If you know Rock Content, you are probably aware that we are a real beast when it comes to content creation, no false modesty.
We have blogs in English, Portuguese, and Spanish that surpass 8 million monthly sessions.
And what’s the secret behind that?
First, as marketers at Rock Content, we are fortunate to be promoting a top-notch content marketing company with exceptional tools and resources.
That makes scaling high-quality content and focusing on organic growth a lot easier.
So, in this blog post, I will not discuss SEO tips and techniques. I’ll provide an in-depth explanation of our operations and how we rock content scaling. We wisely mix SEO content, brand journalism, internal, and outsourced content.
Our Content Team Structure
We work with a lean structure that consists of basically two squads in our content team:
- Media Squad
- SEO Squad
Each team is responsible for a different type of content.
The Media Squad
When searching for information online, you usually have two options:
- Search for a keyword and find sites that best answer your question
- Go directly to a trusted, authoritative site for answers.
This is where the Media Squad comes in.
Our focus in this team is producing content that is not only good for search engines, but also reinforces Rock Content’s brand authority. It encourages our audience to come to us for the latest hot topics in marketing and content.
This team is responsible for creating trendy content, thought leadership, opinion pieces, columns, brand journalism, and any other kind of content that is not necessarily focused on SEO. However, these pieces of content also generate organic traffic.
Currently, we count on three team members: one audiovisual specialist and two editors/writers who work together to build content in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Even though we have two great writers on this team, it’s impossible for them to handle all our content volume. That’s why we concentrate on thorough editing and research, and entrust the writing to two groups of writers:
- Rockers: we explore our own employees’ expertise to create content. Although creating content is not part of their daily responsibilities, they feel enticed to contribute to our blog and gain personal and professional branding in return.
I must admit, although I work at a content marketing company, having a good volume of content built by employees is not that easy.
That’s why we count on the second group of writers for scaling content production:
- WriterAccess talent network: counting on our freelancers’ work is how we create a high volume of content without losing quality.
You may think: how could freelancers write good brand journalism, thought leadership, or opinionated content? Well, you’d be surprised at the power of a well-crafted creative brief.
This is where the talent of Rapha and Vanessa, our content editors, comes in.
It is much better to take advantage of their time to conduct thorough research on topics, sources, and interviews to build an outstanding brief instead of making them a bottleneck in the content production process.
If you combine their talent with the creativity of 15,000+ word magicians, you can get lots of great content.
Our freelancers at WriterAccess are a great choice for any kind of content.
They have vast experience in different areas and can provide the best solutions to your needs efficiently.
Moreover, they have the right mentality when it comes to creating content that corresponds with your brand’s voice, values, and objectives, so you don’t have to worry about its quality.
The SEO Squad
If we use the WriterAccess talent network for scaling the Media Squad content production, for the SEO team this is absolutely a must!
As I said earlier, we’re lucky to work in marketing for a content marketing company.
On the other hand, we’re also up against talented marketers in a highly competitive environment.
A key factor in our SEO strategy is producing a high volume of quality content. It would be impossible to deliver what we need without our talent network.
Our SEO team structure is similar to the Media Squad: three savvy content editors/SEO specialists: Diana, Iasmine and Júlia plus 15,000+ talents from WriterAccess.
Our internal team is responsible for the strategy, doing the keyword research, identifying optimization opportunities, and building our SEO content calendar (If you want to learn more about SEO check this post out!).
So, once we have the editorial calendar ready, the main job of the SEO team is to create briefs and send them out to our freelancers through WriterAccess platform.
WriterAccess makes content production easier than ever. With helpful content briefs templates and guidelines, we can effortlessly ensure that our standard brand tone of voice is met.
We can also create our buyer personas and customer journey map to ensure a consistent content creation experience every time.
Plus, WriterAccess provides custom rulesets to follow – just another way it assists us in keeping things organized.
The Content Operation Process in Practice
Ok, we explained the logic behind our process, but how does it really work?
I’ll detail the process and provide some examples for you to better understand.
