Assign Writers & Track Team Output

Transcript of this lesson

Austin Distel:

Lesson number six is tracking your production output. So when you're publishing an article every day or two or three articles every day, it can probably get overwhelming. What is a system for operations do you have to track this content once it's published?

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. Firstly, a quick correction. It's not three or four articles. Overall I would say we're producing about 120 articles per day for all of our clients, but for each client that we're working on, we tend to produce 10 to 12 articles per day. I assign four or five writers to each website and they each produce sort of three or four for websites per day. So that makes up about a total between 10 to 15 articles per day for each website.

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, tracking can get a little tricky. We not only want to keep ourselves on track, but we also want to ensure that our clients are kept up to date on what's going on, how many articles are being produced, so they can give us incremental feedback on it as well. So in between, if the client says that, "Okay, this article I had such and such issues," we correct it on the spot. And for the remaining articles, we ensure that we avoid that same mistake.

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, I would say that organization and sort of keeping up to date is sort of the core value of this whole business that keeps it together. And without it, we would completely fall apart with all the communication. So yeah, for that, I have about two or three spreadsheets that I'd like to maintain other than the content plan. There's one spreadsheet for the client-

Austin Distel:

Do you mind showing us?

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just about to exactly. So this was the original content plan. This content plan is sort of assigned as separate for each website or each client. Once the client approves of the content plan, I add in these three columns. These columns are essentially the updated date as to when this article was written and published, the time taken to publish the article, and the writer assigned to it.

Osama Zahid:

So this content plan is also available to the client. And what I add is I add this as well, published URL. I forgot to add it, published URL. So this is something that I add in as well where the writer posts in the published URLs. And so this helps the clients to keep themselves up to date on what articles have been published. They can directly access it through the links posted over here.

Osama Zahid:

Secondly, we have a client spreadsheet as well. This specifically caters to the clients, but this is something that I keep for my own organization. Because let's just say that these are only two rows, but on the original client spreadsheet we have about 200 rows as of now. And to maintain that sort of the communication and keeping it up to date, I update this spreadsheet on an hourly basis. Whenever I receive an email, whenever I forward a message to the client or the client sends me a message, I sort of update this spreadsheet on the go.

Osama Zahid:

So if this client website isn't provided, what I write down is, "Waiting for client to provide site." And I highlight this as orange. This is for my owners understanding because I've explained the color codes over here. Orange means potential issue needs to be resolved. Red is content production is underway and green is order is complete. So coming back, I've set up an example, the order details. This contains the drive link to folder where the client's details are and when the order was placed, when the order was completed and submitted to the client. So it was supposedly submitted on 22nd March. So I marked it as green, meaning that this order is closed. It has been submitted.

Osama Zahid:

Then we have the writers assigned to this client. Writer one, writer two. If I need more writers, I highlight it as orange to remind myself that, okay, we're still missing two writers on this. So once I add the two writers, I will remove this and I will simply remove the color as well to ensure that this potential issue has been resolved.

Osama Zahid:

So, like I said earlier, it's a very dynamic process. I have to keep these spreadsheets updated on a daily basis regularly as I go about my day. Whenever I communicate with the clients or the writers, I have to ensure that all of these spreadsheets are maintained. Otherwise I would lose track of everything that I'm doing or what my writers are up to.

Osama Zahid:

The last spreadsheet I have to maintain is the writer spreadsheet. This specifically details all of the writers that we have working right now. It gives me a list of the writers that are available and assigned to which website right now, what's their status. Are they on Slack or not? So in Slack I've created this writer's group for all my permanent writers. If I hire a new writer, I won't just add them to the group instantly. I would test them out first. And if they're hired as a permanent writer, only then would I add them to the group we have?

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, this is for my own personal understanding. And this column is of the comments. It's again to remember how well or how bad a writer seems to be doing. If he or she needs improvement, then I would simply write here, "Needs improvement." And I would confront that writer, help them, guide them in whatever ways or whatever features that they're lacking. And then if I notice that they're managing well, then I would simply change that to, "Doing well."

Osama Zahid:

Then we have writer emails. This is for my own personal communication, because we have to give them Jasper accounts. We have to give them server accounts. So I need to have that detail up to date as well. So yeah, these are only two rows, three rows let's say, but right now we're working with about 50 writers that are working under me right now. And the new co-manager that we've just onboarded she has about eight or 10 writers working with her as well. So it's efficient to know what writers you're working with, are they available, what website are they working on? Is their website nearly completed? If so, then what is the next website I need to assign them? So these are all sort of organizational tips for me because without these spreadsheets, I would not be able to maintain the business as it stands right now.

Austin Distel:

Yeah. So, cool. Thank you for sharing.

Madeleine Lambert:

Oh, sorry to jump in. But then from a business ownership perspective, all of this data gets sort of compiled into a master spreadsheet which I'm able to take a look at at the end of the month while I'm doing my P&L. And it allows me to very, very quickly and easily understand my cost per article, my cost per writer. And so those production costs are very, very well understood with all of this robust tracking. And that's how you create a massive agency off of spreadsheets.

Austin Distel:

Yeah, it's very impressive. And of course, it's all based on the talented writers that you've attracted into your agency. Them using the right tools makes it all efficient. And I'm curious, in the past, before AI writers existed, what was the approximate time to go and publish an article?

Madeleine Lambert:

Oh, I can speak to this one because we have a large agency that has a very, very robust editorial team without AI. So I would say that an order of eight articles, so 8,000 words, would typically from start to finish take about five days. So this is drastically cut down on time. And obviously it caters to a slightly different clientele, but if you're looking for relatively good quality content and a whole lot of it quickly, this is 100% the way to go.

Austin Distel:

Wow. Yeah. So 8,000 words, roughly a thousand words per article. So eight articles would take a week?

Madeleine Lambert:

Yeah. Five business days.

Austin Distel:

And now how long does eight articles take?

Osama Zahid:

Five hours or six hours at most.

Austin Distel:

Wow. Yeah, that's awesome. So going from literally five days to fulfill on work to five hours.

Madeleine Lambert:

Yeah.

Austin Distel:

Yeah.

Madeleine Lambert:

It's a drastic, drastic difference, but we knew that this was the disruption that our industry was going to face with AI. And it's just fun to sort of get ahead of it and use it to our advantage in terms of an agency perspective.