How to Scale Content Production: Build a Content System That Actually Works

Your content strategy is only as strong as your level of content production. But, like me, you may have had some strategy hiccups in the past.

I’m here to show you how to scale content strategy and content production.

In my decade of specializing in content marketing, some projects required managing teams of writers and editors. Others required building streamlined production systems that allowed smaller teams to produce large volumes of high-quality content.

Across every project, I noticed one thing consistently: content strategies only succeed when production systems are built to support them.

That’s the approach I’ve used to help both billion-dollar companies and startups scale their content production processes and smash strategy goals. Let’s get into it.

How to Scale Content Strategy: The Untold Secret

Consistency is the key to scaling content strategy.

Sure, you need a few other things for a great content marketing strategy:

A careful marriage of content + SEO
A meticulous content calendar
A well-planned content schedule
Content tracking systems/data
Team members with experience
Content tools that ease the process
Ability to update content as needed

But all of these components require consistency. So, what systems do you need to stay consistent with your content strategy?

Here’s the secret sauce to content strategy consistency: a scalable content production system.

If you’re disappointed in the answer, hang with me for a while. Let’s explore why.

Why Content Teams & Systems Can Make or Break Content Strategy

A strong content team is often one component of a larger content production system that includes workflows, tools, briefs, editors, and sometimes AI-assisted drafting.

Picture it. You’ve got an airtight content calendar, a perfectly mapped-out content schedule, and the tools and budget in place to execute this well-honed strategy.

Yet another content manager, content editor, or content writer quits on you. Sure, you can blame the good ole trope, “no one wants to work any more.”

But just like people who continually fail in relationships, you have to look at the common denominator.

Maybe the problem isn’t your writers. Maybe the problem is the job you’re offering them.

At the end of the day, content writing jobs are just like any other job. That is, people hold these jobs to financially support themselves.

And people leave content writing jobs when they are:

Unsupported
Undervalued
Not paid well
Not trained well
Not heard

If you are continually failing to scale content production, which is ultimately affecting your content strategy execution, it’s time to take a closer look at both your content team and the system supporting them

How to Know if Your Content Team Is Affecting Your Strategy

Unhappy content writers, editors, and other teammates can affect your production, which in turn affects your entire content production system and overall strategy.

But, how do you know if copywriters are unhappy? Many are afraid to speak up. And research shows people will leave jobs before asking for change (Harvard Business Review’s “Why Employees Quit”).

If you suspect content team members are dissatisfied in their roles, ask yourself:

Are my content writers well-supported in their role?
Do content writers have everything they need to do the job well?
Are there processes or concepts the writers don’t understand?
Could I train the content team members better?
If my content writers were happier, would I experience less turnover?
How can I create a content team with a stay-worthy vibe?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the first 5 questions, you have work to do. And if you can’t immediately answer “my team already has a stay-worthy vibe!” to the last question, SAME.

Now, let’s focus on how to know if your content creation processes are hurting your content system’s ability to keep good writers.

6 Signs Your Content System Is Affecting Writer Retention

The first sign that your content system may need work? Low retention of content writers.

“But I want to scale with AI tools for content. It’s cheaper.”

Right you are. Yet you’ll still need that human touch everyone is talking about. That will come from experienced content writers who will become your AI (artificial intelligence) content editors.

Here are key signs that your content processes are pushing writers away:

Writers Often Quit Within the First 3 Months

True of any business, writers coming and going is a sure sign that the job isn’t great.

This is the hardest part to swallow — but it’s also the easiest to fix. You simply need to make the job work for the writers the way it works for you.

Some ways to create an attractive content writing job include:

Offering content deadline flexibility
Providing consistent, weekly content work
Matching content writer strengths to specific task assignments
Allowing flexibility in content assignment workload
Writing content briefs/outlines so detailed that writing is a breeze
Easing the writing process so much you decrease the writer’s time investment
Training hard with praise and detailed, custom feedback for the first 3 months

Writers Are Always Asking for a Raise

Content writers are in this work for the money. If the job doesn’t pay well, they simply won’t do it. If you have writers constantly leaving your contract job or full-time jobs, it may be due to poor pay. But, all the ways mentioned above can also make the job more lucrative.

Even if you don’t have a high content budget, there are ways you can make content writing attractive for your prospective writer.

These ways include:

Offer a well-honed content system that provides everything the writer needs to succeed.
Decrease the amount of time they spend writing, topic researching, doing keyword research, and editing.
Offer consistent work on a regular basis: While some writers would rather take on only high-dollar projects, most freelancers want projects that offer longevity.

As a former senior content manager, one of the first ‘benefits’ I included in job postings for content writers was the benefit of consistent weekly work. And it worked!

When you can’t offer a higher rate, make the content production process as easy as possible, train your writers well, and work with them. They’ll continue working for you simply because you make their life easier.

