Writing engaging and relevant content is a crucial part of marketing and driving website traffic. For many entrepreneurs, business owners, and small companies without dedicated marketing or content teams, it can be challenging to generate enough quality content on a consistent basis. There are a number of approaches you can take to get help with writing your content and overcoming common challenges.
Outsourcing Content Writing
One obvious solution for getting help with writing content is to outsource some or all of your content creation to freelance writers. There are many talented writers available on sites like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr who can craft blog posts, website pages, social media posts, and other types of content for you at an affordable hourly or per-project rate.
When outsourcing content, be sure to provide clear guidelines and instructions for writers. Give them a style guide with branding, tone of voice guidelines, and topics you want covered. Provide competitor analyses, keyword research, and targeting goals to help the writer produce audience-focused content that achieves your marketing objectives. Conduct writer interviews to find someone who understands your industry and business. It’s also wise to proof read outsourced content before publishing to check for quality.
Using Content Marketing Agencies
While freelancers offer an affordable way to outsource individual pieces, full-service content marketing agencies can take on the entire content strategy, planning, writing, and creation process. Agencies employ whole content production teams including strategists, writers, editors, graphic designers and more to handle the planning and volume of content needed to fully implement a content marketing plan.
Agencies are a great option if your content goals require consistent delivery of various content types across blogs, social media, videos and other channels. They compile keyword research, perform competitor analyses, develop editorial calendars and style guides and take care of outputting finished content usually on a scheduled delivery basis such as weekly or monthly. Agencies are obviously more expensive than freelancers however they take content stress and workload off your plate.
Hiring an In-House Writer
For businesses that produce a high-volume of content or require specialist industry knowledge, hiring a dedicated in-house writer may make the most sense compared to outsourcing. In-house writers become fully immersed in your business, target markets and brand voice. They are readily available for real-time collaboration with marketing and product teams who can provide rapid feedback and input on topics.
In-house writers develop deep expertise that allows for more consistent, high-quality output. They can focus entirely on content without switching between clients. The salary and benefits of an employee does represent a larger ongoing cost than outsourcing content work. You’ll need sufficient content workflows and volume to justify a full-time writing role.
Using Employee and Customer Contributors
Rather than solely relying on outside writers, leverage internal resources by empowering relevant employees to contribute content. Subject matter experts within customer support, sales, product development and other teams hold a wealth of industry and company knowledge. Bring these cross-functional voices into your content by having employees author blog posts, create case studies from customer success stories, or share their professional insights and experiences.
Posting content from various departments humanizes your brand and builds different relationships with readers. Still appoint a content manager to assist employees with strategic guidance, editing, and publishing workflows. You can also engage customers by hosting user-generated content through challenges, questions and other participatory features on your website and social profiles.
Automating Content Creation
While automation can’t replace all human-written content, it provides opportunities to supplement writing with machine-generated articles on specific topics. Tools like WordAI, SpinnerChief and Spin Rewriter utilize AI and algorithms to spin unique articles from source text such as existing blog posts, news articles, or transcripts. With some human editing, AI-generated articles can populate targeted sections of your site or feed social profiles.
Additional automation options extract long-form insights from documents, social media, and websites using summarization tools. Some tools like Anthropic scrape and organize public data sources into article form. These approaches streamline the research and initial draft writing process. Machine generated content still requires human oversight, refinements and promotions for maximum effectiveness. Automation works best for supplemental rather than primary on-site content.
Leveraging User & Reader Input
Include readers in the content creation process by publishing questions, polls and prompts that engage them to share their perspectives, stories, advice, recommendations and industry knowledge through on-site comment features. These real user contributions provide authentic and helpful material that humanizes brands while allowing limited staff to maximize engagement.
For e-commerce brands, invite product reviews and crowd-sourced guides by providing incentives. Look at data on frequently searched terms and questions via analytics to write tutorials addressing those direct needs. Post summaries of reader support inquiries, comments and social mentions to surface issues for coverage. Pose questions and discussion topics on social media that encourage input and responses with insights for future posts.
Managing the Process
To successfully get help with writing content from various sources requires careful management. Develop style guides, editorial calendars and strategic briefs to maintain consistency of tone, accuracy and to keep all contributors focused on goals. Assign a content marketing manager or lead writer to oversee planning, delegate briefs, collect and edit submissions or outsourced copy, approve/reject submissions and coordinate publishing across all channels.
Set measurable goals and key metrics of success for different content initiatives so you can continually refine processes based on performance. Use project management software or shared editorial calendars to streamline contributor coordination and content supply chain visibility. Brief outsourced writers on optimization requirements and approving officials on brand compliance. With a mix of collaborative approaches and the right processes, any business or organization can enrich their content supply.
There are many ways to get help writing content through outsourcing, automation, empowering employees or nurturing reader contributions – or a mix of these approaches. The key is finding scalable solutions aligned with your budgets, capabilities and content goals. With clear planning, management and oversight of workflows, companies of any size can strengthen their content creation process and maintain consistent publishing schedules to grow their authority, engagement and marketing results over time.
Andrew Stroud