Building a Content "Dream" Team

voLdie

voLdie

Cody
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I feel like I am dealing with full-blown autism while trying to put together a solid content team.

Strategy so far:
  • Hired 3 agencies and the quality is just not there. You can smell the non-native English from a mile away. My niche requires some decent knowledge but nothing that special. Need to go in-house clearly.
Building my Upwork "dream" team:
  • Put out an ad asking for "long-term writers"
  • In the ad, I stated there would be a test article of 1k words with a rough outline to gauge quality.
  • Had 3 required questions in the Job Posts
    • What is your rate per 1k words
    • Can you use Slack / average response time for communication
    • Average turnaround per 1k word article
  • While I didn't need all these people in Slack I figured it was another way to push them and see who will go the extra mile.
  • Sent out 6 articles to the "best" writers that applied. 6 / 34.
  • 3 were shit and required way too much editing and formatting with the English being garbage. Most writers were from East Asia, 2 in the UK, and 1 in Serbia.
  • They all finished the articles in 1 - 2 days then I send over another article right away bumping the word count to 2k. I kept all these writers in somewhat of a topic cluster in hopes of not needing them to context switch too often.
  • Serbian dude is the shit and while not perfect goes out of his way to stay in constant communication and always goes 300-500 words over the required count (I like that)
  • Other 2 writers are on their 2nd `job`. Let me know if these messages look familiar to y'all...
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Mother fuck.

I assume my best course of action is to keep the Serbian dude and do another "test" round of hires?

I also have had some opportunities to provide some content to competitors that include a link. The topic is somewhat specialized and needs top-end shit. The links are gold though so I need to not fuck this up.

Does anyone have any tips here? Just continue to hire and fire until I have a team?

What kind of turnaround should I expect as far as TAT and amount per week from each writer?

I'm thinking of staying with my topic cluster author idea. I can then have writers specialize in varying difficulties of writing.

Less $ for easier listicle and review type content, more $ but less work for the more specialized stuff.

I am also recording my editing/formatting after receiving the articles to send back to the "keeper" writers to hopefully continue making their end product a little closer to "done".

For images, I am working on a Python script so I can:
  • Load up a folder with images for the post
  • The image is then uploaded to Canva into my "blog post image" template
  • Downloaded and ran through Google's Squoosh CLI for compression / resize
  • Uploaded to WP added after each paragraph, centered, and alt text grabbed from the heading above
I am also pumping out about 2k words myself per day and have about 20k words coming in over the next few days. My budget is currently 1k-2k per month expense-wise so I am trying to maximize that as much as possible.

I live in a town with one of the biggest universities in the US. I am thinking about trying to hire straight from the school in some capacity. Has anyone worked with universities/college students on their content teams?

Figuring this shit out as I go.

I will keep this updated as I stumble into the inevitable pitfalls and refinements needed to build a successful content team.
 
I have hired writers from Upwork and my results have been similar to yours, though my experience is limited.

The best advice I can give is that if there is any hint of something not being great with them, then cut your losses and run.

I hired two writers so far that worked out for any length of time. One was American and another was from South America.

To find them I probably screened through 60 candidates (maybe more) and had 6 or 8 who got test articles. I put at least one question in my job post which helps make it easier to screen the candidates. It can be a decent amount of work to screen all those candidates and I have always wanted to do it as efficiently as possible.

I have found that the good writers are just good from the start. I'm not saying I don't ask for revisions or need to edit their work, but they are 90% there. I shoot for getting them a little better with some feedback and edit the rest myself. The writers I have wanted to hire and work with were also very good with communication. Radio silence has always been a bad sign.

I don't give my writers deadlines other than for my trial articles which get a one week deadline. The best writers have always completed the article in one or two days. Everyone who has given an excuse or been late on the initial article has been an outright waste of my time.

The best writers I have worked with have also been fairly new to the platform.

I pay a $50-$60 flat rate per article for my writers. Article lengths vary from about 1-2.5k words. It is a fairly technical niche where experience is helpful. The writers I have worked with turned in about 1.5-2k words on average per week. All of my job postings have made it clear that I am looking for one article per week for a long term project with the possibility for more.

I have heard that trying to hire local college writers can work well. I would love to hear how it goes for you if you give it a shot.

Good luck with hiring your Dream Team. I'll be following along to try and pick up some tips myself.
 
Be careful that you aren't filtering people out with arbitrary things that might not really matter for the job, because you have to sift through a lot of candidates and assign a lot of trial articles as it is, and filtering people out too willy-nilly can end up being counter productive.

Here's a random example...

Let's say you assign a few test articles to different people. A few of them finish it the same day, another person takes 3 days to hand it in. The 3 days can make them seem slower or worse, especially if you're making very quick judgements, but what if it took them longer to get your trial article done because they had their existing clients as a priority?

As a person looking for a trial article, that's not ideal and can lose them points... but put yourself in the position of someone whose been their client for a year and you're going to be happy they take longer on trial articles by completing their existing clients work first.

This isn't always going to be the case, but just in general, I try to be really mindful about this when I'm hiring someone. There's also people who don't communicate daily or reply super fast, but they get their writing done and it's solid. I'd rather have a poor communicator who gets their stuff done, than someone whose quick to reach out about why it's not done.

Granted, there are plenty of examples where you're correct to cut the person loose quickly, where the above examples don't apply. Just something to think about.
 
My theory - if you want people to treat your project as a freelancing gig, then go to freelancing platforms. If you want them to treat it as a job, then go to job boards.

