How to Scale Content Creation (Step-By-Step Guide)

Feb 19, 2025Read time: 6 minutes

This post will show you how to scale your content marketing.

(Step-by-step.)

Our team has published and updated over 300 articles in the first half of 2024.

That’s about 50 per month.

Plus: we’ve maintained our content quality while increasing our organic traffic sessions by 30% year-on-year.

backlinko-jan-jun-2024-performance — some caption

And most importantly: This strategy has helped us boost our revenue by 77%.

You’re about to learn precisely how we scaled up.

Step #1: Break Down Your Writing Process Into TINY Steps¶

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of “writing content” as a single step.

Creating content is actually made up of several smaller steps.

If you try to do all of these steps yourself (at a high standard), you won’t be able to achieve the publishing volume needed to scale.

Backlinko’s founder, Brian Dean, started as a solopreneur, writing and publishing articles by himself.

Fortunately, because he focused 100% on quality over quantity, the Backlinko blog grew like crazy. Even though he published an article every four to six weeks.

But at a certain point, traffic to the blog started to stall.

Backlinko – Initial Blog Traffic Started To Stall

He realized that growing a blog past a certain point with only 10-12 posts per year was pretty much impossible.

And also that you don’t need to execute every single step yourself.

In other words:

You can focus on the stuff you’re good at (In Brian’s case, keyword research and writing). And get help with the things you’re not good at (editing, design, visuals).

This helped our content creation process go from this:

We now publish 50 articles a month across Backlinko and TrafficThinkTank.com.

Without sacrificing quality.

That said:

Your content creation process will probably look different than ours.

There may be more steps. Or fewer steps.

The idea here isn’t to follow the same process that we use.

Instead, your goal should be to document all the steps you follow for creating content.

Then, get experts to help with some of those steps.

Step #2: Create an Organized Content Calendar¶

For your content calendar to do its job, it needs to be super organized.

(This is especially true if you’re putting out lots of 10x content, like ultimate guides, industry studies, or content hubs.)

As mentioned in step #1, “creating content” is a process with dozens of smaller steps.

And if you want to scale up, you need a way to list each step that needs to be done. And the current status of those steps.

Otherwise, and trust us on this one, something WILL fall through the cracks.

Today, our content schedule acts more like a project management system than an actual calendar. We use a combination of Google Sheets, Notion, and Monday.com.

So, if you already have a content calendar, great.

If not, make it a top priority.

And even if you have a calendar, take a second look at it to see if there’s any way that you can improve it.

Specifically, try to have every single tiny step laid out as a checklist. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.

For example, in 2024, we migrated our content calendar from Notion to Monday.com so we could get even more granular about each step.

For one article, we have 12 stages, including substages, for three revision rounds.

Each stage is grouped into one of five queues, including:

Writer’s queue
Editors queue
Designers queue
Developers queue
Distribution queue

This gives us end-to-end visibility on our production so we can improve efficiencies.

Step #3: Plan Out Your Content Schedule for the Next 6-9 Months¶

Planning out Backlinko’s blog content has been a game-changer for us.

Previously, Brian’s team and would have maybe 2-3 posts planned out in advance.

(In fact, sometimes he’d only start writing a post after the last one came out.)

This led to rushed projects, stressed-out staff, and posts that weren’t as good as they could have been.

Today, we have the next 6-9 months of content planned out.

Which is a HUGE stress reducer.

Everyone on the team knows exactly what’s coming up. So there’s zero stress wondering what the future looks like. And you can account for seasonality.

The other great thing about having a 6-9 month plan is that you can batch things.

Especially keyword research.

So, instead of logging into a keyword research tool every single time you want to write something, you can spend a day 100% focused on finding topics and keywords.

Then, map those topics in your content calendar for the next few months.

We use Semrush’s Topic Research tool to generate dozens of content ideas in seconds.

Say we want more topics to complement this article on scaling content. Type “scale content” into the search box, and hit “Get content ideas.”

Step #4: Create Detailed Briefs for Each Post¶

A good content brief sets your writers and editors up for success. It provides a clear direction and objective for every article.

SEOs and Content Strategists create our briefs. The document includes:

The primary and secondary keywords
The post type (e.g., listicle, how-to, hub page, etc.)
The search intent and target audience.
Notes for the writer (content angles, differentiation, featured snippet opportunities)

During the briefing stage, you can include a detailed outline (more on that in the next step) or leave it to the writer.

We sometimes use AI tools like ChatGPT and Frase to understand what’s currently ranking and find a unique perspective that aligns with Backlinko’s brand tone of voice.

Step #5: Outline Your Articles¶

Create detailed outlines before you write.

Many of us like to approach writing blog posts like Ernest Hemingway: grab a cup of strong coffee, whip open WordPress, and start banging on your keyboard.

That may work for a genius like Ernest Hemingway.

But for us regular folks, writing freestyle like that is slow. And, more often than not, the final product doesn’t turn out that great.

Today, we write everything (including this post you’re reading) from a detailed outline.

Not only is this way faster than writing on a blank page, but it makes your content more organized and structured.

An outline gives you a high-level overview of what you want to cover.

That way, you can see if you’re missing any important steps or strategies. Before you write a single word.

And it also allows your editors to provide early feedback so writers and editors are on the same page.

For example, here’s the outline for: What Are Canonical URLs: An In-Depth Guide for SEOs.