Josh Pitzalis

July 12, 2022

Putting a content team together

Over the last week, I’ve been hiring writers and putting a content team together.

So far I've been working on content by myself. On my best week, I was able to publish 2 posts in a week. That left zero time and attention for anything else.

If content marketing is going to become our primary growth channel, I'll need help.

I hired several writers last year, and it was such a disaster. Most of the writers either quit after the first assignment or the writing was nowhere close to the quality we were expecting.

But I have to make this work.

Scaling up a content operation 

Emilia Korczynska is the head of marketing at Userpilot (a B2B SaaS platform for product managers). She just wrote a book called Content Operations where she chronicles how Userpilot went from releasing one post per week to 40 blog posts per month. She covers big-picture strategy and goes into generous detail on specific tactics and workflows. Reading about how it all came together has renewed my confidence in building a content team.

40 blog posts a month feels like overkill for us.

2 blog posts a week is more than enough, just as long as they don’t take up all of my attention.

I'm going to start by hiring two writers. It’s always better to hire people in pairs. You get a clearer picture of whether you're messing up or if the person you're working with just hasn't got it together. Learned this from Ryan Kulp's course on putting the sales team together. Working with multiple hires for a single role leads to more reusable instructions, workflows, and processes. 

I managed to finalize hiring my first two writers last week. I’m lining up two new candidates in case either party decides the work is not a good fit. 

What changed this time round

The biggest difference in my approach this time is the amount of time and effort I'm putting into the briefs for each article.  

Last time, I'd come up with a topic to write about, hand it to the writer and then expect them to do the research, and develop enough expertise to say something interesting about the topic.

The result was banal writing filled with generic advice. The only thing that was clear was how disinterested they were in the topic.

I thought the solution was to hire more expensive writers. Sliding up the pricing scale didn't have much impact.

Joining Benji and Devesh's Grow & Convert content marketing course and reading about how they've struggled with similar issues, I think my mistake was around what I thought the writer's job entailed.

Writers should not be expected to develop subject matter expertise. At least in the context of lower-funnel content marketing for SaaS products.

Now I do all the research, and the background reading, I develop the argument, structure the article, make a little instructional loom video, and then hand it to a writer to turn the substance of the article into a cohesive argument.

The brief format I’m working with now

This will change a lot over the next few months. Here’s what I'm working with at the moment.

  • Requirements - The primary keyword I'm going after and the word count.
  • Who is searching for this article and what are they trying to learn? -  This background context helps ensure the blog post is written for the right person, in the right context, and at the right expertise level.
  • How will this piece be better than the existing top 10 existing search results?  - This is by far the hardest bit of my contribution. This part justifies why a blog post needs to exist. If I mess this up, the article will be rubbish, even if it's written well. Nail it and the piece is solid even if it's written terribly.
  • Headline options - This is more of a sandbox where I can throw ideas for headlines I think if as I'm developing the argument. I don't expect the writer to use these headlines, they are meant more as inspiration and as a useful fallback if the writer can't come up with anything better.
  • Resources to read - I will do all the research and reading and then I'll include an important reading for them here. This will either be an interesting point of view and use arguments to include or it will be previously written that we've already produced on the topic that they should be aware of.
  • What not to cover - This bit is great. It has saved me so much back and forth. The importance of stating the obvious when working with new people is underappreciated.
  • Article outline - I'll either break the article down by its main arguments and have bullet points for each section or I'll just record a video with instructions. Or both. I also try and write the introduction given how disproportionately important it is.
  • Final checklist - This is useful for all those fiddly little details that accrue over time like remembering to include alt text, or to proofread with American English, etc.

My job is to construct the argument for them so that the posts are practically impossible to mess up. The writer's responsibility is to transform these detailed bullet points and instructions into the final article. 

Developing the brief takes about 50%-60% of the effort I'd put into writing a complete post. This lets me create 3-4 briefs a week with plenty of energy left over for everything else. 

I'm sure there will be plenty to figure out as we go, there always is. I'll share some of the posts we create once I have a few out the door.

These posts are thoughts-in-progress, they're meant to be conversational. If you have questions or thoughts let me know on Twitter.

Links to stuff I mentioned


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About Josh Pitzalis

Building effective marketing funnels for software businesses.