How to Scale Your Content Marketing and SEO Copywriting in 6 Actionable Steps

Content Marketing Institute asked 980 marketers if they have a scalable model for content creation. The results? Only one in three marketers said yes. This doesn’t bode well for businesses as it is already well-documented how important consistency is to content marketing.

Companies with active blogs get 67% more leads and 55% more website visitors. Producing one blog post every month will not help you achieve these results. You need a steady flow of reliable content to keep your audience engaged and Google’s algorithm interested in your website.

But there’s a reason why one in three marketers haven’t figured out how to scale their content marketing operations in the first place. That’s because scaling isn’t just about cranking out more blog posts—it’s about building a system that allows you to increase output without losing the unique voice and relevance of your content.

To make that happen, you need the right processes and tools in place. Read on to learn what these are.

The Scaling Challenge in Content Marketing

Companies fail to scale their content marketing because they lack the system in place, not people, to support their growth plans.

Let’s say you understand that theoretically if you 10x your current content efforts, you will get outsized growth returns. If your first thought is to hire more people, then all you’ll have is more people with the same foundational problems that need solving.

For example:

• Your content quality drops every time you increase your publishing frequency despite adding new writers to your team.
• You routinely run out of content ideas and find creating the right content for your audience is challenging.
• Your writers deliver off-brand content because they aren’t clear on your style guide, tone, or SEO strategy, forcing you to spend additional time reworking drafts.

Why does this happen? Because increased output adds pressure to every area of your content operation. It’s like trying to cook for a party in a small kitchen–you’ll burn something. If you plan to increase the number of blog posts you publish weekly without a solid system to support this increase, then your content production will be disorganized. Your writers will be overworked, leading to lower-quality content and poor results.

To avoid this, here are practical steps to scale your content marketing.

How to scale content marketing and SEO copywriting

1. Scale topic ideation and research

57% of content marketers say that their biggest challenge is coming up with the right content ideas for their audience. If you have a ton of content to create, starting topic ideation from scratch every time will not only be challenging but also inefficient.

You need a framework (and the right tools) to help you build a bank of topic ideas to feed your content engine for a long time. This framework is the SEO topic cluster.

Topic clusters are groups of interlinked content pages that cover broad subject areas. When you research a cluster comprehensively, you’ll unearth subtopics related to your core topic that will not only be an inspiration for new blog posts but also help Google understand what your website is about.

However, building out topic clusters manually can take days. You have to brainstorm and analyze competitors to identify new topics. After you do this, you also need to show careful organization and visual skills to map how each piece relates to one another.

This is where an entity SEO tool like InLinks comes in to save your time and speed up your content production process. InLinks’ NLP API will analyze Google’s SERPs for your topic, use sentiment and syntax analysis to build a knowledge graph and extract the subtopics Google associates with your core topic.

These subtopics will make up your cluster, and you’ll have identified them in minutes instead of the hours of manual research it’ll have taken you.

2. Simplify your content workflow

To scale your content marketing and grow traffic, you need an organized workflow that helps you monitor progress, access information when needed, and keep every contributor on track.

To get started, define each stage of your content production process. It can be something as simple as:

Ideation ➡️ Drafting ➡️ Editing ➡️ Publishing.

Or you can add more steps such as this:

Ideation ➡️ Topic Assigned ➡️ Content Brief ➡️Drafting ➡️ Editing ➡️ Publishing ➡️ Promotion.

Whatever your content production workflow looks like, break it down into well-defined stages. Then assign roles and tasks to contributors based on these stages, set deadlines, and track progress.

Consider using a project management tool with kanban board features like Trello to provide a visual roadmap for your workflow. You can see which stage each task is in. By moving cards across the board, you can show progress from ideation to publishing.

Tools like Trello have templates you can copy and tweak to fit your unique use case.

3. Automate your content briefs

A content brief is a set of requirements and recommendations that guide a writer as they create a piece of content. It usually includes:

• A rough outline
• Topic research
• Keywords to target
• SEO Competitive analysis 
• Search intent
• Word count
• Internal and external links, and so on.

Now, imagine managing a team of 4 freelance content writers and having to create content briefs for each of them every week. That’s a lot of work, right? Thankfully, there are tools like InLinks that can automate the creation of content briefs.

When you’re ready to create a content brief for a writer, navigate to the Content Brief section and click on Create A Brief. When you enter the keyword you want to rank for, InLinks will run deep entity research, analyze competitor gaps, and generate a comprehensive content brief.

You can then assign the content brief to a writer.

4. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are how you document your content marketing process to make it repeatable. Scaling is a whole lot easier if you have documented processes to fall back on.

For instance, you hire a new writer to help scale your content marketing. You provide them with your SOPs and they use them to create content that aligns with your brand guidelines, thereby avoiding a prolonged onboarding period.

To create an SOP, you must first understand your content creation process. What you want to achieve is to break a large task like writing a blog post into a series of smaller steps. So ask yourself, “What stages does a blog post pass through before it gets published?” List out each task, the persons responsible for them, how they accomplish the tasks, and the tools they use.

As your team grows, SOPs ensure everyone is on the same page. Establishing a clear set of guidelines also reduces the chances of errors and ensures consistent content production quality, regardless of who fills the role.

5. Automate internal linking

Internal links help search engines index your content so they get found on the result pages. They also allow website visitors navigate your website and find more content with ease.

However, internal linking can quickly become an endless exercise when you publish over thirty blog posts monthly. If you’ve used spreadsheets to try to make sense of your internal linking, you’d understand how complicated things can quickly get.

One way to avoid this complication is to use the InLinks internal linking tool.

InLinks automatically identifies opportunities for internal links within your content, ensuring that relevant pages are connected with the correct anchor text. This saves you hours of manual work and ensures your website is navigable by search engines and humans.

6. Implement a consistent publishing schedule

A consistent publishing schedule helps maintain audience engagement, as users will come to expect new content from you at regular periods. It also helps you allocate your resources more efficiently by preventing last-minute rushes.

A content calendar is central to implementing a consistent publishing schedule. Owning a content calendar is like having a bird’ s-eye view of your content production. It shows publishing dates, topics, and writers, allowing your team to see what’s coming up and collaborate with your team and external partners.

To make your calendar more effective, schedule sessions with your team to discuss upcoming topics and address roadblocks before they arise. This will reduce any last-minute stress and ensure that you stay focused on your content strategy.

Scale your content marketing to achieve business goals

Your main goal as a marketer is not to create content. Instead, it is to contribute to the business’s bottom line using content. By scaling your content production process, you can remain in your audience’s faces and gain an advantage over competitors that move slower.

But you shouldn’t scale before you’re ready. Otherwise, your content marketing will break. Before you ramp up content production, ensure that you’ve made the necessary upgrades to your process and tools.

This is where documents like content calendars and SOPs and tools like InLinks come in. By using the recommendations in this blog post, you’ll be in a better position to scale your content marketing efforts.