You Feel Blindsided When Writers Quit

You may have hired a great freelance writer, trained them, and loved their content submissions…only to have them quit without notice.

Perhaps you feel blindsided. “But I thought things were going so well?!” And for you, they probably were.

Yet writers will quit if the job isn’t enjoyable, doesn’t provide adequate training, and, especially, if they gain nothing from it.

And when writers quit unexpectedly, it’s usually a signal that something in your content production system isn’t working the way it should.

In the Harvard Business Review mentioned above, researchers found that people quit when they:

Are dissatisfied with the work
Feel their strengths aren’t being well-utilized
Don’t see growth opportunity

Pour into your content writing team and the system that supports them, and they won’t quit. Or, at least, they’ll quit less often.

You Only Attract Inexperienced Content Writers

Looking for experienced niche writers but only attracting new content writers is a sure sign that you need to change your content production process.

When the job isn’t attractive, only desperate-for-cash or new writers will take it on.

Experienced freelance writers can spot a bad job offer a mile away. If you want to work with them and have their crafty writing grace your content strategy, improve your process.

Make the content system so well-polished, so writer-focused, that they can’t say no and THEY come to YOU.

Writers Have a Hard Time Making Deadlines

If a content writer is having a hard time making content deadlines, they simply aren’t prioritizing your work.

Maybe they have higher-paying work. That could be true, but I have worked with some jobs that paid writers a pittance ($.05/word) up to high-paying jobs ($500+ per page).

In fact, working as a content manager who was tired of losing all my best writers is the reason I came to make writing jobs as easy as pie for writers.

I was SO tired of going through the process of hiring writers, training them, working with them, teaching them the brand and voice and style…only to lose them to better, more lucrative writing jobs.

Simply put, writers will prioritize your work over all others’ when they have:

Support
Proper training
Systems to keep the time investment low
A content manager who listens to, values, and respects them

You Need Many Content Revisions

The best way to avoid halting content production is to teach your writers everything they need to know about your content production system, strategy, audience, and mission.

This way, they don’t have to make revision after revision to get content where it needs to be. And the best way to ensure you avoid lengthy and numerous revisions?

By providing a content brief and outline so detailed, it’s like your writer is filling in blanks. “But why not just write the content page or blog post myself, then?”

You know why. That would take hours of your time.

Instead, structure your content system like this:

Hire a content manager who is highly experienced in writing content briefs and outlines.
Work with them until you are certain they know the brand goals and content strategy backward and forward.
Delegate outline/brief writing to the content manager.
Ensure each outline breaks down exactly what to write in every single section.
Know that you won’t have to do this process forever. Eventually, your writer will know what to write for similar pages as you reproduce this strategy across your various sites.

The greatest way to invest in your content strategy? Teach it to everyone in your content system, right down to the writers. Do this by showing, not telling.

Show them what to write for each and every page and explain why and how you are doing it. With time, you won’t have to explain these processes. It will be second-nature for the writers who have been on your team long-term.

When content writers understand strategy, they can help you achieve strategy goals beginning with the building blocks of that very strategy: the content.

10 Steps to Take if You Can’t Retain Content Writers

You know that writer retention is affecting your content strategy and content production rate. Cool. That means you can get to work on fixing this error.

Here are the top 10 ways I fixed my content creation processes to retain great writers, churn out quality content, and execute content strategy.

Many of these improvements aren’t about the writers, but about improving the content production system that supports them.

1. Hire a Content Manager

A strong content production system begs for someone to keep it running smoothly.

So, if you have a set amount of budget each month for content, the bulk of it should go to a content manager. These experts are your right hand for:

Project management: Making you scale content by meeting all content submission deadlines, managing the writing team, overseeing assignment deadlines, managing the content calendar, and much more.
Repurposing content: Content managers can outsource new content, but they can also make use of what you have by rewriting or updating existing content, including tweaks to re-optimize, fix on-page SEO snags, and completing competitor analysis as needed.
Suggesting new ways to share your content: You can make use of different platforms to better scale, such as on podcasts, webinars, or LinkedIn posts. Content managers can use existing content and rewrite new versions as needed.
Paying attention to content metrics: An experienced content manager can work closely with the digital marketing team to watch the content’s organic traffic, performance of related social media posts, overall performance (i.e. leads and conversions), rank in search engines, changes to algorithms, and more to discover what may need to change for each content piece and for the content plan moving forward.
Ensuring scalability: You, the company owner, CEO, or digital marketing manager, can’t do it all. Scaling is all about delegation. Let the content manager oversee content. Manage and train them well, and let them do their job, so you can focus on the bigger picture.

Don’t have a content manager? Excelsior Content offers outsourced content management and strategy support for busy digital marketing teams and business owners. Reach out to us now to learn more.

