Content workflow strategies for efficient content creation

Create a list of every step in the content creation process – all of them – including ideation, outline creation, content gathering, writing, graphic design, proofreading, editing, approvals, translations, scheduling, publishing and promotion. Once you've ID'd the steps that satisfy all of your stated requirements, put 'em in order. Note which steps need to go before or after others to avoid any unnecessary backtracking or revisions. For example, don't translate the piece before the copy is approved, don't get all the graphic design done before the writing is OK'd. Avoid wasting time by making approval workflow part of the content production workflow.

Delegation is the name of the game and identifying key stakeholders for the entire process is important, as someone's ultimately got to be the decider-in-chief. They'll be responsible for ushering content along the process and ticking things off the checklist you previously made; interim and final approvals, conflict resolution, vote tie-breaking and any other high-level decision-making tasks that need attention. Of course, allowing too many cooks in the kitchen, or too many stakeholders giving input, can spell disaster. Ideally, select one person who has the final word for any piece of content, maybe including input from 2-3 other stakeholders if needed.

Cliché alert: teamwork makes the dreamwork and identifying who on your team can cover the various tasks associated with the content operations is important. Plus, knowing who you do have also forces you to address who you don't have and take the steps to bring them onboard. Keep costs in mind here, particularly if you're bringing new people in that require additional resources and training to get up to speed. Content isn't free and neither is the expertise to create it, try to keep your entire team as efficient and agile as possible. In other words: multi-task where possible.

Depending on the size of your team and content needs, it's often beneficial to diagram or map your workflow using symbols to represent key personnel, tasks or phases in the content assembly line. Put them in order and draw connectors between them to indicate flow. Getting this sort of bird's eye view of how your work flows really helps pinpoint any snags or potential bottlenecks and sharpens your content strategy. In a perfect world this would be linear and, save for the project manager, avoid circular patterns that have content returning to the same person over and over which could represent poor order or redundancy.Learn more about Slickplan's Diagram Maker.

Sounds obvious, but it's important to understand where the lifecycle of a piece of content begins and ends. Ask yourself where does this content really begin; in the brainstorming phase, as a request from a director or from the SEO manager? Likewise, you should also know when you're well and truly done working on it. After you schedule your content for publication, do you plan to promote it on social media or other channels? If so, you may want to consider adding these steps to the overall workflow, especially if they occur for everything your team creates.

Diagram, diagram, diagram. Are you sensing a pattern? Diagramming how a visitor will potentially move through your site helps you improve the overall user experience, giving you the ability to better support your content, purpose and audience. Having an easy to interpret visual diagram allows you to see and edit the various actual user paths through your site from page to page. One of the best parts? By diagramming, you can uncover and fix unexpected dead ends, excess clicks and other navigational issues.

We've already talked about delegating a project manager/stakeholder but you also need to assign tasks to the rest of your content team with an eye towards grouping and reordering tasks where you can. This will reduce handoffs between people and make it easier to cover more without interruption; a lean, mean collaboration team. Naturally, you'll likely need to play around a bit with the groupings and orderings with some real life trial and error as things don't always work as outlined on paper. Worth noting, don't feel locked into the first plan you create, if it's not working, just adjust. Optimization is the goal, take as many iterations as you need to get there.

Revisions come with the territory of producing content. Rarely, if ever, will a first draft be the draft you publish. Therefore you want to make revisions part of your content development workflow. If the changes have little or no effect on future steps, they can likely be grouped and addressed all at once. If, however, something needs to be locked in, like copy for a translation, do not proceed to the next steps until it's approved. If people know to expect revisions, it also helps with managing expectations and creating more reasonable deadlines.