A guide to producing hundreds of quality technical articles — Brad Smith // Codeless

Quotes

• “Essentially, the thing that most people struggle with is that they just dont look at enough people. If I am looking for one writer then that doesnt mean that I looked at five potential writers, it means that I looked at a hundred. You need to have a system in place where you dont need to do all the work in-between because otherwise, they never get anything done.” -Brad

• “But the other thing is you can automate a lot of stuff. For example, from the very first application process, so we run job ads and we try to drive people to the same form and if they dont follow basic instructions in the job listing they automatically dont get added to the database for the nextstep that applicants go through.” -Brad

• “We have different hurdles in the process to get from a thousand down to a hundred qualified. Then from there, we work on testing them with paid trials and dole it out of the budget accepting that we have to spend some money.” -Brad

• “We do actual job postings and we dont usually work through platforms like Upwork because we want to control the relationship a little more. We have also tested everyone as contractors initially and hire the best ones on part-time as full-time after.” -Brad

• “We dont do job board listing on Indeed because we find that it tends to be full-time writers who arent focused more on production and output. It tends to be contractors and freelancers who have that better mindset of producing X amount of work to get paid. We just find that they tend to be easier to work within that type of environment.” -Brad

• “We have not had good success in LinkedIn, it tends to be overpriced and not very good quality.” -Brad

• “Its a little of both. If we have an enterprise client, we often build-out full training programs for that client with some style guides, types of content, all that kind of information upfront at the very beginning that they have to learn more about the client that they are going to be writing about or for before the time that they are actually doing the paid tests.” -Brad

• “This is one of the issues, whenever we try to hit up for scale and speed, thats when problems pop up. Thats when deadlines issues pop up. We get them to do one article a week and if they do those successfully at the end of the month, then well start slowly ramping them up from there.” -Brad

• “If I was trying to hire a really good writer, I would probably want at least a hundred initial applicants. I would want to vet the Top 20 or 30 and usually, thats seeing their published samples to. From there I would do at least five paid trials to get one good, legit writer.” -Brad

• “Our full-time writers do six long-form pieces a week and long-form would be defined as 2,000 words and more. The problem then becomes I need more of this quality writers if I want to publish more.” -Brad

• “What else is on their plate is usually what I would come back with. Most full-time writers that work in-house, you dont want to get anywhere near that because they are on Slack, emails, on meetings, proofreading some executives shitty PowerPoint, they get pulled in so many other directions that they are not actually able to produce a lot of content and sit down and focus.” -Brad

• “If you are looking at a full-time in-house writer you are looking closer to 100K a year, maybe 80K to 100K. On a per article basis on a really good writer, you are looking at a 1,000 dollars an article plus, assuming its a longer, in-depth article. For less experienced writers, its somewhere in the ballpark of anywhere from 300 to 600 as average.” -Brad

• “So I am doing the math here on an individual article basis. A $1,000 an article, $5,000 dollars a week, 50 weeks a year, that is $250K grand. Thats the difference between outsourcing content production to a freelance writer and then having somebody in-house doing content production for you, thats 100 grand vs. 250 grand.” -Ben