Over the past few years, I have hired hundreds of freelance writers. And built a ton of content teams. And I have hired a few editors as well.

I’m here to tell you that building awesome content teams is not as easy as it once was.

Just this week, I met with a freelance writer ready to throw in the towel on it all.

We’ve all been there. Ready to burn it all to the grown. And I’m sure all the buzz about freelance writers losing their jobs and the noise around AI isn’t helping the cause here.

So, I put up my hand to help! I have reviewed thousands of writer and editor applications, and I see many of the same ‘mistakes’ these days.

After meeting with this writer, reviewing their resume, and talking about the types of jobs they are looking for, a few things became crystal clear:

1. They didn’t sell themselves

2. They did have some serious writing skills, but we had to dig a bit to uncover them

3. They were afraid to claim a niche or specialization

4. The most exciting experience was buried among the wishy-washy ‘buzzwords’ writers think hiring managers want to hear

The harsh reality was that no matter how many resumes they sent in or how many applications they sent in, if this person wanted to get hired as a freelance writer, they needed to make some fundamental shifts in their approach.

And there’s the rub. On the other side of things, colleagues always tell me that it’s tough to find a great writer or editor these days.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about quality issues, freelancers flaking on them, missed deadlines…

You get the picture.

When did building a content team become so hard?

Traditional hiring practices of writers are shifting. The more I dig into content ops and help build solid content teams, the more I want to continue discussing what we can do to improve this.

A lot has changed in the content marketing space, and it’s not just because of AI.

Writers are the heart and soul of our business at Venture 4th Media — we rely on our writers to be passionate niche experts + writers, which is not always an easy feat to find!

When Google started talking about E-E-A-T (or EAT back then), many companies (including ours) were forced to pay greater attention to WHO was creating the content, not just thinking about the content produced.

Today’s content teams need to deliver more than the content teams of the past, which means we’ve been seeing these growing pains in content team creation for a while.

Every publication, internal content marketing team, or company seems to work differently with writers and subject matter experts.

I get to see under the hood of many content marketing teams, and while most of us agree that we need to work with SMEs in some way, no ‘one way works’ for all content teams.

The Different Approaches to Working With Content Teams

Creating solid content teams that can deliver is not as easy as it once was.

Anyone that wants to create high-quality content needs to work with subject matter experts. That we can agree on, right?

Where it gets murky in content ops is HOW we work with them and where writers fit into the mix. And, then, how does editorial or SEO fit into that mix?

Finding and building a great content team starts with thinking through exactly what roles we want to fill. I’ve seen firsthand how many content teams try to wing it — like, let’s see who we find, and then we’ll figure this out.

Knowing how you want to work with SMEs, writers, and editors and who you need to hire is the first step to finding those perfect writers and people who can execute.

If you are a writer, it’s important to determine the approach and workflows you’ll be working in. Are there clear writers’ guidelines? What about briefs? Will you be responsible for SEO-ing? Are you getting hired as the go-to expert writer or more of a generalist? Do you need to find other SMEs to reference in your work?

Here are a few ways I’ve seen content teams work:

The generalist writer + SME review approach…

I’ve seen this a lot. Hiring generalist writers can be less expensive than hiring specialists so this approach can make a lot of sense at first glance. If the SME reviews the content and adds some expert insights, content teams can produce better-than-average content.

But with the rise of AI, we are looking at generalists a bit differently. Why are we investing in human writers if AI can get us to that generalist quality?

Writing is still a skill. It is thinking through a topic. But great writing and great content need something more.

And that is what having an SME reviewer tries to help. And, yes, this workflow can produce quality content, depending on the level of interaction and involvement from the SME. I have seen some teams execute amazing quality content getting the SME involved in the writer briefs, then reviewing the content as well.

I’ve also met a lot of really talented ghostwriters and generalists who have honed that skill of taking on the tone and voice of an organization. But, there are still limitations to this approach.

This is perhaps one of the easiest workflows for others to replicate. There are still a lot of generalist writers out there. Finding SMEs who don’t need to commit to content creation and only need to be minimally involved is much easier than having them be a dedicated part of your team.

And, in content, sometimes the harsh truth is — if your competitors can do this easily, it might not be the moat around your content strategy as you think it is.

The SME writer + editorial review approach…

We take this approach with our processes, but there are some downsides. For certain niches and specializations, finding experts who can also write is tough. You can pay a high premium for credentialed experts, so content costs go way up. And, even with expertly written content, you need editorial. I’ve worked with many real-deal experts thinking they could figure out the writing side of things but have been disappointed with the outputs.

Not all experts can write well, even with training and clear editorial guidelines.

