Don’t lie.
Show of hands.
How many times have you uttered the following in the last year alone?
Probably all of them at one point.
No fingers pointed. I’ve used them all, too.
But here’s the thing you need to recognize about these oft-repeated clichés: they’re excuses.
All of them.
Excuses and lies we tell ourselves, to simultaneously:
(a) puff up our own ego (“’cause no one’s as good as me”), and
(b) avoid doing the hard work of learning how to systemize and build processes and delegate effectively.
Here’s why you’re your own worst enemy when it comes to scaling content, and how to solve it so you get back on track ASAP.
The truth hurts sometimes.
And when it comes to content operations, the faster you recognize that your operations are the problem, the faster you’ll get to crushing your next revenue target.
Time and again, we see that companies fail to scale because they lack content operational systems that underpin all of the creativity layered on top.
Instead, too many teams still operate under this false assumption that they’ll just “luck out,” and that the perfect unicorn writer or marketer or [insert rockstar role here] will fall into their laps, solving all of their problems in one fell swoop.
Or even better, the perfect AI content workflow! (Ha, good luck.)
You know, the unicorn content creator that just gets “it.”
Without ever bothering to figure out:
Diagnosing this problem is difficult to spot, unless you’ve seen it happen LOTS of times before.
So here are the clues to look for:
Does any of this sound familiar yet?
It should.
And the biggest problem is that these seemingly surface-level issues sabotage your content success by killing output, slaughtering velocity, and maiming morale.
No chance closing a Growth Gap when your editors are spending 3+ hours “editing” AI slop.
But don’t stress.
After seeing these issues routinely play out over the last decade (and making the same mistakes ourselves countless times), we’ve developed a helpful framework that’s the backbone of our methodology: Operationalize Editorial.
Here’s an overview graphic, and then we’ll dig into each section below in detail.
The best writers make bad editors and terrible content managers.
That’s because the best writers thrive on ingenuity; on saying the same thing multiple times in multiple ways.
Editors should be the opposite, in a constant pursuit of consistency and uniformity.
Meanwhile, managers are the glue that keeps both the big picture goals and day-to-day actions of everyone aligned.
In other words, completely different skill sets that too many teams try to force into one individual.
It’s like the Michael Scott problem: Great paper salesman. Funny television character. Awful Regional Manager.
Roll back a few centuries and the solution comes from the unlikeliest of places: the military.
The Brigade System of management even influenced how professional kitchens are organized, providing them the flexibility and coordination to create hundreds of items all in sync, within minutes of each other, so that all of your table’s food comes out with different preparations + temperatures but at the exact same time.
Content teams should be organized in exactly the same fashion. Starting with separating out your writers, editors, and managers.
From there, as you grow in both stature and resources, you continue adding specializations to master each small piece of the much larger content operation machine. Like a giant factory assembly line.
This means that you should also have a well-defined workflow, where the strategists work on strategy, the planners plan, the writers write, the editors edit, and the producers coordinate.
As your operations mature, you can even add designers, videos, and even distribution specialists to the mix.
This shouldn’t be a trick question, but it often is:
How would you define “good” content?
Everyone talks about the importance of “good” content. Yet, no one can define it the same. Ask ten people in your organization and you’ll get ten different answers.
As you can expect, that answer is not good enough.
The longer your team flies without radar keeping you on track, the higher your odds of a crash landing.
Documenting a specific quality checklist is the bare minimum that needs to happen right now. Not tomorrow or next week.
And in it, you should define the overall structure of most content, along with the nitty-gritty details for each sub-section, from word counts to source preferences to image criteria and more.
The more fleshed out this starting point, the faster you’ll (a) train writers, (b) reduce editing time, and (c) drive up ROI (better results for less investment).
The second lesson here is to show, don’t tell.
A nice, easy example is your introduction.
Be specific, laying out the ones you like or don’t like, and then also listing resources to show writers, editors, senior management, clients, or whoever, exactly what these things should look like.
For example, here is a good example if using the old Problem, Agitate, Solution (PAS) copywriting formula:
So here is a good example of PAS in action:
However, don’t just point out the good! You should also draw a clear line in the sand to help people immediately understand what bad looks like, too.
Here’s a “bad” example of a section in an outline:
And another one!
We’re talkin’ OCD-level of organization here because it gets everyone on the same page. And when everyone is on the same page, things run smoothly. And your life becomes peaceful.
Hiring and firing becomes almost automatic. Everyone is 100% aligned with the expectations. The number of dumb questions or stupid arguments evaporates into thin air.
Who knows. You might even get your weekends back to yourself!
The trickle-down effects are magical. To continue beating a dead horse, watch what happens to the editing function once your content quality checklists are fire. 🔥
(Do the kids still say that?)
Our Editorial Leads have a one hour guideline.
Ideally, they should NOT have to spend longer than one hour editing an article. But here’s the thing…
If they do have to spend longer than one hour, it’s NOT an “editing” problem. It’s a writing problem. It’s a strategy problem.
In other words, the preceding steps and roles in your assembly line.
Because if so, it means the writer screwed up. Or the strategist failed to prep the writer properly. So the editor should flag the problems and sent back to them to fix. Not because they’re rude, but so they can learn what is good vs. bad.
Then, we can review an editor’s time across multiple pieces or clients or writers and spot operational issues creeping in at a moment’s notice.
Too little time spent editing might mean those writers are due a pay increase, while too long spent editing might signal the opposite.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But no one — no content, SEO, growth, whatever — can actually control the end results you’re looking for at the end of the day.
Rankings, traffic, leads, and customers are all lagging indicators. They are generated months or even years after doing all of the actual work.
