Mindsets For When You, Alone, Are The Content Team

“You should upload ten blog posts monthly, " the SEO consultants advised.

I restrained an audible scoff. When you’re working for a company whose first of five values is ‘every detail matters’, and who staunchly operates by those values, then drafting posts to meet a quantitative minimum will only result in a sad and overwhelming backlog of unpublished content.

In my case, and in the case for so many content writers, the adage ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’ holds true. But at the same time, the imperfect is the enemy of the finished. Using ChatGPT to churn out SEO-rich but utterly bland and formulaic blog posts wasn’t an option by nature of the brand that I worked with.

And truthfully, I wouldn’t want it to be. I personally like quality, well-researched articles with anti-generic angles; work that I can be proud of.

But this wasn’t a matter of preference. Limited by the fact that I, alone, was the content team, I wasn’t the only bottleneck - the VP of marketing and the CEO had to pass their scrutinizing gaze across every piece before it could be published.

For many brands, the problem isn’t that they can’t publish many blog posts every month; it’s that they can’t publish many good posts every month. Especially if the content team consists of a single person.

TLDR: Here’s are a few mindsets I've adopted that help me output a respectably steady cadence of high-quality, well-researched, and authentic articles.

Delay Gratification with More Research, Less Writing

If you were preparing the world’s best lasagna, you wouldn’t throw random ingredients into a casserole dish and hope for the best. As a content marketer, your ingredients are your research, and that lasagna? It’s your final article.

When you’re setting out to create a campaign or a piece of content, you'll ache to start tapping away as soon as possible. The delight of words showing up, slow as they may, on a previously blank word doc is an instant reward.

On the contrary, research is delayed gratification. Research requires self restraint as you read long articles and sort through disparate data and look to tangentially-related topics that you must verify and mold into cohesive blocks. You have to think before it makes sense. 

But the payoff is really nice. Your brain will be primed with new and original thoughts, and the who's, what's, when's, where's, and why's necessary to completely understand a topic.

So spend 80% of the time on research, and 20% of the time on writing.

Embrace Iterative Content Sessions

Great content doesn’t spring forth in its final state, even after a lot of research and planning. When it comes to content that you own on your site, you have the ability to publish and then refine over time. The idea that a piece is never truly done may sound exhausting, but the idea champions evolution over perfection. You can, in fact, go back after the final draft and make it better.

While you may see a campaign riddled with areas that need improvement, sometimes you must accept that it’s sufficient now, with scope for improvement. Good enough is better than nothing at all.

There are times when things do need to be perfect - a pivotal PR announcement, for instance. But there are other types of content where it can be mostly finished, but that final polish might come later.

This doesn’t mean that you should put out complete, careless garbage. Everything you make should align with brand voice, should serve a purpose, and be underpinned by credible sources. It’s not about settling for mediocrity, but balancing the pursuit of excellence with practicalities.

Be Firm in Recycling Existing Content

Obvious, maybe. But the siren song of creating fresh new content, rather than revisiting old content, comes from many places; the ideas that everybody throws at you, a product launch that you need new content for, and the competition that has come out with some very compelling new campaigns. There's so much fresh new stuff to create, so much to do. 

Old sounds boring, but old is gold. I wrote a book for a client once, and that book became fodder for six month’s worth of educational newsletters and blog posts. Much of the copy was repurposed into YouTube scripts, and those YouTube videos were broken down into IG reels. The content was no longer fresh, but it was as relevant as ever. 

Recycling content isn’t just about repurposing; it’s about breathing new life into old content with the knowledge and insights that time hath wrought upon you.