In this post I’m going to show you how to scale your content marketing.
(Step-by-step)
In fact, this process has helped me publish over 326,649 words of blog content over the last year.
Plus: a new flagship course, dozens of social media posts, email newsletters, YouTube video scripts, and more.
And in today’s post I’ll show you exactly how I scaled up.
- Step #1: Break Down Your Writing Process Into TINY Steps
- Step #2: Create an Organized Content Calendar
- Step #3: Plan Out Your Content Schedule For The Next 6-8 Months
- Step #4: Create Outlines For Upcoming Posts
- Step #5: Write Content Based on Firsthand Knowledge and Experience
- Step #6: Hire Writers With Actual Experience
- Step #7: Staff Up Your Content Team
- Bonus: Repurpose Content Into New Formats
Step #1: Break Down Your Writing Process Into TINY Steps
I used to think of “writing content ” as a single step.
But I recently learned that creating content is actually made up of several smaller steps.
Back in the day, I’d do all of these steps myself. Which meant that I could only publish a new post every 4-6 weeks.
Fortunately, because I focused 100% on quality over quantity, the Backlinko blog grew like crazy …even though I didn’t publish that often.
But at a certain point, traffic to the blog started to stall.
And I realized that it was pretty much impossible to grow a blog past a certain point with only 10-12 posts per year.
I also realized that I didn’t need to execute every single step myself.
In other words:
I could focus on the stuff that I was good at (like keyword research and writing). And get help with the things I wasn’t good at (editing, design, visuals).
Which helped my content creation process go from this:
To this:
Now that I have a team helping me out with content, we published 3x more blog content last year than ever before.
Without sacrificing quality.
That said:
Your content creation process will probably look different than mine.
There may be more steps. Or fewer steps.
The idea here isn’t to follow the same process that we use here at Backlinko.
Instead, your goal should be to document all of the steps that you follow for creating content.
Then, get experts to help with some of those steps.
Step #2: Create an Organized Content Calendar
This is another lesson that I had to learn the hard way.
When I first started Backlinko, I wrote, edited and published everything myself.
Which meant that Backlinko’s editorial calendar lived in my head.
I would literally think to myself: “OK, the on-page SEO infographic is going out on Tuesday. And then I send the newsletter about link building next Tuesday. And on March 5th, we have the case study coming out”.
The closest thing I had to a content calendar was a “Blog Post Content Ideas” spreadsheet that listed out topics that I wanted to cover.
And once I started to get help with content, I’d get emails from my team at least once per week:
“Hey Brian, what’s the status on the case study? That’s coming out on March 5th, right? I don’t see that written down anywhere”.
Not good.
Even though I was starting to build a content team, I was still the bottleneck.
So I decided to create a simple Google Sheet that laid out the next few months of content for the blog.
As you can see, this sheet isn’t super organized. But at least we had a single place to coordinate and plan upcoming blog content.
Which was progress.
But over the last year or so I learned that having a content calendar isn’t enough.
For your content calendar to do its job, it needs to be SUPER organized.
(This is especially true if you’re putting out lots of 10x content, like ultimate guides, industry studies or content hubs).
Like I mentioned in Step #1, “creating content” is a process with dozens of smaller steps.
And if you want to scale up, you need a way to list out each step that needs to be done. And the current status of those steps.
Otherwise, and trust me on this one, something WILL fall through the cracks.
Today, our content calendar is more of a project management than an actual calendar (we use Notion):
So yeah, if you already have a content calendar, great.
If not, I’d make that a top priority.
And even if you DO have a calendar, I’d take a second look at it to see if there’s any way that you can improve it.
Specifically, try to have every single tiny step laid out as a checklist. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.
Step #3: Plan Out Your Content Schedule For The Next 6-8 Months
Planning out Backlinko’s blog content has been a game changer for us.
Before, my team and I would have maybe 2-3 posts planned out in advance.
(In fact, sometimes I’d only start writing a post AFTER the last one came out).
This led to rushed projects, stressed out staff, and posts that weren’t as good as they could have been.
Today, we have the next 6-8 months of content planned out.
Which is a HUGE stress reducer.
Everyone on the team knows exactly what’s coming up. So there’s zero stress wondering what the future looks like.
The other great thing about having a 6-8 month plan is that you can batch things.
Especially keyword research.
So instead of logging into a keyword research tool every single time you want to write something, you can spend a day 100% focused on finding topics and keywords.
Then, map those topics out in your content calendar for the next few months.
Now, there’s one thing I should point out here:
This plan isn’t set in stone. You can always change, add, remove or shuffle things around.
For example, we recently had a relaunch of one of our popular guides on the schedule.
But one day I thought of something that would work even better: a content marketing tips list post.
So I replaced the relaunch with that. Not a big deal.
You obviously don’t want to mess with the schedule every day.
Otherwise, it kinda defeats the purpose of having a schedule in the first place.
But it’s totally fine to occasionally replace or change something once in a while. Especially if you make the change super far in advance.
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