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 create content at scale, mixing SEO content, brand journalism, internal, and outsourced content.
Our content team structure
We work with a lean structure that consists of basically two short squads in our content team:
Media Squad
SEO Squad
Each team is responsible for a different kind 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 and 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 the content volume we build. 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 writing 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 freelancer’s 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, references, and interviews to build an outstanding briefing instead of making them a bottleneck in the content production process.
If you combine their talent with the creativity of 15,000+ word magicians at your disposal, you can get lots of great content without having to sacrifice quality.
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 and it would be impossible to deliver what we need without the efforts of our talent network.
Our SEO team structure is similar to the Media Squad: three savvy content editors/SEO specialists: Diana, Iasmine, and Júlia, and 15,000+ talents from WriterAccess to help us scale our content production.
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 the WriterAccess platform.
WriterAccess makes content production
easier than ever. With helpful briefing 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.
Even if the teams work differently in the process, 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 it’s an article created 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 inside the Writer Access 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 really care about the freelancers and make them feel they’re our co-workers.
So, besides providing good briefs,
we also need to give 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.
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