Most new ♍content managers suffer from two conflicting, gut-wrenching anxieties:

1. Oh my goodness, I’m going to run out of content ideas within the next few days!
2. Oh my goodness, there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to write all the content we need!

Strangely, these tend to alternate insteꩵad of balancing each other out. 

Sometimes you feel like you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and you’re going to write yourself out of a job. (No content needs means no content manager.)

At oth🧸er times, you’re facing a sky-high mountain of content needs and you can only type so fast. (*Nervously cracks knuckles.*)

Luckily enough, the solution to both of these worries is the same: You need to build a stable, consistent process to take each content idea from brainstorm to publica✅tion.

If you’ve always got a backlog and an easy way to track progress, you’ll squash these fears and get back to worrying about things that really matter, like whether leftover Halloween candy is still𓄧 OK to eat.

I mean, that peanut butter cup is sealed, so…

A steady content pipeline is vital to They Ask, You Answer success

At IMPACT, we’ve helped thousands of businesses succeed with our 168极速赛车官网:They Ask, You Answer framework that simplifies 168极速赛车官网:content marketing and delivers results. 

And They Ask, You Answer is neither gimmick nor trick: It takes steady effort to succeed, and a ce💛ntral contributor to the entire initiative is the content manager.

Indeed, for most successful They Ask, You Answer companies, is a watersh𒁃ed event. Often, they try at first to have someone else on their team handle content, but when a person wears too many hats, something slips. When it comes to content, that means fewer articles going out, as well as diminished qu🐻ality.

But with a dedicated content manager on staff🐼, a company has a full-time writer who can crank out content, interview SMEs, write sဣcripts, edit website copy, and more. 

At the center of a content manager’s responsibilities, though, is the regular publication of quality 168极速赛车官网:inbound marketing ꦍcontent that directly addresses customer que𝐆stions. 

What does a healthy content pipeline look like?

As a content manager, you’re sort of like a on꧃e-person content factory: You’re likely responsible for each piece of content, end-to-end. 

As you produce each piece of content, though, you should always have several other content projects in process. Seeing a single piece of content all the way through, from brainstorm 🎃to publication, one at a time, is too inefficient. Real-world content production involves a good deal🐻 of waiting (some voluntary, some not), and your time is best divided among tasks. 

A content manager should always have a whole🌸 bunch of irons in the fire. A few pieces that are done and ready to publish, more that are in various stages of the production process, and a healthy backlog of content ide🥃as that are listed by priority.

168极速赛车官网:Kevin Phillips, lead content trainer at IMPACT and allꦅ-around SEO and content marketing wizard, likes to tell his clients to have “nine in the pipeline.”

We advise our cli🤡ents to publish 💝three articles each week. So, if Kevin talks to a content manager on a Monday, they should have three already scheduled for this week, three nearly done for next week, and threඣe more in earlier stages for the week after. 

That way, they’re never scrambling to make a las😼t-minute deadline. And, should something come up, publication won’t immediately suffer.

The 9 steps of content production

Think of it this way, all content more or less follows the same steps, from brainst𒆙orm to publication. For me, these steps look like this: 

1. Brainstorm the idea
2. Write an outline or interview questions
3. Conduct research or interview
4. Draft the article
5. Edit
6. Get approval
7. Stage
8. Final check
9. Publication

*Note: Sometimes pieces can move backward in this process, or ping-pong between steps. There might be a few rounds of editing and approval, for example.

The efficient content manager should always have numerous articles in ev💖ery stage of this process, including a healthy backlog of topics that have been brainstormed but not started. 

Right now, as I write this, I’ve got two articles staged a☂nd scheduled, and three more in the final stages of revision. I’m working on four (with three more interviews scheduled 💮for the next few days), and I have a backlog of 18. 

How long does a piece of content take to create?

Writing at a steady clip of three articles a week should keep you pretty busy. Content expert Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask, You Answer, says . 

(Now, it's important to note that he posted this before the rise of AI. Today, content is faster than ever, but we need to spend addition🗹al time fact checking, humanizing, and brand🌸ing our content.)

I took Marcus’s gener💃al principle and wanted to see how it applied to real life.

For a recent piece of content I wrote and published, I tracked all of the time I spent, from initial idea to final ဣ💙product.

Now, this was a longer article — a 2,400-wo🗹rd step-by-step inbound strategy explanation. All told, I spent exactly three hours and 11 minutes writing and editing the document — about two and a half hours writing and 45 minutes editing. (I can track 🐎all of this with a Chrome add-on called .)

Start-to-finish in just over 5 hours

So, how did I spend my time when 👍working on this piece? I tracked that, too. Although there are some estimates, these are generally hard numbers. 

Below are the normal steps of my content creation proceꦏss, in order, and I’ve added explanations about how much time I spent at each stage. 

