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

Before AI: Scaling was hard because producing more content was hard.

Now: Scaling is easy. Producing content that’s actually worth reading is hard.

In my time as lead editor at Backlinko and Semrush, I’ve reviewed over a million words of editorial content.

I built the editorial systems you’re going to read about in this article. And I can tell you for a fact: AI hasn’t 10x-ed our content production.

Because as the tools have gotten better, the expectations for what counts as publishable have risen right alongside them.

The teams that successfully produce content in this environment aren’t using AI as their foundation. But they’re also not avoiding it.

The key is to build your process first, then add AI where it genuinely serves that process.

That’s what differentiates teams that scale quality from teams that simply scale output.

That’s what this guide is about.

At Backlinko, our content has generated over 887 million search impressions and 1.8 million clicks in the last 12 months. We have over 100K email subscribers, and this same content now feeds our YouTube channel.

We’re going to show you exactly how we scaled our content process. Step by step.

Step #1: Break Your Writing Process Into TINY Steps

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

It isn’t.

Creating one piece of content is actually 8-10 distinct steps: research, keyword analysis, briefing, outlining, writing, editing, fact-checking, visual production, publishing, and distribution.

At Backlinko, each new piece represents 50 to 60 hours of investment when you add all that up. A single writer may spend 20 to 40 hours on a topic alone.

If you don’t fully acknowledge all of these steps (and the human energy you need to invest), it can be easy to let something slip.

So, treat content creation as a production system.

Each step is defined, owned, and executable by the right person (or the right tool) at the right time.

Here’s what Backlinko’s content production process looks like broken down:

Your process will probably look different. There may be more steps or fewer.

The point isn’t to copy ours — it’s to document yours.

Every step should be written down, owned, and repeatable.

Once you have that map, two things become possible:

• First, you can bring other people into the process. Quality doesn’t fall apart because everyone knows exactly what they’re responsible for.
• Second, you can identify where AI actually helps and where it doesn’t. Because you’re looking at specific steps rather than “content creation” as a blur.

AI is genuinely useful at some steps in this process. At others, it adds noise without adding value.

You can only tell the difference once the process is clear.

Step #2: Map Every Stage of Your Content Process in One Place

For your content calendar to do its job, it needs to function less like a calendar and more like a project management system.

Here’s why: If creating content is actually 8-10 distinct steps, then your calendar needs to track all of those steps — not just publish dates.

Otherwise, and trust us on this one, something WILL fall through the cracks. (At scale, it always does.)

Here’s what this looks like in practice.

Every article in your pipeline should have each production step listed, assigned, and tracked. Track which specific stage it’s in, who owns it, and what’s blocking it.

At Backlinko, we run our entire content operation through Monday.com.

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

Each stage sits in one of seven queues:

• Writers’ Queue
• Editing Queue
• Final Review
• Designers’ Queue
• Developers’ Queue
• Ready to Publish
• Published

This gives us end-to-end visibility on every piece in production. When something stalls, we can see exactly where and why.

The tool you use matters less than the discipline behind it. Monday.com works for us. Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and Notion can all do the same job if you set them up with the same level of granularity.

The question to ask about any tool: Can I see the exact status of every piece of content, at every stage, at a glance?

If yes, you’re in good shape.

If not, you need more structure.

Step #3: Plan Out Content Clusters

In a world where AI Overviews are compressing clicks, publishing a piece that ranks #4 for a low-intent keyword isn’t a win anymore.

That’s why content planning no longer means generating hundreds of topic ideas and sticking them on a calendar.

Focus on content pillars and topic clusters instead.

Building content clusters into your planning is the fastest way to scale experience and expertise.

Why?

Because the whole team is working together to produce content on multiple channels across all of our owned media.

That’s hundreds of hours of expertise channeled into one topic.

At Backlinko, we ask three questions to choose the right content clusters:

• Does it align with what Backlinko and Semrush are genuinely trying to achieve? Content that doesn’t serve a clear business goal (e.g., traffic, leads, authority in a specific space) doesn’t make the cut. Regardless of volume.
• Can we say something genuinely different? If the top-ranking articles already cover this topic well, what’s our specific angle? What do we know — from our own experience, our data, or our team’s expertise — that they don’t?
• Does a real reader actually need this? Is there a real person with a specific problem, searching for this specific answer?

That last question actually changed how we approach research.

Before, we used to build out detailed reader personas and reference them (by name) in the content planning and revision process.

In theory, a great idea. In practice, it blurred the line between search intent and a fictional audience.

Now, we source actual reader pain points from places readers are having real conversations: Reddit threads, forums, product reviews, YouTube comments, and AI deep research tools.

Here’s how this process might work.

Let’s say you’re planning a content cluster around local SEO.

First, you could use Semrush’s Topic Research tool to generate new ideas. Head to “SEO” > “Topic Research” and type in the topic you want to target.

This gives you hundreds of topic ideas in seconds.

Which is great, but it can also be hard to know where to start or what to prioritize.

That’s where real reader pain points come in.

In this example, you could peruse the /localSEO subreddit and collect some of the questions people are asking.

