Writing is a very basic skill that everybody possesses, but not all are great at it. Site owners or managers like you who aren't as well-spoken and articulate have the luxury of outsourcing or hiring a writing team to do the job for them.
At the tip of the iceberg, there's Upwork and Elance if you want to build a team by choosing from its talented pool of writers hungry to prove themselves capable of any writing task given to them.
If you're looking for editorial content that relies on storytelling to effectively gets its point across, then there's Skyword, Scripted, and Contently for you.
There are other writing services out there that specialize in a particular niche. For instance, if you're looking to build on academic content for your site or blog, you can choose from this list from Omnipapers blog that feature the best essay writing services online according to ranking.
Once hiring the right people for the writing job, all you need to do is come up with a content plan and strategy to ensure that the posts passing through their hands meet your criteria.
However, the problem lies in not being able to communicate your content marketing strategy to your writing team. This is due to disorganization or lack of proper channels to discuss the project effectively.
As manager, you want to make the content process much easier by delegating all writing tasks to your team and concentrating on coming up with strategies instead. If this is the case, then below are the marketing hacks that you should lay out to your team and let them do the dirty work.
Establish editorial guidelines
Laying out the ground rules on how your content should read is key to building a readership to your blog or site. You need to establish a consistent tone that resonates with your readers on all your posts and your social media updates. Sticking to your tone of voice at all times helps build reader expectation so that they know what they'll get when reading your posts.
By creating an internal editorial guidelines that all your writers should follow, you can expect to maintain and strive for the same quality from all your posts, regardless of who wrote which. You can start by reading this post at Hubspot. From here, refer to these points mentioned in the post to help you craft your guidelines:
- Who will come up with the topic? Will you be the one to assign topics for each writer or will the writers come up with article topics that will need your approval first before they start writing it?
- How will your post be formatted? How many images and outbound links are the writers allowed to include in the article? Regarding the images, what will be the sources where writers will take the image? What are the minimum words for each post?
- What will the style of writing be? Will it take the business and professional approach or do you intend to take a conversational tone for the articles?
These are just some of the things that you need to consider when drafting your editorial guidelines.
Develop content calendar
The key to developing a well-oiled writing team machine churning out content in record time is an content calendar. This is created by outlining the different topics that will be written in the next few weeks or months and scheduling them within the same period of time.
If you have decided to come up with topics for your blog or site, use title generators to automate the process of thinking titles for your posts. Just enter your keyword and the tool will do the work for you. Keep refreshing the results until you find a title that fits your content needs.
Furthermore, you can improve thge content title by using this Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule. Running you title using this tool will give you an aggregated score that determines the impact it can have to your readers. The higher the score, the better its effect.
Once you have come up with multiple article topics and titles, search for online resources on Google to use as talking points for your articles, as well as supplementary readings if readers wish to learn more about the subject you touched upon.
You can then schedule each post on your calendar so that everything is placed out equally and ensure that you don't leave weeks without content. Follow your calendar schedule to provide readers with a steady stream of content .
Finish these weeks before the actual date of publishing your first few posts so that your writing team will have a headstart in writing these.
Review their work using online tools
If you're not a writer, then you're probably not the best person to review the written works of your team. However, you can still check for grammar, spelling, and sentence composition using tools like Hemingway and Grammarly.
The former lets you see whether the sentences in the article get too complex for your readers and your use of passive verbs and adverbs, both of which are no-nos in beautiful writing. The purpose of Hemingway is to simplify your writing and making it tighter by identifying unnecessary and difficult to understand words .
The latter is geared towards correcting your grammar so you can produce impeccable and well-written content.
Refer to the article's performance using both tools should help you determine the ones that are doing their jobs correctly against those who don't.
Create incentive plans
As the site owner or manager, it is your responsibility to encourage teams to perform under pressure and keep pushing themselves to the limit so that the goals and milestones are reached, if not exceeded. One way of facilitating this is to develop incentive plans to reward the best performing team members.
Before doing this , you need to set up clear and achievable goals for the writers so they can aim for something for a reasonable amount of time. You can set the metrics according to the number of posts written, number of social shares it achieves within a week, for example.
For more information on how to get this done, check out this post at Salesforce.
Final thoughts: Managing your writing team should be made each easier by following the tips above. By establishing the groundwork early on, writers can simply focus on doing what they're good at - writing compelling content that resonates with your target audience. At the end of the day, everybody wins: you receive the best possible content from them and they get paid handsomely for their efforts!
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