How to source thousands of writers and only hire the top 1% — Brad Smith // Codeless

Quotes

• “My secret is ten years doing it the wrong way and then I had to learn to rip it all up, start over again and figure it out. Like most creative marketing people and agencies, I like doing different types of projects for different types of clients and what you learn very quickly is that if you are going to scale and pull yourself out of the business, you need systems, processes, and specialization. I am now in a position where everything is not relying on me.” -Brad

• “It started with me doing all the labor and then very slowly learning to pull myself out of every single aspect of it. Itstarts with some contractors where they can do the outline or maybe do the draft and if they can, I can just do the editing at the end. It is a lot of systems and processes and then making sure you have checks and balances in place.” -Brad

• We take a more structured approach than what I did back in the day. It is a little more strategic now where we are looking at the key opportunities like where we can rank faster, what are the bigger things at play.” -Brad

• “It is a bit different today but it is likea combination of looking at everything from relevancy to the clients business and services and products to the volume, like the potential big opportunity to the competitiveness both using classic SEO tools ahrefs but also marketnews.” -Brad

• “At the very beginning whats really helpful is actually defining what content types we are going to work on. For instance, is it going to be a How-To article, is it going to be a case study or definition page and based on those types of content, they should look different, so the structure should be different, the way you go about researching them and pulling information should be different.” -Brad

• “I think one of the best places they should go look is to just go into an incognito browser and start looking up some of these keywords and looking up the content ranking for that because that is going to tell you more or less exactly what is already performing.” -Brad

• “There are two key components once we vet the writers and we know they are good and they have gone through our default training process, there are two problems we address. It is understanding the companys business and what they do at a more nuanced level and how they help people. Secondly, how they want to be perceived by their audience.” -Brad

• “We like to look for subject matter experts. People dont need to be breathtaking writers. We find experts who can also write, then we help themeither clean up the writing or improve writing style. For instance, if it is about real estate, we look for someone who works with a real estate broker who understands the industrys language and jargon.” -Brad