Bio: Today βs article is written by Marc John (makeshift12) who is a seller on Legiit offering a premium backlink service which you can find here. Marc is a digital entrepreneur who is currently building and growing a range of digital assets including his most recent project which is online surf store, Surf Gear Lab.
Being a freelance writer on Legiit can be a great side hustle or even a full time gig for some. The reality is that as you grow your service, youβll start to find it increasingly difficult to scale as an individual freelance writer. Hiring a team of other freelance writers will be hugely beneficial and enable you to significantly increase your capacity.
Recruiting a team of freelance writers can be a fairly straightforward process. As long as you have a well-defined job specification in place, and have clear parameters in place to measure the quality of each applicant.
Managing a Freelance Writing Team
The harder part however, is managing this newly recruited writing team. Remember that applicants will pull out all the stops to get hired, but once hired they can easily begin to rest on their laurels. This is where the quality of their writing may begin to deteriorate. Itβs your job to make sure this doesnβt happen.
A writing team that is not attentive to active management can very quickly become complacent, resulting in poor writing and disappointed customers.
Having a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPβs) in place will enable you to manage writers effectively. The quality of your SOPβs will ultimately determine your ability to manage your writing team.
Beyond your SOPβs there are two key components to expert writer management β Ongoing Writer Feedback and crafting a comprehensive Writing Brief.
The Writing Brief
Prepare a detailed brief for every new writing project you assign to the writer/s you will be working with. The brief should include the following elements:
- Article title
- Article word count
- Primary and secondary SEO keywords
- Writing Style: Descriptive, persuasive, expository and narrative
- Deadline
- Include any key website links the writer can use for research
After reading the above information, all the writers in your team should be able to complete the task at hand competently.
Ongoing Writer Feedback
To ensure that your writers properly grow and develop, you should provide detailed feedback to every member of your writing team as soon as they join.
I have noticed a significant difference in the quality of writing between writers who have received little feedback and those who receive regular feedback.
It is important to remember that feedback can be either positive or negative. The feedback is intended to let the writer know whether theyβre meeting expectations and hopefully get them to the point where theyβre consistently producing content that exceeds expectations.
Setting a precedent early on is a good way to achieve this. The first two weeks of a writer joining your team is a critical time to provide valuable feedback and a lot of it. This will give the writer a clear understanding of how to write well for your company.
Most writers actually value the feedback they receive as it enables them to become better at their craft which in turn improves their career prospects and value in the marketplace.
Donβt Forget About Plagiarism
Plagiarism is sadly rather commonplace across the internet these days. It is too easy to copy and paste content and try and pass it off as your own. As a manager of a team of freelancers it is of paramount importance that you make it very clear that plagiarism will not be tolerated under any circumstances.
Thankfully, there are a number of free tools one can use to detect duplicate or plagiarised content. Some popular ones include Grammarly, Plagly and Duplichecker. All you have to do is copy and paste your content into a box on the website and it will then scan the entire web to detect any instances of plagiarism.
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