Best way to manage a team of content writers?

C

CLKeenan

Banned
Jun 24, 2006
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So I run a popular high school resource website. I'm sick of paying content writers to produce articles for me (no offense Tangy, et al. - you guys have been great!) so I figured why not offer an internship to these overachievers visiting my site? Turns out the response was extremely positive. I now have more volunteers than I know what to do with.

If you had a team of approx. 20 volunteer writers, how would you manage them? I'm talking about scheduling the content, providing feedback to your writers, posting the content, etc.?

Ideally, I'd spend a lot of time at the beginning to get this thing running like a well oiled machine, but I want to get the right structure/framework/processes in place to do that.

Any thoughts or guidance?
 


Before anything else, you might want to take a look at one of my earlier posts on managing multiple virtual assistants.

I am not sure on how you're approaching this now, but are these paid internships? If not, then you've already struck gold and all you've got to do is start building up!

Now, I am assuming that all internships are not limited to writing per se. So the approach, I'd take is this way -

We begin with the pre-prep and research the direction of the content we're going to move forward with. We discuss and decide on topics and subjects which we want to see on the website. We also let our interns write on topics that they find are appealing.

Basically, we'll create a blueprint of future plans for the website. Create a small introduction sheet mentioning all of the above.

Phase 1 - Armed with the instruction sheet, we let 20 Interns in on the Internship Program. Be prepared to answer a shit ton of questions.

As the content submissions begin, we'll be doing all the editing manually, at this stage. Furthermore, we'll also be providing our interns with gradings depending on their submission.

I typically rate my writers based on the following aspects -

  • Creativity (when giving them the freedom the choose a topic)
  • Choice of Words
  • Focus on the Topic
  • Organization of Paragraphs
  • Technicality
  • Jargon level
  • Details
  • Tone of writing
  • Spellings & Punctuation
  • Research Level

Based on these ratings, you can usually deduce the best out of the rest.

Phase 2 - Promotions

Once you have your best guys sorted - it's time to promote them. Promote 5 of them & seek their help in managing the site. Give them a position such as "Jr. Editor (Intern)" on your website.

Now let them do the hard work. Deciding content, editing, posting, dripping. The works.

Make sure you let them know that the position is extremely volatile and that they need to be at their very best, in order to continue with their position. Also, let them know that the site is serious business and if they fuck around, they'll be held responsible and will forfeit any chances of getting a recommendation from you and may even receive a lot of bad press.

Also, ensure that everything happens under your direct authority or under someone you trust.

That's all I can come up with over the top of my head.

Good luck
 
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Good stuff! Thanks for the insight. That's kind of what I had in mind as well. Take the 20, promote 3-5 of them to manage the rest. Get some some sort of hierarchy going on so I don't need to answer questions from 20 people, only the 3-5 that directly report to me.

Got any ideas for managing the scheduling of the content?
 
First, I use Trello to manage the writers. If you PM me on Skype I can show you my set up, but basically it's like this:

I have a column for topic ideas, which are usually in the form of headlines. I then take those headlines and am able to assign them to individuals and move them to the "To Draft" column.

Once the writer is done, they update the card with a link to a Google docs article and move the card to the "To Edit" column. Any notes are made on the card itself.

Once edits are made it get moves to a "To Post" column where we schedule it out. After that, it gets moved to a "To Promote" column. It works pretty well for me.
 
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A company i did business with, educated me to this before.

Pay 1 person to write & manage. The rest, pay nothing and only give credits. Many just want to get their name seen in reputable places & use the site as credentials to enter events.

You can profit quite well if you use that method. The company i learned the idea from, earns millions
 
Very interested in this well, I'm constantly expanding my writer base and am self-managing everything. In my case I deal with a crapton of wordpress blogs and will be doing more in the future.

For my paid writers, I've found out offering 5% or 10% more pay can lead them to really learn to do a bunch of extra things. On top of this, I'm very much looking at developing some writer to wordpress software so I can have a "Article job board" where they write, submit to the wordpress site directly, and have it administrated by a associate or contact of mine who just makes sure it flows right & has correct content. The cost to do something like this is very minimal.
 
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