How to Accelerate Your Content Production Process

1. Decide on Your Goals and Strategy

Before you even begin to create a production process, decide what you want to achieve with your content. Do you want to sell your products or services, inform your clients, or educate them? You can do this on a whole-blog basis or on a blog-by-blog basis. But be careful; your readers won’t want to only read blogs that try to sell to them, so make sure you include informative or educational blogs. The general rule is that 80% of your content should inform, educate, or entertain, and only 20% should explicitly promote your business.

2. Create an Efficient Process

Once you’ve decided on your goals and strategies, create an efficient process for them. There are many steps in creating content – research, writing, proofreading, and formatting – so you need some system to keep content flowing freely through the pipeline. Perhaps have a team responsible for each step of the process. That way, your team can focus on the job at hand rather than trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none. 

You could also create a template and style guide for all your writers to use. This reduces the need for them to worry about formatting and frees them to focus on their creativity.

3. Prioritize Your Work and Tasks

Once you have a basic process in place, decide which tasks are most important. Is it important for you to have a large backlog of content before publishing? If this is the case, you might initially want to focus more on writing articles. If your priority is to create incredibly niche, detailed content, perhaps your time and effort would be better spent researching and planning. Only you can decide what your priorities are, and these may change depending on what you want to achieve. The most important thing is that your content team understands and supports these priorities, so you must decide what truly matters to your business.

4. Address Bottlenecks When They Arise

With so much going on, bottlenecks are inevitable. Bottlenecks are anything that prevents content from flowing through your pipeline. It could be as simple as a staff shortage or as difficult as writer’s block. Regardless of how frustrating these bottlenecks are, remember that every writer or content creator faces challenges at some point (usually multiple times) in their career and finds ways to adapt and move forward. If it were simple, everyone would do it.

5. Create an Actionable Content Calendar

The easiest way to prioritize your tasks is to use a content creation calendar. These are print or digital calendars that help content creators manage and schedule their content. Content calendars have many benefits, including keeping your team on track, maintaining consistency, and improving efficiency. You can read about all the benefits here.

Setting up a content calendar is simple, especially if you use one of the many available digital platforms. You don’t need to make them too complicated; even a spreadsheet could help. You just need something to plan your content. The main thing is that it’s actionable and that you have one because, as the adage goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.”

If you’re unsure where to start or have tried to implement a content strategy that turned out slow and inefficient, consider how other organizations manage their content. You won’t be able to implement a carbon copy of another organization’s strategy into your own because that organization will have personalized it to meet their needs. But you’ll get an idea of what works for them and how it might work for you.