I find writers from LinkedIn because people who look for jobs are there. And IMO they take it more seriously than someone looking for a freelancing gig.
 
The return on posting content to linked in if you’re a decent writer is astonishing.

Based on a lot of the journals here most webmasters would make more doing that than running their sites.

It’s annoying but it’s where the head space is the best for value generating. The internet’s bad at generating professional context. Linked in is awkward but the front of the pack.
 
secretagentdad said:
The return on posting content to linked in if you’re a decent writer is astonishing.
Click to expand...
I am not sure if I got your context right, but what I meant in my post was to use the free job posting on LinkedIn to get my writers. I am not using my LinkedIn profile to seek leads.
 
I was just blow Harding about how of course the good content writers are their. They have free sign up organic networking that actually allows people to get value.
Microsoft hasn’t killed it yet.
 
Some suggestions after a quick read-through:
  • For a budget of $1-2k per month, you're better off looking for one good writer with decent capacity. You don't need a team. Less people = easier quality management.
  • Make your questions need some creativity. Ask what their experience in the niche is, or even just what they did yesterday. Better to gauge their normal writing ability.
  • Set the rate yourself. IMO this should be per 1,000 words and upwards of $45/1000 if you need them to have expertise or do technical research.
Do all of that and you should get more hires and more interest from the applicants. Pay them well and show you can be a great client - you'll be surprised how much easier it is to find good writers.
 
My experience of hiring from upwork was like this-
  • Writers with somewhat experience have their own SOP, which most won't match with what you want from your contents.
    Fix: Either take them through a quick onboarding process(a teachable course of yours or so), or provide them with pre-made content structure.
  • The commitment issue is there, especially among those who're now exploring multiple client projects and will pick up the most comfortable(pressure and money, both-wise) gig.
    Fix: Create a rinse and repeat funnel for the newcomers and promote the proven ones to your premium payscale.
Finally, I've moved on to an in-house team of writers whom I train via my own course at teachable. They're treated as employees with all the benefits, and they have their KPIs.

Working way better than the upwork ones. Gotta compromise the native tone, though. Trying to make it up with better structures/original stuff across articles.
 
Alrighty, a bit of an update.

I have been through about 14 writers.

I have 2 gems but they can max pump out like 5k - 7k words per week.

One of the writers in Eastern Europe has shown an interest in more responsibility so I have him updating the SOPs and sending suggestions my way. Will continue to pay this dude well and hopefully have him in a more managerial role as I grow.

I am continuing to "test" writers via Upwork and have added more questions in the "apply" section.
  • How much per 1k words
  • How many words per week
  • Include a link to the live article that you are most proud of
  • Very specific question in my niche that requires critical thinking and makes it easy to detect shit English
This seems to be helping. I may build out a mini-course for onboarding like @Ahmed71 mentioned. This can test grammar and formatting comprehension.

If I can screen total shit from the test article phase I don't mind spending the money and continuing to jam writers through my funnel.

Things I have learned/figured out so far...
  • $30 - $40 per article appears to be the sweet spot for quality content i.e. reviews, best of, and more bottom-of-funnel targeted articles
  • I can get $15 to $25 per article for the more informational posts. The key is I have topic clusters where they follow the same format but different keywords. I built out a very tight outline so they are basically filling out a "form" / answering questions. Harder to fuck up.
  • Created a general "Content Bible" and added Loom videos https://pastebin.com/rGQ23Wef (images and videos added in the live version).
  • Created SOPs for specific types/clusters of articles to keep formatting consistent.
  • I am realizing I want this as close to done as possible so I can rip through an editing/formatting checklist that I can also build out SOPs for to eventually outsource(saving money by editing/formatting myself currently).
  • Learning to trust the "winners" and fire the shit keeps this as more of a conveyer belt where I am stacking solid writers.
What's Next
I will keep tweaking SOPs and the hiring funnel until I can push 15 - 20 articles per week anywhere from 1k - 3k words per article.

While I would love to have 1 writer I find that for my niche I need some "specialized" writers and some more generic ones.

Some of these articles take time, which leads to me needing more writers.

Why am I doing this?
The obvious, I want to be able to push out a ton of content and hate writing.

The not so obvious, I have a handful of websites and would like to systemize and organize a team to be able to continue to scale.

My traffic is growing fast as shit and I would prefer to build a business at this point in life vs a hustle.
 
Hiring from universities sounds great, a friend of mine did it in the UK, but found a lot of the students became lazy, missed deadlines, and were happier out partying in the bar etc.
They then rushed to submit work that was sub standard and he ended up hiring from overseas instead.
 
Adding the Content Notion board I use.

Categories
- Templates for General and Topic Cluster Posts
- Topic Clusters / Pillars to track coverage
- To-Do (I throw topics in here as I do research or if something pops in my head)
- Doing (Posts I am personally writing)
- Outsourced (Assigned to a writer and which one has it)
- Optimize (ready to be formatted and posted)
- Done (post is live)

Card Layout
- Topic
- Writer (which writer has what article)
- Type (the type of post i.e. info, best of, review, etc. This also corresponds to a template/outline on the left)
- Word Count
- Date (So shit doesn't get old)

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I am thinking of adding an OPEN section so writers can simply choose articles that are within their skill set/interest. This will require some more thinking/structure.

I have been liking this setup as it seems to scale.
  • Throw in keywords/topics from anywhere.
  • Add more writers to handle the backlog.
  • Optimize section can be outsourced eventually.
  • The template/SOPs are all in a place where they will be used and not lost in the ether.
 
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