1. Brainstorm idea. This topic was assigned to me by our director of content, so I didn’t spend any time brainstorming. 0 minutes.
2. Write an outline or interview questions. I pretty quickly knew the direction I wanted to go with this piece. I put down an initial structure that I tweaked slightly as I wrote it. It took me about 20 minutes.  
3. Conduct research or interview. This one was a bit tricky. I did initial research before starting, and then more as I went. The research was blended into the writing process. But I’ll estimate 50 minutes. 
4. Drafting. Actually writing the article took me about two and a half hours. Again, this was a longer piece, and this included some research along the way. I’m also pretty ADD, so I’m sure I was checking Slack and doing other things during the writing process. Still, I’ll say 150 minutes.
5. Editing. The next day, I spent time editing — and then I did the same two days later. Altogether, I spent about 45 minutes editing. 
6. Get approval. I sent a draft to Kevin Phillips for his feedback. It took him some time, but it didn’t take me any time, other than sending him a message. Thus, zero minutes getting approval. 0 minutes.
7. Staging. Once the draft was ready, I staged it in HubSpot. This always takes longer than I think it will, especially with extra images that I need to resize, title, and insert. 40 minutes.
8. Final check. 168极速赛车官网:Paul, our director of content, does a final check on everything before it goes out. So, 0 minutes of my time. 
9. Publication. Ditto. 

All in ♎all, for the work I did, it looked🌳 like this:

What delays content?

So, if an article takes less than a day to produce,ꦬ why can’t it get out the door more quickly? Well, two main🔜 reasons:

1. A content manager has other tasks to do (meetings, mostly) that slow things down. 
2. Content spends a lot of time sitting around before it gets out the door. 

The 𒈔truth is that the longest part of conten🍌t production is idle time. There’s🔜 the actual work of writing the article (as detailed above), and there are the times in between, when a piece of content sits on a virtual desk, waiting for the next step to happe𒆙n.

If a single piece of content ta♕kes less than eight hours to produce, it probably takes two or thre🐓e weeks to publish. Here’s what that process looks like:

1. Brainstorm idea — There’s always time between a brainstorming session and getting started. For me, the idea needs to develop in the back of my head. (+1 day)
2. Once I have an idea where the piece will go, I can write an outline or interview questions. I need to do this before I schedule an interview so the SME knows what to expect. I never like to schedule an interview on the next day, so I try for later in the week. Then, I send a one-on-one video going over the questions and the piece as a whole. (+3-5 days)
3. Conduct research or interview. An interview is quick (usually about 20 minutes), but then I pay to have it transcribed (auto-transcriptions from Rev.com are a cheap and quick option). Then I go through the transcript and pull out relev꧟ant quotes and snippets. If I’m doing research, I spend time reviewing sources, looking through statistics, and more. But this is not idle time.
4. Once I’ve done all that, I can start to draft. The more work I’ve done on the front end, the easier this process is. Funnily enough, the writing usually doesn’t take all that long. 
5. Hemingway famously said that “.” That’s pretty good advice, so you need to spend time editing, whether you do that yourself or work with a colleague. If you do it yourself, you should wait for a while so you can look at the piece with fresh eyes. If you share it with someone else, you’ll need to wait for them to get it back to you. (+1 day)
6. Once you’ve cleaned up your draft, you can send it back to the SME or anyone else for approval. They need a chance to look it over to make sure your facts are right. (+2 days)
7. With an edited and approved draft in hand, you can move forward to stage (or get it into your publishing system) your piece. Sounds fun, sounds easy, but actually, it takes a really long time. Double-check your links, write your meta description, resize your images, craft your URL, standardize spacing and headers, and you’re ready for your ...  
8. Final check. Whether it’s you or a colleague, someone will have to go through one last time — nice and slow — to check everything. Same as the editing above. If it’s you, wait a day. If it’s someone else, it will depend on their schedule. (+1 day)
9. You’re ready to hit “Publish”! But, more likely, you’re ready to hit “Schedule for later” because the articles being published today were written and staged last week. Once something is totally good to go, it can sit for days (sometimes longer) to actually get out the door. If you just publish things as soon as they’re ready, you’re less likely to have a consistent publication schedule. (+3-5 days)

Adding it all up

This single piece of content ಌtook me a little more than five hours to produce, start to finish. It also spent about 12 days hang❀ing around, waiting to move forward. That’s (*checks calculator*) about 96 hours.

Or, to put it another way:

Organization is everything

To succeed as a content manager, you have to constantly move things forward. There are parts of the process you control (writing, eꦓditing, etc.), but there are parts you don’t. A chunk of your time will go to touching base and following up with people, helping to free those articles that have gotten snagged on their journey down thꦕe content river. 

Organization is vital.

Kevin r♐ecommends a few different tools to keep everything running smoothly. Something as simple as a Google spreadsheet can suffice, especially for 🍌organizations on a smaller scale. Bigger companies can use project management tools such as , , , or an equivalent.

These allow collaboration and doc🎐umentation as each project moves forward. Without a system in place, things slip be🍎tween the cracks or get unintentionally put on the back-burner. 

Build your content factory

Henry Ford revolutionized the modern factory♋ by introducing the assembly line. Before this change, a team of workers would build a car from start to finish. One team, one car at a time.

With the assembly line, though, the car itself would m🍨ove forwaꦯrd, with each worker performing the same task on each car that came in front of him. 

With this new system in place, Ford was able to reduce the time it took to .&nb൲sp; 

You need to be your own little content factory. Build a process that lets you put your effort where it’s needed so that there are numerous pieces of content on the assembly line at any given time. By the time one rolls off t🐼he line (and is published), there’s already another ready to take its place.

Keep nine in the pipeline and you’ll always be in good shape.