2. Schedule Content Around Writer Availability

I used to organize each client’s content calendar around their needs. Satisfying the client, or for major organizations and companies, the boss, is crucial.

But, in the last two years, I also began to consider the content writers’ workflow and needs. That is, I now schedule content around each writer’s availability.

This means my content calendar looks like:

Staggered content assignment due dates
Staggered content submission due dates
Different submission schedules for each client/website
Content submission goals set weekly and monthly

Here’s an example of how to organize your content calendar around both your content team’s needs (for contractors) and your clients’ or website’s needs:

Writer assignment submission schedule:

Writer 1: M/W/F. Writer 1 is a full-time contractor. She has endless flexibility and availability.
Writer 2: T/Th/F. Writer 2 has lots of availability, but works best on a set schedule.
Writer 3: Weekly on Mondays. Writer 3 has a full-time job, and can only complete assignments over the weekends.
Writer 4: W/F. Writer 4 has young children and likes to have her assignments for the week ahead of time.

Then, have your content manager or content editor choose a day or two to edit assignments each week.

For the example above, they would likely edit content the following Monday or Tuesday, once all assignments have been submitted, and submit it to the client/uploading team the next day.

Why go to so much trouble by staggering content submissions? Because, when you pay attention to your team’s needs, when you make their life easier, they will go out of their way to prioritize your content first.

In two years of implementing this process, I’ve had zero freelance writer turnover.

3. Allow Content Deadline Flexibility

Nothing crushes a piece of content faster than rushing it — just look at all the AI-created content that hasn’t been edited before uploading. And this in turn affects your scaling strategy.

Avoid the dreaded content penalty (oh, yes, it does happen). One way to ensure you always get high-quality contentis by allowing content deadline flexibility within your team.

Notice above that all due dates for all types of content are set days before the editing date. That’s to ensure the writers and editors have a bit of wiggle room before having to turn over the content to the SEO team or client.

Note that having different due dates and submission dates both weekly and monthly for your clients or websites helps you avoid bottlenecks in the content plan, or piling up content.

4. Write Hyper-Detailed Content Briefs/Outlines (At First)

Writing highly detailed, organized, and packed-with-information content outlines and briefs is part and parcel of having a great content plan and well-oiled content production system.

Yet not everyone knows how to write these briefs or outlines, or has the time. If outlining and brief writing isn’t your forte, no worries. Outsourcing is a great way to save you time and stress. Excelsior Content offers outline and brief writing targeted to your content strategy.

Our top tips for content creators who need to write great briefs or outlines for their team:

Batch content. If you’re writing briefs for an in-house writing team, this could look like doing all the content outlines for one site at a time to ensure a faster workflow. When handling content for clients, it means batching like content pieces together.
Use content templates. There are MANY automation tools to help you create content templates these days, such as ChatGPT. Create a content outline and brief that serves as a master template for the rest of the batch. Then, make copies and amend instructions to each individual outline as needed.
Include detailed information in every brief. So many briefs are bogged down with useless information the writer doesn’t need. Know that they don’t need to know every single loosely related keyword or distant competitor. They do need vital information like:
1. Top keywords
2. Detailed instructions on what to cover for the page and each section
3. Overall target audience
4. Goal of the page
Provide a style guide in addition to the content briefs/outlines. And update it often. Style guides save you so much time in answering questions regarding your brand voice, tone, style, target audience, marketing personas, and much more.
Offer tools to help your writers write well. This could include access to writing aids like Pro Writing Aid and optimization tools like Clearscope. Set them up for success straight out the gate.

By giving your content writers everything they need to do their job well, you make their job less time-consuming.

Saving your writers time means they get paid more when they work for you — less time invested per content piece means a higher hourly pay rate for them overall.

And that means, you guessed it, loyal writers who help your marketing team edge toward content scalability every day.

5. Provide Feedback for Each Writer, Not the Content Team

Don’t waste your time providing blanket feedback to the team as a whole. To scale content creation, you need writers who understand your strategy and all of its goals and nuances.

To get your team running like a well-oiled machine, offer feedback that’s specific to the writer. At Excelsior Content, we achieve personalized feedback in two ways.

First, we keep an open dialogue going within the assignment document. This way, we can both see what the feedback refers to, specifically.

Second, when needed, we send detailed feedback via email. Such emails include the specific assignment, the feedback, and instructions for improvement moving forward. They also include the reason why.

Writers have an easier time implementing feedback if you explain where the issue falls in regards to content strategy.

6. Write Feedback In Real Time

If you’re worried this will make the writer feel called-out, unsure, and embarrassed, schedule a real-time meeting to go over their assignments via a shared screen.

Allow the writer to ask questions, and use the sandwich method, compliment-feedback-compliment, to help them learn.

An hour of your time now can save you a headache and hours of time wasted later. Don’t write off every freelance writer before they’ve had a chance to improve. First, give them the feedback and guidance they need. Invest in them, and they’ll invest right back in you.

