Example Format
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Example Format

This startup had an in-house content marketer who was writing articles that ranked extremely high in Google and organically acquired users. Our experiments concluded that scaling their content marketing efforts would prove to be exponentially valuable, so we recommended a path to outsourcing the job and scaling efforts with easy oversight. Keep in mind this is one section from a larger report, we chose to display this section because it exemplifies how we format an idea and think about setting it up for scale. Rather than just saying "you need to scale these efforts," see how we define the path to scaling their efforts and how we set them up to get there.

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Flow optimizing for volume of standardized articles

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Walking through the flow:

Idea generation

  • use an airtable form for writers to contribute ideas, you don't need a shared table view with everyone.
  • you can even put a link to that form in an email newsletter or on a social platform where you can ask your users what they want us to write about

Opportunity scoring - create an overall score for SEO opportunity using competition, search volume, and brand relavance scores. A simple one is (volume * relevance * competition^2). Prioritize the highest opportunity scored articles ideas.

Idea approval - keep it internal

Attach links, create graphic & provide tags

  • once you've officially approved an idea, you should give it 3 related links, appropriate tags, and a graphic before it's distributed to an author
    • give the author 5 tags. having each person tag their own article under-optimizes for the relevance of the tags themselves.
      • try to standardize them like create a db of each tool and each demographic, use 3 'tool' tags and 2 'demo' tags per article
    • 3 links should just be the top articles for the main tag, always link to articles that are already popular. Since it's just internal backlinking, Google values a page that can link to other relevant pages rather than 3 random links at the bottom that might not get a high ctr. We researched how much 'newness' plays into the algo, and doesn't seem like a whole lot for internal backlinking. However, backlinking the most recently published articles could be a strategy to consider in order to guarantee every article has been backlinked to.
    • We felt that putting a specific aesthetic to all article covers will give the resources pages the official feel it needs. Also, it's easy to be less-than-excited by graphics when the outsourced author is not an artist. This one may be a little more intensive on the internal team.

Distribute to writers or let writers choose

  • create an airtable / slack trigger to DM that person that they've got another article in the pipeline
  • create another slack trigger every time 'status' is changed in the editorial database

Write & Publish (authors)

Debrief

  • create zapier trigger for each new post in ghost > share it in the group #content slack, allow others to read it and chat about the goods and the bads. goal should be to make everyone a better contributor, not to bash on people or call out specific mistakes.
    • maybe do this on a daily basis? or even weekly?
  • is it possible to create a report to let authors know how their articles are doing? If you're still using GA you can plug that into Parabola and automate a weekly email to each author.

Taking all of the above into account, here's what we think the Airtable should look like:

As an 'everyone' viewing a topic submission form (live- you can try it)

These submissions would automatically fill the following table (embedded)

Master (internal) view

the idea here is to start from left to right. come up with the header and explainer, do the math on opportunity, then approve once that data is evaluated. ideas are grouped by if they're approved or not, once it's approved you can add footer links, tags, a cover image, and an assignee. Once you push to that assignee's profile, the information will autofill on their side. the very last box (where you 'add a new record') will automatically fill the author's airtable with that topic's details. Here's what that whole process looks like:

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and here's what it looks like on each author's view as soon as they're assigned:

here's full access to this base, go ahead and play around with it:

Note as of 5/15/20:

This team has implemented most of these recommendations and has seen significant usage increase from these efforts.

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