Here are my guidelines I give to my writers (video)

Brian Casel

May 27th, 2014

Ever since I published the video detailing our content marketing systems, I’ve been receiving many requests to share our actual guidelines document that we give to the writers we hire on the Restaurant Engine blog.

Well, today I’m making it available for you to download, use, and tweak for your needs.

By the way, looking for guidance on how to set up your own checklists and processes for your content team? Check out this guide my team and I put together over on our Ops Calendar blog.

But more importantly, I want to share how I’ve gone about creating this guidelines document. It’s been a 2+ year process of refining and improving it, and I’ve learned quite a few lessons along the way.

So I created a video lesson, where I share some of those lessons with you, and walk through our document piece by piece to share my thinking behind it.

Back when I started…

When I began hiring writers in the early days of Restaurant Engine, I struggled a bit. The articles I received back from my writers lacked consistency. Sometimes they were too short, sometimes they didn’t link back to other articles, sometimes the headlines and paragraphs ran too long, etc.

I ended up spending a lot of my time revising and in some cases completely re-writing full articles. This completely defeated the purpose of hiring writers in the first place!

Creating the guidelines

I learned that in order to effectively remove myself from the blogging process — but keep the quality and consistency of our content intact — I needed to develop a set of guidelines that my writers can follow every single time.

So that’s what I did. The document started with just a few notes about word count, how to use sub headlines, and choose an image. But over the course of 2+ years of working with my writers, we expanded the document into a multi-page resource and procedure.

Today’s version of the document includes:

Length and content specifications
Tone and style guidelines
Info about audience, demographic, how they find us, etc.
Headline writing guidelines & resources
Paragraph, sub-heads, and list formatting guidelines
Image style guide, and places to source images
Linking strategy
Procedure for setting up the post in WordPress
SEO Optimization procedure
Procedure for scheduling and sending to me for review

Getting to autopilot

Aside from the decision to hire writers for our blog, creating these guidelines was the first, and biggest step, I took toward putting our content marketing on autopilot and removing myself from that part of the business.

Today, our blog is our biggest driver of traffic, yet I spend almost none of my own time working on it. In fact, the only reason I ever spend time on it is when I actually want to read the articles my writers publish for us!

It has taken over two years to build our systems to this point, and it all started with the guidelines doc I’m sharing with you today.

Two common mistakes

Based on my own experience and from talking with others who are just starting out hiring their first writers, I came across two common mistakes that prevent blog guidelines from doing their job effectively:

Mistake #1: No guidelines

This was the mistake I made early on. I thought that just hiring talented writers was enough. I assumed they would simply know what my audience needed, without me needing to provide any guidance or direction.

This mistake resulted in:

Inconsistency from one post to the next
Writing in the wrong tone for our audience
Me spending too much time revising and re-writing articles

Mistake #2: Micro-Managing

The second mistake I see many founders make when they begin hiring writers is the opposite of the first mistake. Here, they micro-manage and go overboard on guidelines and direction they give to their writers.

Specifically, I see founders do a lot of the brainstorming and creative work for their writers. The founder would provide the headline, sub-headlines and points to be made, and then expect the writers to just expand the word count.

To me, this is going overboard. It prevents the writers from doing what they do best — researching and crafting unique ways to communicate a topic. I’ve been guilty of this myself from time to time and found that when I do this, the article suffers. It’s not as well received by our audience because there were too many cooks in the kitchen.

This mistake results in:

Article lacks flow and focus because there are too many cooks in the kitchen
The founder spends too much time doing the creative work
De-motivates the writers because they’re prevented from doing what they do best

Enjoy

I hope this helps. As always, feel free to leave any questions here in the comments or shoot me an email.

I’d love to hear your feedback. Tell me how the guidelines work out for you and your team. And if you find this helpful in your business, please pass it along (tweet)