MozCon 2017: Size Doesn’t Matter: Great Content by Teams of One

The following post is part of WTWH Media Marketing Lab’s ongoing blog series from MozCon 2017. 

If you work independently or on a small team, and you find yourself in situations with large content calendars, blog posts backing up, tweets backing up, product launches getting delayed – you’ll find comfort in this. As a team of one, it’s important that you adapt to your surroundings and thrive independently to create great content with a successful workflow.

What is the best approach to creating content as a team of one?

Creating a structure. The first step is to create a structure that you can use to section out your content. Lurie suggests sectioning into light, moderate, and highly branded content. The highly branded content is normally what sells, and should be a top priority.

Brainstorming ideas. Creating new content is great, but most of our content is already there. To create a quick blog post, pull chunks out of a previously written white paper or blog post. To create content for Twitter, pull quotes out of a previously written blog post. If you are really struggling  to find ideas, look at support forums or stack overflow and answer those questions for content.

Now you have your idea — its time to get to work. Lurie suggests using plain text markdowns like SublimeText or Markdown 2 to write content quickly. These applications don’t crash, convert to Word, HTML, PDFs and you can open them in 20 years. Plain text editors also allow you to easily add in lists, links and images.

Stop using generic stock photos. Using generic stock photos will not help you create good content. Put your own touch on it and take what is available and do something cool with it.

Have an image prep work flow. Source legally by using Pexels, UnSplash, Istock. If you pay for images, make sure to save them for re-use.

Handle color palettes on your own. Use canva’s color palette generator to create high quality, cohesive branding.

Have your own editorial workflow. Edit your work by using the Hemmingway and Grammarily.

Just publish. At some point you have to just publish – don’t get stuck in an internal loop. Keep chipping away until your organization produces awesome stuff!

All of these tips and tools help teams of one refine, streamline and accelerate their processes.

Ian Lurie is CEO and founder of Portent Inc. He’s recorded training for Lynda.com, writes regularly for the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Forbes.com and TechCrunch. Ian speaks at conferences around the world, including SearchLove, MozCon, SIC and ad:Tech. Follow him on Twitter at portentint. He also just published a book about strategy for services businesses: One Trick Ponies Get Shot, available on Kindle.