
The first step towards creating consistently amazing content is to build up a network of 75+ freelance writers who can cover the bulk of your content creation. If you’re sticking within one industry this number can likely be much smaller but if you’re servicing a variety of industries bulking up your team is the best way to ensure you’ll always have someone for the job.
What we’ve found through this process is that while some writers will come to you highly recommended there is a lot of trial and error here. Some of our best writers are also the most disorganized and have trouble hitting deadlines. These are things you can plan around but this is precisely why we don’t leave big or high priority projects in the hands of a writer we’ve never worked with before. While trying out new writers can feel like a gamble or risk the payoff is even greater when you have an all-star you can count on to deliver for the next six months or year.
Play To Their Strengths
When vetting out writers we’ve had the most success in letting them focus in on one or two specific subsets of an industry. Instead of trying to find one person to take on everything, which may be less time consuming to manage, we pride ourselves on building unique teams around each client. This way we never feel like our writers are reaching and we know they feel confident in their ability to tackle every project we send their way.
Don’t Be Cheap
In the Upwork era it can be easy to simply look for the lowest price but now more than ever, you pay for what you get. Content creation needs more attention than most when outsourcing services and is often the easiest for clients and customers to pick apart.
Anyone that tells you content marketing is cheap does not have experience in creating great content—it’s an investment and the amount of time and energy you put into will be a direct reflection of the value it brings down the road. So, how do you strike a balance between being fair and getting ripped off? Play the field. The reality is that writer’s prices can vary greatly and while some are over-charging for their services there are plenty that are worth the money. This is where having a solid network of writers with diverse skillsets and price ranges plays to your advantage.
Provide Clear Direction
There is nothing worse than getting something back from a writer and feeling like they completely missed the mark. Sometimes all you want to do is get something off your plate and into a writer’s workflow but spending the time to provide enough details and direction will pay off big time down the road. We recommend creating a comprehensive style guide that writers can reference to make sure all content stays on brand and maintains a consistent tone. This is especially important when you have a whole team of writers working on one account.
