Sometimes, crafting content can be like banging your head against the wall—too many ideas, too many deadlines, too many writers, producers, and designers to wrangle. It can feel less like herding cats and more like fighting off a swarm of bees.
Congratulations! This is what having a wealth of content feels like, and it’s a way better problem to have than not enough content. Nevertheless, let’s fix it—there are solutions you can implement to get those unruly posts back in line. In fact, I’ve got eight for you. Use this list of tips, tools, and process tweaks on an ad hoc basis for a quick fix to a specific problem, or roll all of them into your process for a total content creation process makeover.
1. Make the Process Clear, Simple, and Accessible
Can your content creation process be explained in a few sentences, or does it require elaborate charts? If your contributors can’t follow your process easily, they won’t.
Take a hard look at your process and see what you can do to simply or clarify the steps. Make sure a well-written, reader-friendly guide to the process is available in an easy-to-access place for all potential contributors. When people bring an idea for future content, send them the guidelines directly.
For the medium-sized public relations firm I work for (and our content marketing clients), I prefer to stick to the basics when it comes to management applications and parameters. In fact, I typically just use Outlook and Excel for this—seriously.
Why so old school? Using familiar tools makes contributing easier for contributors outside the content marketing world.
2. Make Contributors Tie Their Posts to Content Goals and Categories
Submission forms can be an excellent funnel for this purpose in large organizations. For small ones, it’s probably fine to have contributors just email this information with the post. Make note of your process for this—and the goal and category options available to your contributors—in the aforementioned process document. Even though this information is probably easy to identify as you review the post, requiring a contributor to connect the dots for you forces them think about it as they draft.
One way to ensure this happens is to set up your writers as “Contributors” in their WordPress user profiles. This requires them to submit new posts to an Administrator before their work can be published. This creates a smooth review funnel that gives writers the ability to select a post category right from the sidebar.
If they don’t select a category, send it back to them and ask them to address the issue.
3. Use a Content Calendar
By laying out opportunities and tying them to specific dates, you simultaneously create a signup system for those who want to contribute and allow contributors to self-assign deadlines. This relieves some of the burden of assigning content, and also makes you less of a “bad guy” if you have to put your foot down when that deadline finally rolls around—after all, they chose it.
There are ample tools available for this. It can be as simple an outline in Word or Excel or an actual calendar like Outlook and Google Calendar. If you want something more robust, CoSchedule is a great tool, too.
4. Make Your Style Guide Easy to Follow
You may be seeing a pattern here. Making resources about your organization’s content creation accessible and easy to understand makes the process smoother for everyone. Think of these resources as pieces of content marketing themselves—for your content program.
However, don’t confuse “clear and easy to understand” with “simplified.” It’s not necessary to dumb down or eliminate complex rules that protect the brand. Just be thoughtful about how you present them to make them user-friendly.
At my firm, the assumed base for any style guide is…