The journalistic writer + SME resources + editorial approach…

This is the approach I see a lot in smaller content teams. Instead of generalist writers, they use journalistic writers who can source SMEs, interview experts, and inject that into the final product. Actual journalistic writers do come at a cost, though and I feel like many writers will claim this as a skill but don’t know how to interview, pull relevant quotes or get the most out of an SME.

The SEO + SME writer + generalist editor approach…

Okay, this is similar to the SME writer approach, but it comes with a twist, and I see this type of workflow a lot as well. SEO still works and should be a part of your editorial somehow. This can be a smart approach for companies that want to scale SEO content. I see the challenges here: SEO tools can somewhat limit a true SME writer or expert. If you are a real deal expert writer, it may not make sense to include some of the topics suggested in tools such as Surfer SEO, Market Muse, or Yoast.

If you publish written web content, a strong SEO strategy is important, but not at the cost of expertise. EEAT should work with other SEO strategies. It’s not good enough to do the SEO basics and sprinkle in some EEAT elements to do slightly more than what is currently in the SERPs. Content creators need to think more holistically about the content they create and find those ways we can make our content unique, special, and different than what’s out there.

Many content teams can get by with a decent generalist editor approach IF the content creation outputs are quality and follow the best SEO practices. Still, as the content goalpost has shifted, I predict that generalist editors, like generalist writers, will get pushed out of content teams.

Are you starting to see why building content teams is not as easy as it seems?

The SEO, then SME writer + SME editor approach…

This is perhaps my favorite editorial approach and one I’m striving to implement more into our workflows at Venture 4th Media. For us, content is our product. I have been quite spoiled in my time here that I have never had to ‘sell content marketing’ to our CEO — he’s a content purist like we all are.

So having SMEs involved in editorial and content creation makes sense to me. This is not as easy to execute as it seems, though. There are still many possible friction points when creating great content. This could come at a higher cost, so carefully strategizing what content to invest in becomes important. Two, SEO still needs to be an important part of the content strategy and creation process but not at the expense of the SME.

With SME editors, there is a natural synergy towards a more developmental editorial. Our SME editors can smell inauthenticity in content creation and quickly tell when someone is ‘faking expertise.’ An SME editor looks for EEAT signals and should be able to spot fluff pretty easily.

The Do All The Things Writer + Editor…

Okay. While I would love to create the ideal content team for every organization I work with, I am also a realist. I also work with smaller companies where investing in an entire content team is not within the budget.

For this type of company, yes, you can still create great content with a do-it-all person, but finding the right person is important if this is you.

If you have a small company and are the expert, this person can be you, with a caveat. If you don’t know SEO or haven’t written for the web, you will want to get some expert help.

I always tell my smaller clients or friends starting digital businesses if you want to invest in content marketing (even if that means you’ll be doing the content creation yourself), it’s worth figuring out the strategy first.

This year, we helped a small company where the owner is the bonafide expert get their content marketing strategy off the ground. Before content was created, we did market research and a competitor content analysis and mapped out the topical areas we would build into. We also established a move-forward plan for demonstrating EEAT and implemented basic SEO best practices.

Just having this initial strategy can help a solo content creator so much. If we stopped here and let the owner write and publish their content, they would already be far ahead of similar-sized companies.

So, yes. You can have someone do it all, but limitations will always exist. And I would make sure that do it all person has some subject matter expertise as well.

Things to Read, Watch and Ponder

If you haven’t heard yet, Google is getting rid of the FAQ and How-To displays in the SERPs for most of us. Yes. Say goodbye to another outdated SEO hack. I’m personally happy about that one, especially after seeing the real deal data from Lily Ray on what this ‘really’ means for our clickthrough rates.

JR Oakes waded through 32,000 of Barry Swartz’s posts to create this intensive look at the past 20 years in search. Time to get super nerdy here.

Should you be pruning your content to get more traffic? As Google shifts, it can be tempting to delete mass amounts of content, but is this the best decision for your business? There are so many layers to this, but Google is warning us against this. Agree or disagree, worth a read.

Helen Guo shares her playbook here for growing a newsletter. These are some great tips if you want to grow. Check it out!

That’s it for this week.

It’s been really fun writing these newsletters. With all the projects and things I have going on right now, I’ve given myself full permission to be a bit flexible this summer on sending these out, and I’m happy to say my engagement is still amazing!

Next week, I want to continue the discussion on hiring writers and discuss some of the challenges I’ve seen in finding great writers and working with them.

Cheers! Amy

Some Bonus Newsletters You’ll Love

If you want to get into the weeds on these topics, here are a couple of newsletters to subscribe to.