That means we need to turn our attention to the leading indicators, instead. You need to focus on the process and the inputs that will drive those outputs. If, and only if, executed properly.
Exhibit A. What should you write about?
Well, the answer is whatever people are already looking for!
Analyzing search intent helps you understand what people want to read or learn about when they type in a specific query. LLM prompts can similarly give you more context around potential discussion points.
The good news is that these tools literally tell you the answers.
Start with the actual SERP layout (AI Overview, videos or images, People Also Ask questions, related searches, and more):
When you do this A LOT, across dozens if not hundreds of queries in your space, you’ll start noticing patterns.
For instance, check out the Table of Contents from these Investopedia pieces on compound interest and promissory notes.
Almost the same exact structure!
Now, you have your first content template.
These are consistent article structures you can use for different types of queries (think: “what is…”-style queries that might apply across different topics or even verticals).
And it means you can start standardizing article structures across hundreds-to-thousands as well. So if you had ~1,000 topics to produce content on over the next year to close a Growth Gap, those could probably be boiled down into ten groups of 100. One template now might apply to each of those ten groups (so ten templates).
We lived and breathed this experience with monday.com and Robinhood and Remote and countless others.
From there, you’ll standardize content briefs, which will form the backbone of your writers’ outlines eventually, because they basically spoon feed them everything from the subheads to the semantic keywords and even word counts for each section.
Imagine we’re about to write an article on “content planning.”
Your content brief would be pulled together by referencing all of these different points of information, from People Also Ask questions to Related Searches to LLM query fan-out to Reddit Q&A discussions to semantic keywords from your favorite content graders and, you know, maybe actually reading some of the best content already ranking.
This is obviously a very basic starting point.
But the lesson is that standardizing the content planning process like this will make:
And when you do this, consistently over months and years, your ultimate success will be virtually guaranteed.
It’s just a matter of how quickly the Google & LLM gods reward your work.
Shades of Grey should only be reserved for cheesy romance novels and even worse movies.
They have no business in a high-performing content machine.
Take voice and tone preferences. Once again, ask ten people and you’ll get ten different answers.
So here’s an easy tip: sometimes seeing what you don’t like makes it easier to understand what you do like.
❌ Take the following sentence:
It’s… fine. Not great. Kinda generic and boring. But fine.
Now, rewrite that sentence like this:
✅ “This company is just the latest in a long line to be gobbled up by the massive hosting conglomerate, Endurance International Group (EIG). Or, as it’s also known, Where Good Web
Hosts Go to Die.”
Over the top? Probably.
Some might like it, some might not. The vivid language (“gobbled up”) and power words (“Go to Die”) would be great for a conversational or satirical brand, perhaps not for a formal medical one, though.
We create and update detailed Writer’s Guides internally that make all of this perfectly black and white for them. Even down to specific vocabulary to terminology.
These are the words or phrases or expressions that your brand uses, unique to your point of view on the industry, that would be different from other direct or indirect competitors.
For instance, do you prefer:
It literally doesn’t matter which one you select.
It only matters that you pick one, are consistent, and clear up this gray area for your writing and editing teams.
The goal of this supporting documentation is to clear up all the intangible or unwritten principles your team already practices — even if they’re not even conscious of it.
Last but not least, you should also lockdown the approved sources your writers can use, as well as a blacklist of sites that your writers should NOT reference (because they’ve proven to be inaccurate, misleading, confusing, inconsistent, or whatever).
Once again, make sure to show bad examples:
And then document the lesson learned for next time:
Stamp out all unwritten or intangible items, one by one, day after day, like a big game of Whack-a-Mole, and pretty soon the only Shades of Grey left are the questionable kinky ones in your free time.
Let’s end at the beginning.
The Brigade System helps professional kitchens deliver multiple different dishes to the same table at the same time, all cooked to perfection.
They do THAT by working in batch and parallel processes.
Imagine a line cook at the grill. They might be preparing five different cuts of steak for five different tables at five different temperatures with five different cook times.
Sounds exhausting, right?
So exhausting, that they can’t ALSO be cooking pastries or prepping salads at the same time. That’s Role Specialization in step one above.
Now imagine that ten different people in a kitchen are each doing their own version of this at the same time.
Taking this back to content operations, it means you might have one team of people (writers, editors, SEOs, designers, etc.) working on one content project while at the same time another team of people (writers, editors, SEOs, designers, etc.) are working on another one.
We created a custom-built dashboard for this, that connects all of the strategy work (research, planning, approvals, feedback, etc.) that’s often happening months in advance of when it’s actually going to be produced.
There’s a month-over-month, 30,000-foot view that helps everyone connect the dots from what was approved to where in the production cycle the work is – helping to keep the entire team NSYNC.
Your job, as leader of this chaos choreography, is to have the right teams in place with the right systems so that your output and quality stays high, even if a bunch of people are working on different things at the same time.
Now, instead of micromanaging or meddling or trying to control every little detail, you’re able to step back, oversee from a high level, while still making subtle tweaks along the way to key stages of the overall assembly line.
Content is subjective at the end of the day.
You might like short, snappy, snarky sentences.
While your boss might prefer formal, flowery, and factual.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
The only thing that matters is that you — and the rest of the people you work with — are all on the same page.
This seemingly simple, yet little practiced point, is what often derails content projects on a daily basis and sabotages your content results over the long term.
Start by optimizing your content operations with the following five steps:
It’s not always easy or fun. It’ll take some getting used to. But it’s ultimately the only way to break through your self-imposed barriers and generate the long-term success you deserve.
And if not, we’re just a phone call away