Building and Managing a Team of Freelance Writers

Vincent D’Eletto, owner of WordAgents, and MarketMuse Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Coyle talk about building content teams and managing freelance writers. Here are the webinar notes.

Why Outsource Content Creation to Freelancers?

Outsourcing enables you to leverage both time and expertise. It enables you to scale faster, taking advantage of opportunities at a fixed and quantifiable cost since freelance writers are paid per deliverable.

Preparation is Essential for Scaling

Create a blueprint on paper along with a clear vision before you outsource any content creation. That blueprint at a minimum should include an internal style guide, content types (blog posts, how-to, link-bait), and a workflow document.

Important Roles for an Effective Content Team

In smaller teams, individuals may assume one or more roles, but here are the core roles of a content team are:

1. Content Operations Manager
2. Content Creator
3. Proofreader
4. Editor

When looking to scale a content team, the roles of team leader and human resources are also an important factor.

How to Source Your Writing Team

There are a number of ways of finding quality candidates including:

• Job boards
• Classifieds
• Freelancer sites
• Facebook groups
• English departments
• Existing publications

Personality is a key determinant in determining whether to hire a content writer. 

Hiring and Managing Your Team

Subject matter experts don’t have to be stellar writers if they’re working as part of a team. They just need expert knowledge in their field to fact-check articles and provide guidance.

Writers may not have the desired level of experience, but with the right personality can be molded to perform to your standards. Give candidates specific instructions to follow during the application process. It’s a great way to filter out those who aren’t good at following directions.

Give them a paid test assignment to determine their writing ability. Hire writers on a probationary period between 30 to 90 days in order to evaluate whether or not they are a good fit for the content team.

AI-Enabled End-to-End Content Strategy

Jeff talks about MarketMuse and its use in content strategy including research, planning, briefing, writing, evaluating, and optimizing. Vincent discusses some other tools he uses including, Google Sheets, Asana, Formstack, Monday.com, Skype, Slack, Trello, and Zapier.