For example: “How does local SEO work with AI recommendations?”

Doing this gets you closer to what someone actually needs — not what you imagine they need.

Of course, if you want to scale content production, you need a way to do this even faster.

Here’s where AI comes in.

Using a simple prompt in an AI tool like ChatGPT, you can get a summary of relevant research and new ideas for topics.

Of course, the output won’t be a full brief. But it will pressure-test your topic and surface angles you might have missed.

Use this prompt template:

Once topics pass this filter, you can map them out as clusters in your content calendar.

Step #4: Create Detailed Briefs for Each Post

Before someone spends 20+ hours writing a piece of content, set up a detailed brief. This helps guide the direction of each piece and saves a lot of time on edits down the road.

At Backlinko, our strategists and editors create every brief before a writer touches the topic.

The document includes:

• The primary and secondary keywords
• The post type (e.g., in-depth guide, tool listicle, tool review, hub page, etc.)
• Audience type (beginners, intermediate, or advanced)
• Audience insights (like the pain points we uncovered above)
• Notes for the writer (including content angles, the goal of the piece, or a specific format to follow)

But one of the most important additions we’ve made — and the one that’s had the biggest impact on content quality — is what we call the information gain section.

Every brief includes a dedicated section where the strategist, writer, and editor align on differentiation.

It might be a specific insight, data point, experience, or framing that makes this piece worth publishing.

For new content, AI can significantly compress the research phase.

You don’t need custom workflows or AI agents to get started.

The simplest version of AI-assisted brief creation requires nothing more than an AI tool and a few minutes of prep.

Here’s a prompt you can use in Claude or ChatGPT:

You’ll still need to paste the source material manually, and the output won’t be as precise as a workflow that pulls live SERP data.

But it compresses the thinking phase significantly — and it’s something you can do right now, before building anything custom.

For teams ready to go further, here’s what two members of the Semrush content team have built:

Carlos Silva, content product expert at Semrush, built an n8n workflow (an automation that completes actions in multiple tools) to create data-driven briefs.

The workflow follows specific steps:

• When a new task is added in Monday, it pulls the keyword
• Pulls top-ranking pages via SerpAPI
• Runs semantic similarity scoring to identify content gaps
• Outputs a structured research brief, including keyword landscape, SERP features, and related queries

There are no AI agents in the chain, since, as Carlos said:

Each step is a distinct tool call with a defined output.

What used to take a few hours of manual research now takes 5-10 minutes, plus 15-20 minutes of human review.

For updating existing content, Semrush Content Strategist Faizan Ali takes a different approach.

He created a custom Claude Skill — a saved set of instructions that tells Claude exactly how to behave — loaded with Semrush’s brand guidelines and brief format requirements.

Feed it a live URL, and it runs a full SERP analysis by connecting Claude and Semrush so the tools share data in real time.

It automatically pulls keyword data, analyzes competitor content, and identifies gaps.

About three to four minutes later, Faizan gets a structured brief, ready to copy into a doc and edit.

Neither of these outputs is publish-ready. Both still need a human pass to pressure-test the angle.

But you’re starting with hours of research compressed into a few minutes.

Step #5: Outline Your Articles

The time you spend on your outlines is an investment. It means fewer revision rounds, faster time to a publishable draft, and less editorial bandwidth spent on problems that could’ve been caught earlier.

At Backlinko, we use outlines as an alignment checkpoint in our content process.

Before anyone writes a single sentence, an outline answers critical questions:

• Are we covering the right scope?
• Is the structure logical?
• Does the angle match what we established in the brief?
• Is there a clear through-line that ties the whole piece together?

Everything we write at Backlinko started with a detailed outline, like this one for our guide to AI visibility for fashion brands:

At this point, the editor can flag structural gaps, the strategist can confirm the angle matches the brief, and the writer can see exactly where to start.

Everyone is working from the same map.

Of course, some topics are more complex. And we’ve found that sometimes, a shared document isn’t enough.

So we started doing alignment calls at the outline stage: a short conversation between the strategist, writer, and editor.

In this call, they can work through the scope, sharpen the ideas, and agree on what the piece needs to cover (and what it doesn’t).

We typically spend 30 minutes on a call. But even 10 to 15 minutes can be helpful to align early and reduce editing time later.

We’re still building out the data on exactly how much this compresses production timelines, but the early signal is strong — fewer major structural edits, and faster time to a publishable draft.

Step #6: Set Your Team Up for Success With Helpful Resources

Style guides, checklists, and evaluation tools make quality content consistent across a team — regardless of who’s writing, editing, or reviewing a given piece.

Providing these resources upfront helps speed up production.

You’ll spend less time editing drafts when your writers know what voice and style guidelines they need to stick to.

These resources are how you encode what “good” looks like, so it doesn’t live exclusively in one person’s head.

And beyond that, having these guidelines helps you identify patterns and make systematic improvements in your content production.

At Backlinko, we’ve built three core resources that help every writer and editor:

First, content guidelines.

This is like our internal content bible, where we document how we approach search intent, post titles, visuals, formatting, and more.