7. Train Hard the First 3 Months

As long as you test new writers before hiring them, you probably have highly experienced writers on your marketing team.

But, new writers always need time to adjust to your team’s marketing efforts, different forms of content, and brand style. And strong onboarding and training processes are another essential component of a scalable content production system.

So, train your writers closely for the first three months. Make sure:

All content is on-brand
They write effective content
All writing choices are aligned with your content writing style
Overall performance is in line with your team’s needs

Note: This will be the hardest part of your journey with any writer who is worth their salt. You will need to spend a lot of time giving feedback, supporting, encouraging, and generally training.

Yet once training is complete, you will have a writer who is an expert on your content and brand awareness, understands your target audience, and remains loyal to you as a result.

8. Offer Cross Training

Not every team member will want to move into different roles, but many do. Good strategists aren’t scared to help their team members succeed.

Instead, they understand that the more they pour into their team, the more the team’s expertise and knowledge base will overflow, pouring right back into the people who help them reach their goals.

Don’t be afraid that cross-training and helping your writers or editors or other digital marketing team members will drive them to leave. Even if that’s true, then you simply gain another ally in the industry.

So, help your writers learn to edit, your editors learn to content plan, and all of your teammates learn about content strategy. Knowledge is power, and 10 minds on strategy are better than one.

(Disclaimer: you should also have everyone on your team sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect your strategy, but that’s a story for another day).

9. Assign Content According to Writer Strengths

No doubt about it, scaling content strategy also boils down to having each marketing team member working where they are best-suited.

Different freelance writers have different strengths. Some are better at long-form content and technical wording, as in white papers. Others shine when writing short, snappy, to-the-point content like blog posts.

In the first 3 months of training a content writer, you or your content manager can get a feel for where that writer is best-oriented.

Remember: writers have preferences, too. Pay attention, and begin assigning them work in formats where they excel. That way, you always get high-quality content from each team member.

In my seven years of managing content plans, I have also noticed that writers write faster when they are writing content they don’t hate.

And when your content production system accounts for individual strengths, scaling content becomes far easier.

10. Add AI Workflows Into Your Content System

Content writers are still gold, don’t get me wrong. But you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t even try to implement AI workflows into the content creation process.

At Excelsior Content, we use AI to help:

Come up with ideas for new content
Research subject matter
Quickly outline drafts
Edit for tone matching
Match client voice, mission, and goals across pages
Ensure no duplicate content

Between AI-assisted content and experienced content strategists, we have 4x our content production.

AI tools we’ve found that work well for content workflows include:

ChatGPT: useful for brainstorming ideas, outlining drafts, summarizing research, and editing content for tone or clarity.
Clearscope: helps optimize content for search intent and keyword coverage during editing.
Claude: particularly strong for long-form editing, rewriting, and analyzing large documents.
Jasper: a popular AI writing platform designed specifically for marketing teams and content workflows.
Surfer SEO: combines AI writing with on-page SEO optimization.

AI workflows can also improve writer retention. By handling repetitive tasks like early research, outlining, and basic editing, AI reduces the tedious parts of the job that often lead to burnout.

Writers get to spend more time focusing on the work they actually enjoy: creating thoughtful, high-quality content.

How Important Is Content Writer Retention to Content Strategy?

Retaining employees or, in this case, a steadfast freelance writing team offers many benefits, especially when they are supported by a well-structured content production system.

Some benefits include:

Reduced cost of training new writers
Reduced time invested in hiring and training
Higher skill level among trained writers
An arsenal of content writers who are experts in your content strategy

When you hire excellent content writers and invest the time and money into training them, listening to their needs, and working with their schedule and preferences, you get loyalty.

Beyond writers who show up every day, they write efficient, high-quality content — every time.

If the cornerstone of scaling content strategy is writing quality content at high volumes on a consistent basis, investing in writers (and the content systems that support them) is the answer to scalability.

Scale Your Content Strategy and Production at Excelsior Content

Consistent content creation is key to scaling your content marketing strategy. But consistency doesn’t happen by accident.

No, consistent, high-quality content publishing happens when you build a content production system that allows your team to create high-quality content week after week.

And a successful content production system is supported by experienced strategists, editors, and content writers.

Enter Excelsior Content. We can help your organization build and execute scalable content strategies through content planning, outlining, writing, editing, and strategic support.

If your team is struggling to keep up with content production, or you simply need experienced support executing a larger content strategy, Excelsior Content can help.

Get in touch with Whitney at Excelsior Content to start building a content production system that actually supports your strategy.

Sources

https://www.business.com/articles/employee-turnover-rate

https://jobs.washingtonpost.com/article/consider-these-7-benefits-of-employee-retention

https://hbr.org/2018/01/why-people-really-quit-their-jobs