According to Techjury, content creators publish about 7.5 million blogs every day in 2022. In this crowd, you must stand out. And the best way to do so is by creating great-quality content fast. Techjury.net also found that businesses that blog consistently have a return on investment 13 times higher than those that don’t blog consistently. But how can you accelerate your content production process without sacrificing quality?
The easy answer is to use a content team. A well-run content team can cost your business much less than producing inefficient content. But content creation teams are only as good as the processes they follow. So, how do you create an efficient content production process?
5 Tips to Accelerate Your Content Production Process
1. Decide on Your Goals and Strategy
Before you even begin to create a production process, decide what you want to achieve with your content. Do you want to sell your products or services, inform your clients, or educate them? You can do this on a whole-blog basis or on a blog-by-blog basis. But be careful; your readers won’t want to only read blogs that try to sell to them, so make sure you include informative or educational blogs. The general rule is that 80% of your content should inform, educate, or entertain, and only 20% should explicitly promote your business.
While deciding on your goals or strategies, you must also decide how you’ll measure your content’s impact. KPIs are an invaluable tool for your business, as long as they align with your goals. There’s no point in tracking sales conversions on an informative blog because this will return misleading data.
2. Create an Efficient Process
Once you’ve decided on your goals and strategies, create an efficient process for them. There are many steps in creating content – research, writing, proofreading, and formatting – so you need some system to keep content flowing freely through the pipeline. Perhaps have a team responsible for each step of the process. That way, your team can focus on the job at hand rather than trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
You could also create a template and style guide for all your writers to use. This reduces the need for them to worry about formatting and frees them to focus on their creativity.
3. Prioritize Your Work and Tasks
Once you have a basic process in place, decide which tasks are most important. Is it important for you to have a large backlog of content before publishing? If this is the case, you might initially want to focus more on writing articles. If your priority is to create incredibly niche, detailed content, perhaps your time and effort would be better spent researching and planning. Only you can decide what your priorities are, and these may change depending on what you want to achieve. The most important thing is that your content team understands and supports these priorities, so you must decide what truly matters to your business.
Although this blog is about how to accelerate your content production, and we've just discussed setting priorities, the one thing that should never come before anything else, especially quality and accuracy, is speed. Producing content quickly is great, but if it contains typos or grammar errors, you risk ruining your reputation and driving customers away from your product or service, which is surely the opposite of what you want.
4. Address Bottlenecks When They Arise
With so much going on, bottlenecks are inevitable. Bottlenecks are anything that prevents content from flowing through your pipeline. It could be as simple as a staff shortage or as difficult as writer’s block. Regardless of how frustrating these bottlenecks are, remember that every writer or content creator faces challenges at some point (usually multiple times) in their career and finds ways to adapt and move forward. If it were simple, everyone would do it.
Writer's block is so common in the writing community that it's become a meme. But it's still a significant problem for writers. The good news is that it’s beatable. There are many blogs, including this one, that suggest ways to beat writer's block, but the best thing you can do is relax. The more stressed you are, the worse your writer's block becomes. So, take a break, do something different, and then return when you feel more refreshed.
5. Create an Actionable Content Calendar
The easiest way to prioritize your tasks is to use a content creation calendar. These are print or digital calendars that help content creators manage and schedule their content. Content calendars have many benefits, including keeping your team on track, maintaining consistency, and improving efficiency. You can read about all the benefits here.
Setting up a content calendar is simple, especially if you use one of the many available digital platforms. You don’t need to make them too complicated; even a spreadsheet could help. You just need something to plan your content. The main thing is that it’s actionable and that you have one because, as the adage goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.”
If you’re unsure where to start or have tried to implement a content strategy that turned out slow and inefficient, consider how other organizations manage their content. You won’t be able to implement a carbon copy of another organization’s strategy into your own because that organization will have personalized it to meet their needs. But you’ll get an idea of what works for them and how it might work for you.
Summary
Every business that produces content wants to get its content to the audience as soon as possible. But this is easier said than done. You’ll probably already have some process in place for creating content, but you should always be looking to improve its efficiency and speed. To do this, you should:
- Decide on your business’ goals and strategies.
- Use KPIs that align with these goals.
- Create an efficient process that works for your organization.
- Prioritize tasks according to what you want to achieve.
- But be careful not to prioritize speed over quality.
- Address bottlenecks as soon as they arise.
- Create an actionable content calendar.
- If you’re struggling, look at how other businesses are accelerating their processes.
Looking to Scale Your Content Production?
Thousands of businesses, from award-winning startups to Fortune 500 companies, have benefited from partnering with Proofed. Learn more about how we can help you scale your content production process by scheduling a call with our team today.
