By: Michael Brown
If you're like most content marketers, you spent a good chunk of the last few months creating and refining your 2021 content strategy. You addressed topics, audiences, cadence, and distribution channels. You have it all figured out...except perhaps for one key question: "how many writers will it take to execute this plan?"
Content creation is no longer a one-person job. It's not even a one-department job. Brands of all sizes are quickly adopting a community-based approach to content creation, which includes a mix of in-house writers, freelancers, and guest contributors.
Might this be the year for your brand to do the same?
This post will discuss the value of content diversity and the steps required for building a modern writing team.
How Many Writers Should You Hire?
Before we attempt to answer this question, let’s first note an important caveat on the term “hire.” For the sake of this discussion, we take hire to mean:
Full-time employee (paid a nominal wage)
Freelancer (paid per hour or per project)
Unpaid guest contributor (paid with bylines and high-fives)
Basically, we’re referring to anyone that you’re going to task with creating content, regardless of their official employment status.
Now with that out of the way, let’s take a look at some other factors to consider.
Metrics
Does content move the needle for your company? Does it have a direct impact on new sales and revenue? Or does it play more of a vanity/supporting role?
If content is a mission-critical part of the operation, then you’ll obviously want to have a larger team of writers. If not, the roster can be scaled back to something more modest and manageable.
Budget
When it comes to content budgets, marketers generally find themselves in one of three situations:
No budget: Mostly solopreneurs, non-profits, and bootstrapped companies that simply don’t have the funds to finance large-scale content production. In these cases, the only real option is to scale with unpaid guest contributors.
Floating budget: There is a budget, but it’s largely unknown to the marketer, as they would have to seek approval for new expenses.
Defined budget: There’s a definitive line item for content creation, and the marketer is tasked with allocating that to content in the most effective manner. This is most common at funded startups and enterprise organizations.
Ultimately, your budget (or lack thereof) shouldn’t prevent you from engaging more writers in 2021 if that’s a goal. It will only affect the terms by which you engage with them.
Cadence
Some brands publish a blog every quarter. Others publish a blog every 4 hours. In the past, a brand’s content cadence was usually determined by a combination of the metrics (i.e. the content generates measurable results) and budget (i.e. they can spend to produce).
This is no longer the case. With a modern writing team, any brand can now employ an aggressive cadence with enough writers. Still, you need to define an ideal cadence for your brand and build a writing team that can support it.
Content Types
Are you publishing mostly top-of-funnel pieces? Or are you publishing highly technical content that requires a great deal of domain expertise? The answer to these questions will have a significant impact on the number of writers you’ll want to work with this year.
Generalist pieces are easy to procure and produce. You just need the writers to adhere to your brand style guide. Technical content is another story. You need them to hit the mark in terms of tone and voice, but you also need them to know a certain topic inside and out. This makes them more scarce (and more costly).
Time
Last but least is time; the amount of effort needed to find and manage a broader writing team.A good way to figure this out is by asking yourself the following questions:
Do we have a detailed style guide that shows writers how to succeed?
Do we have a formal process for edits and feedback?
Do we have a tool or platform to organize content production?
Do we have someone who can act as an editor/manager for these writers?
If the answer to those questions is “yes” then your time will be spent wisely. If not, then trying to bring in additional writers will cause a lot of confusion and frustration.
Figuring out how many writers you need is a delicate balancing act. Hiring too few writers could lead to either overwhelming them with too much work or burning them out. Hiring too many writers could result in too much idle time, causing writers to find work elsewhere.
The Benefits of a Modern Writing Team
Unless you hire enough writers, your marketing efforts could stall or crash. Think of your writing team as a cog in your company's overall infrastructure. If that cog breaks down or doesn't move fast enough, that slows or derails all other marketing efforts.
Hiring a writing team allows you and your team to shift effortlessly between content strategy, SEO, social media, and other non-writing tasks.
Additional benefits include:
Eliminating Stale Content: Even if you’re a pro at keeping your creative bank full, the constant pressure to publish can cause problems. At some point, many brands start publishing repetitive ideas just for the sake of filling the editorial calendar. The modern approach ensures you always have a rotation of fresh ideas filling your calendar.
Diversifying Labor: What happens when a sole contributor leaves a company? Suddenly the publishing cadence grinds to a halt while the company hunts for a new content marketing manager. This approach will diversify labor to protect the brand and ensure the story continues to grow as the workforce evolves.
Keeping Content Fatigue at Bay: Sometimes you just need to give your internal contributors room to breathe to avoid burnout. By expanding your writing team, you can create balance between internal talent and external contributors. This ensures everyone creates content at peak performance rather than forming peaks and valleys in content quality.