The editorial calendar
The first step of our content strategy is naturally defining what will be published next month.
To start, let me explain the main differences between my Squads. The Media Squad deals with news, trend topics and dynamic content briefs every week, whereas the SEO Squad focuses on planning a monthly editorial calendar for evergreen content based on keyword research.
Both of them use an editorial calendar to structure and organize what must be done. You can download for free our Marketing Calendars 2023 Kit, and organize your content production too.
This is one of the most important steps we take out of our platform. The rest of the process is managed with a robust workflow on WriterAccess.
The briefs
As I mentioned before, you would be surprised by the power of a good brief, so that’s a crucial part of our process.
To make it easier for you, I’ll share here 2 examples of briefs:
- A media content brief and the article created from it: Why is Musk’s 9.2% Twitter Acquisition An Important Discussion About Freedom Of Speech?
- An SEO content brief and its article updated from it: Got Freelance Writing Skills? Here are 11 Skills You Need to Succeed as a Freelance Writer
Despite the fact we have great SEO writers on the WriterAccess platform, no one understands SEO strategy better than our own team.
Our well-crafted briefs allow us to align with freelancers and receive from them writing pieces that meet our expectations
Content production: making the talent network part of our team
After the content is ready, we can request revisions or approve it and move forward with the process.
The greatest thing about outsourcing content production with WriterAccess is making the freelance talents part of our team.
We don’t just delegate the content creation and move on, we care about the freelancers and make them feel like our co-workers.
So, besides providing good briefs, we also need to provide feedback to our talents.
WriterAccess allows us to give as much feedback as needed to achieve our expected results.
We use Copyscape to check every content produced by WriterAccess against plagiarism.
Any duplicated content found is highlighted together with its original URL.
Most of the time, Copyscape identifies our own content or a referenced source content, but as it’s not always the case, this tool helps us to ensure that our content is one hundred percent original.
Content is also scanned for quality using WriterAccess Language Analysis tool which provides results on content readability using 3 metrics: Flesch, Kincaid and Gunning Fog.
Every time we approve content we need to rate the talent according to our expectations and we also have the option to send them a note providing further feedback.
This is how WriterAccess guarantees its talents meet customer expectations.
As the platform allows us to send a clear creative brief, ask/answer questions, and request revisions, WriterAccess success rate per project is currently at an amazing 99.97%.
After performing these quality assurance actions, we can group our writers in teams, pick our favorites, and segment them by area or expertise, which really optimizes the process and improves the content quality over time.
Content publishing
Now comes the easiest part. We use the WordPress integration to post the content directly on our blog.
You can also use other integration tools depending on your marketing stack:
And… What About AI Tools?
Well… to be honest, we are not blind to the increasing use of AI in the marketing world.
In fact, WriterAccess has led the charge with AI tools to aid the content creation process.
For example, our patent-pending AI-Powered Style Metrics Matcher helps customers pinpoint writers who match their brand’s tone and style.
Our Topic Finder tool, now in Beta, uses AI to help customers with topic suggestions based on previous orders.
At Rock Content, we closely monitor the advancements and test AI-powered content editors along with image and video editing software.
In many cases, AI tools are truly helping creators to enhance their creative work.
Overall, AI does come with potential risks and opportunities.
In marketing, when used with the right intentions and human supervision, AI is a powerful tool in a brand’s arsenal.
AI commoditizes content creation, while it makes human-made content more valuable. It’s a matter of fact, however, that nothing will ever replace the human touch.
Would you like to start using AI in your content production? Well, I suggest requesting small copies, asking for a title variation, topic suggestions, or a small content revision.
We’ve been working on several AI solutions to enhance content production and bring together the best of both worlds, AI and human creativity.
Final Thoughts
So, after all, going back to the first question of this blog post: what’s the secret for Rock Content to be a content marketing beast?
As with almost everything in the marketing world… there’s no secret to success. It takes a good operation process, a talent network to empower our internal team, and discipline to execute and make the process work.
If you want to know better how WriterAccess can change your content operation game, experience all we have to offer with a free 14-day trial.
