How To Get Your Editing Team Up and Running, Fast

Start With a Clear Editorial Mission

Before hiring new editors or onboarding freelance editors, firmly establish an airtight content marketing strategy. Identify your target audience, including their pain points, unique needs, interests, and demographics, and create buyer personas to guide editing choices. For each piece of content, establish one or more clear, measurable objectives. For instance, the goal of a blog post with a strong call to action could be to increase sales and conversions, while the goal of a mission statement could be to boost brand awareness. 

Create a brand style guide for your business content so your editing team can maintain consistency across all distribution channels. In addition to guidelines on your preferred brand voice and tone (e.g., humorous, authoritative, creative), a style guide should include:

• Editorial standards and dialect preferences (e.g., US vs. UK English)
• Punctuation rules, such as guidance regarding serial commas, en/em dashes, quotation marks (single vs. double), and ellipses
• A set of capitalization rules for titles, headings, job titles, product names, and branded terms
• Number guidance, such as when to spell out numbers vs. use numerals and how to handle dates, time, percentages, and measurements
• Directions on when and how to use acronyms and initialisms, including how to introduce them on first reference
• Formatting conventions, such as guidance on bullet points, lists, italics vs. bold, hyperlinking, and other structural elements
• Standardized spelling and grammar rules
• Brand-specific terms

While developing a comprehensive brand style guide does require an upfront time investment, it will save you time in the long run by establishing a documented editorial vision that will align your team from day one.

Develop a Structured Onboarding Program

To save time and avoid confusion, develop a structured onboarding program for every new member of your editing team. A structured onboarding process is essential for every employee or freelancer, including editors, because it ensures consistency, editorial efficiency, and quality from the start. 

But if you’re new to onboarding editors, where should you begin? Start by introducing editors to your brand and content expectations by providing them with your style guide, editing and proofreading checklists, and login information for online platforms.

If possible, schedule a series of brief onboarding sessions led by a lead editor or project manager that cover general workflow processes, tools, and content goals. In addition, provide editors with practical feedback as they learn the ins and outs of the editorial process.

Outsource to a Professional Editing Agency

You don’t need to hire multiple in-house editors or compromise content quality to get your editing team up and running quickly. As an alternative to training full-time employees, consider outsourcing your editing needs to a managed editorial service such as Proofed, and get your team onboarded in a matter of days. 

A professional agency can streamline and accelerate your editor onboarding process by providing round-the-clock access to experienced freelance editors who are already well versed in your style guidelines and professional standards. Instead of starting from scratch with the onboarding process, you can rely on an agency’s trained team to quickly adapt to your brand’s voice and guidelines. This significantly reduces the time and resources needed for in-house training and allows your new or growing editorial team to begin producing polished content almost immediately.

Many agencies also offer structured onboarding support, such as dedicated account managers, customizable content workflows, style guide integration, and regular check-in meetings. These built-in systems ensure that the outsourced editors align with your expectations right from the start. Another benefit of outsourcing to an agency is that you can combine your industry knowledge with your editing partner’s expertise and infrastructure, which ultimately minimizes onboarding delays and helps you meet tight deadlines without sacrificing content quality or volume.

Start Small and Scale

Once you’ve begun the onboarding process, it’s important to start with smaller editorial tasks and work up to more substantial ones. It’s best to avoid overloading your team from day one, as this can eventually lead to burnout. 

Assign a few low-risk projects first to build confidence and iron out process integration issues – it’s much more manageable to address small-scale challenges with a new team before diving into more complex projects. As your team ramps up and grows more comfortable with routines, you can scale to handle larger volumes. Having a feedback loop in place from the start ensures you can make continuous improvements as you expand.