For a deeper understanding of the benefits, check out this blog post.
Small vs. Large: Weighing the Pros and Cons
Every approach to content creation has its own pros and cons. Let’s start with those around working with a small group of writers:
Pros:
Less chance of duplicate content: It's easier for a few writers to source and reference materials they created for you in folders or by memory.
Style consistency: Working with a few writers means you're communicating with fewer people about style guides and related issues.
Cons:
Content limits: There's a limit to how much content a few writers are capable of producing.
Scheduling issues: If more than one writer faces a scheduling conflict, you don't have many coverage options.
Constant recruiting: When you work with a few writers, and one or more of them stop accepting assignments or move on from your company, that means you have to find other writers to fill those gaps.
Now contract that with the pros and cons of working with a larger group of writers.
Pros:
Scaling more content: When you're working with multiple writers, it's easier to scale content production.
Adequate coverage: Working with a group of writers allows you to create a consistent content flow resistant to disruptions.
A broad range of expertise: If you need coverage for a wide variety of ideas, you can draw from your pool of writers for industry expertise, knowledge, and experience.
Cons:
Management: The more writers you have in your pool, the greater the need for a content manager to track communications and invoices.
Vetting: Creating a pool of writers is more than a numbers game. You must ensure they're professional and produce the highest quality content.
You’ll get a better sense of how this might look for you in our “example team” section below.
Step for Building a Modern Writing Team
The last thing any brand or company should do is jump in too quickly when building a modern writing team. Remember, just because several writers are suitable for specific content pieces, this fact doesn't mean they can handle everything you want to do.
Start with the following steps and questions to consider when building your writing team:
Step 1: Content Types
Determine what types of content your business needs to support your content marketing goals.
For example, do you need:
Ad copy
Emails
Landing page copy
Long and short-form articles
Social media content
Webpage copy, including your home and about pages
Whitepapers and eBooks
Video scripts
Step 2: Categorization
Divide these types of content into categories and determine if you need multiple writers to work within each category. Refine categorization by asking writers:
What vertical is their specialty?
What is their favorite type of content to write?
Can they exhibit results they've received from their content? (i.e., testimonials, social shares, and more)
Step 3: Experience & Skills
Identify the specific experience and skills writers must possess to produce the types of content you need. Questions to ask yourself:
Can you easily identify the writer's strengths through their existing content?
Do the writer's experience and skills match the kind of content you need?
Does the writer have a portfolio and, if so, does it showcase high-quality work?
What goals are you trying to achieve with this writing team? (i.e., increasing traffic, developing authority, and more)
Step 4: The Interview
After identifying writers you'd like to work with, it's time to schedule an interview to understand them better. Here are examples of questions to consider during the interview process:
What's your content specialty? You might hear general answers that include, "I'll write about anything," when it might be better to hear, "I specialize in long-form content, but I do have experience writing landing pages and social media copy."
What's your industry specialization? There's nothing wrong with a writer being a generalist who likes writing about multiple topics. However, you might need writers to cover a specific niche requiring specific specialties—like health, legal, and environmental writers, for example.
What process do you follow when writing content? Every writer has separate processes for brainstorming, researching, outlining, writing and editing their work. While their exact process isn't a critical factor, you want to make sure they're using reputable resources when researching and that they can follow your style guide.
You can find more advice for vetting writers here.
Example Writing Team
Let’s take a look at what a modern writing team might look like for a hypothetical company with the following criteria.
Industry: B2B technology
Content drives 50% of new deals
Desired monthly content cadence:
20 blog posts
1 premium offer
1-2 case studies
10-15 emails and newsletters
Daily social content
Budget: $4,000 per month (excludes payroll)
In this case, the writing team might look like the following:
1 in-house content marketing manager to oversee production, editing and distribution
1 in-house writer to focus on the premium offers, emails, and case studies
3 freelance writers to handle the bulk of blog posts (mostly the top-of-funnel stuff)
2-3 guest contributors for occasional blog posts and byline articles
Although this is a hypothetical, it’s indicative of how we see brands using nDash to scale content production. Hopefully, you can start to envision how a team like this can ensure high productivity, minimize the likelihood of writer burnout, and leverage the division of labor.
Pulling Everything Together
Ultimately, only you can determine how many writers to hire this year. We hope this post has given you confidence that it’s not only possible -- even with a limited budget -- but also preferable to keeping your content production in the hands of a smaller group.
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About the author:
Mike Brown is the co-founder of nDash, a content platform for brands and writers. He's a lifelong resident of New England and enjoys basketball, writing, and spending time with family. You can learn more about Mike and nDash at www.ndash.com.