Outsourcing 18 writers from the phillipines

AhFreshMeat

AhFreshMeat

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I’m looking to scale my writing team from 6 team members to 20-30 per month. I’m aiming for 500,000 - 1 mil words per month (50/50 info/affiliate)

I’m also considering the webite online jobs ph website as my source of writers and training them myself. Has anyone gained experience scaling to this size. If so, perhaps you could share the obstacles and challenges you’ve overcame or advice you wish you had before you scaled a team this size!
 
Before you scale like that you need to have all your processes in place and streamlined otherwise you’ll be in a world of hurt and everything will slow down to a crawl.
  • Editing/review process for articles
  • Uploading/formatting of articles
  • Onboarding processes for writers
  • Onboarding process is for virtual assistants you’ll need to hire
  • Training processes writers so they write in the style you want
  • Article interlinking process
  • Link building process
  • Onboarding process for Editor you'll need to hire
  • Training process for editor
  • Creating a central repository for the SOP’s
  • Training process for the VA you’ll need to make the manager so they can mange the team of VAs
  • Hiring, interview, and testing processes for writers and VAs
  • And so on
 
^ Yep, this!

Start with maybe 3 or 4 writers and an editor, see how many more writers your editor can handle and hire more editors accordingly. Make sure your editors also know how to train your writers, even if you have specific training materials for the writers. You can save money by just having them ensure the basic on-page is good and skimming the text, or you can get them to be a lot more meticulous if you're going for higher quality.

30k+ words a day, published, is a lot if you want to maintain your standards and ensure that things are being done the way you want them done - if you don't have somebody checking over everything. Your standards will vary, some people aim for perfection, others aim for "just get it p
image-a5ce508f753119742fe34f459e33ab3b.gif
sted", so that will also influence how many editors you need.

Someone here on BuSo made a really cool quality assurance checker, I'm not sure if they've posted about it but I've encouraged them to release it as a SaaS because it rules and ensures that all of your on-page is in order at a quick glance and will save your editors so much time if you're being strict about your guidelines.

If you try to scale too fast before having a strong foundation, you'll get tons of content posted sooner but it could end up being a big mess. If you're just all about slamming as much content as hard as you possibly can, then you can probably scale up a bit more quickly and not worry about the editors as much, but I think a decent editor checking over everything before it's published is a valuable multiplier than should more than pay for itself.

Dividing tasks between your writers and your editors is something that can make a big difference, too. There could be something that the writers could easily change, that takes up a lot of the editor's time (Basic formatting, etc.) So keep an eye on this, even when you're rolling, and make sure you check in with all of them to see what takes them the most time or energy, which tasks they'd love to not have to do anymore, and adjust/re-delegate as needed. For instance, as an editor, if you're constantly having to fix the paragraph formatting, or headers, or whatever - that's like hundreds of those a day - so just training the writers to do it better could make life way easier for the editor while not adding any extra time to the writer's workload. Stuff like that.

Edit: D'oh, just re-read OP's post and realized there's already 6 writers, so some of the stuff I said won't apply as much. Bonus meme - having specific writers working on info articles, and different ones working on review content can be very effective, can avoid a lot of confusion, and can make life easier for your editor (shoutout to @Sutra for this one.)
 
Sutra said:
Before you scale like that you need to have all your processes in place and streamlined otherwise you’ll be in a world of hurt and everything will slow down to a crawl.
  • Editing/review process for articles
  • Uploading/formatting of articles
  • Onboarding processes for writers
  • Onboarding process is for virtual assistants you’ll need to hire
  • Training processes writers so they write in the style you want
  • Article interlinking process
  • Link building process
  • Onboarding process for Editor you'll need to hire
  • Training process for editor
  • Creating a central repository for the SOP’s
  • Training process for the VA you’ll need to make the manager so they can mange the team of VAs
  • Hiring, interview, and testing processes for writers and VAs
  • And so on
Click to expand...
Good outline. Worth pointing out that some of the steps will take 5 mins max so not as overwhelming as it first seems.

No response from OP so most likely another "fantasy what if thread" :smile:
 
stackcash said:
I wrote these over the past couple of months. I cover a lot of what you asked about..
Click to expand...

I've read these replies and I've implemented both of the tips from these. I actually wanted to respond when I first saw these comments @MrMedia, but ended up not being able to at that moment and didn't return.

I do have the funds for to implement the plan and have begun doing so, but unfortunately I've found I'm very picky and I take a while to write the instructions and add finishing touches to each post and unfortunately I can't find a A+ content editor that I feel is affordable and worth the value. So, that task will be left for me for a bit. This appears to be a common issue by many publishers I've spoken to.

I'll discuss what I've implemented since then and how it all turned out:
I've managed to onboard 4 more writers, (not the 20-30 I was hoping for)- so, I have a total of 11 writers creating 3 posts each per week. I found the writers don't end up completing all of their articles diligently ea. week and I've incentivized an extra $20 flat at the end of the week for those that get 4 out each week and its working very well.

I'm using Trello and have automate an assembly line or 'converter belt' for my formatter/uploader. I found it takes me roughly 2 hours total to get a 3k word blog post out on my end, even with all the outsourcing. (Creating instructions, etc).

I'm publishing 4 blog posts per day currently, which isn't bad. However, its true, I didn't achieve my original goal of 20-30 writer @ 500k words per month. As mentioned, hiring an affordable editor that I trust is currently the bottleneck as well as me being too picky. Once the site generates over 10k a month I aim to take the next step to 16-20 writers per week since that appears more realistic for me.

TLDR: Added 4 writers (11 total), learned I'm too picky making each post "perfect" and while trying to scale I'm learning that a "good enough" article with 80% of what's needed is ideal, instead of spending an extra 1 hour per article on the 20% finishing touches.
 
How do you guys run large content teams while having expertise, authority, and trust? Are you making sure that authors are subject matter experts with formal qualifications or are you hiring naive writers? I’m having issues finding a way to run a large team while meeting EAT in a YMYL niche. Thank you.
 
Philip J. Fry said:
How do you guys run large content teams while having expertise, authority, and trust? Are you making sure that authors are subject matter experts with formal qualifications or are you hiring naive writers? I’m having issues finding a way to run a large team while meeting EAT in a YMYL niche. Thank you.
Click to expand...
Find someone who has the relevant qualifications in that niche/industry to review your writer's content. Verifying things like accuracy of information provided to the reader.

Those same job boards you're sourcing writers from can also be used to find people to review your content. I've even had reviewers turn into Writers because they flat out told me the content they're reviewing isn't up to snuff; Meaning, you kill the bottleneck of waiting for them to review.

Back in College I was told to tailor my resumes to jobs; These people on job boards do the same thing.

Meaning if you're looking for someone for a "weightlifting" blog, you may not ever find the right people because you lack the correct keyword usage in your ad to find them. In this example, you could push keywords like Physical Therapist (PT) or Certified Personal Trainer (CPT) for reviewers. However, if your job board simply says "looking for a writer who knows about lifting" you may not find people who actually know about those topics because you don't use things like PT or CPT in the ad. You'll end up with "naive" Writers (as you put it) who are simply applying en masse to every single available ad on the job board.

Once you source them, ensure these people also have relevant entities like Linkedin that they can list your site on. You also want to ensure that if you Google their name, they actually show up in the results for something. Apart from simply stating "Medically reviewed by" or "Fact checked by" Google has no other way to verify that information, thus requiring entities to compare it to.

Schema is also important here. When you use Schema, you can drop reviewedBy, alumniOf, honorificSuffix, sameAs with their LinkedIn as well as a dedicated "author" page on your site.
 
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