This is a living document. It’s continually updated as the team learns what works and what doesn’t.

Second, we have our Content Quality Criteria. This is a framework that helps us evaluate whether each piece meets our strategic bar.

The criteria cover five core areas:

• Expertise
• Craft
• Presentation
• Credibility
• Promise Delivery

And finally, we have writer evaluation tools.

This will look different for each team. At Backlinko, we add a table to each brief document.

This is where the strategist, writer, and editor adjust their own rating of the piece as it develops, and add notes for each section.

This makes feedback consistent, constructive, and trackable over time.

When you can see patterns across dozens of pieces, you can improve systematically rather than reacting to individual drafts.

Of course, these resources don’t just help human writers. They’re also what make AI-assisted work reliable.

When you load guidelines and other resources directly into your AI tool of choice, you give it that same clear definition of what “good” looks like.

Some of our writers use these resources in Custom GPTs (custom-configured versions of ChatGPT) or Claude Projects.

Both let you load reference documents so the AI applies your specific guidelines, not generic ones.

Loaded with our Content Quality Criteria and other resources, they can review a draft and flag specific gaps:

• A section that doesn’t align with the brief
• A claim that lacks a source
• A structure that buries the key insight

It’s a quick self-check before the piece goes to an editor.

Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush, uses a similar setup, but for a different stage of the process.

He keeps a Claude Project with our brand guidelines and positioning playbook permanently loaded. So when he’s developing a new piece, the context is already there (without re-prompting or drifting from session to session).

For deep topic-specific work (e.g., a piece on ecommerce SEO), he creates a separate project with additional context documents for that area.

The result: he can move from a detailed outline to a working draft significantly faster, without the output veering away from Backlinko’s voice or standards.

The guidelines handle the quality control. AI handles the bridge between thinking and draft.

In both cases, the infrastructure comes first. That’s what makes AI useful for scaling content.

Step #7: Hire for the System, Not Just for Output

Most companies hire with the idea that more writers = more articles.

That’s technically true, but eventually they notice a decline in the quality.

The reason?

A new writer or editor who doesn’t understand your standards, audience, or editorial process will only dilute your system.

That’s why we hire differently.

First, Hire Great Editors

Before scaling your writer roster, hire a great editor.

An editor who knows your industry and understands your guidelines keeps quality consistent, even as volume increases.

We’ve learned even the best writers at the highest rates need editing. And they appreciate the extra support and development.

We test editors’ SEO knowledge and ability to follow our guidelines before bringing them on.

And we give them the full resource stack from day one — guidelines, checklists, quality criteria — so they’re working from the same standard as everyone else on the team.

Second, Hire Domain Experts or Great Writers Connected to SMEs

For writers, you have two options that work — depending on your topic and team setup.

First, you can hire domain experts: people with firsthand knowledge of what they’re writing about.

Firsthand experience produces a level of credibility that a generalist writer researching the topic can’t replicate.

Just look at this article on developing a content strategy, written by Content Manager Amanda Milligan.

The whole article uses real-world, practitioner-based insights.

The second option is hiring strong writers and connecting them with subject matter experts (SMEs).

This is more scalable than finding writers who are also domain experts, and it’s how we approach most technical topics at Backlinko.

To find great writers, use content-specific job boards, referrals, or spread the word on LinkedIn.

Hire based on industry knowledge, writing samples, and — above all — the ability to work within your editorial process.

When you have great writers, you can connect them to SMEs at your company, or outside it.

The goal is to get that firsthand insight and expertise into the piece, even if the writer isn’t the practitioner.

SMEs bring firsthand experience and authority to your content, a critical E-E-A-T signal.

SEO aside, SME input makes your content more helpful.

For example, in our International SEO guide, we partnered with two external SMEs and one internal SME.

They added firsthand perspectives to a technical topic.

By adding strong writers and editors to your existing process, you can scale your content creation (without sacrificing quality).

Step #8: Onboard Writers Like They’re Joining a System

How you bring writers into your editorial system can have a huge impact on whether they’ll produce great content consistently over time.

Done well, it also dramatically speeds up production.

Writers we’ve onboarded in the past year are submitting first drafts in about 10 days on average.

Historically, that number was closer to 30.

Here’s what changed.

We start every new writer with a paid trial. This includes a short test, followed by two paid articles.

We’re looking specifically for improvement between the first and second revisions, and a bigger improvement between the first and second articles.

And more importantly: How do they incorporate feedback? How do they respond to working within a defined process?

We used to score the second draft and track patterns from there. It worked, but a wall of document comments on a first draft can be more overwhelming than useful.

Now, we do an alignment call after the first draft.

On that call, it’s easier to distill feedback down to two or three key patterns and show exactly how each connects back to the guidelines.

For example, one new writer on a technical piece got overwhelmed by first-round feedback.

The call boiled it down to three things: inverted pyramid structure after section intros, visual density, and keeping scope tight to the brief.

That kind of clarity is hard to deliver in document comments alone.

The goal of onboarding isn’t about testing whether someone can write. It’s about testing whether someone can write within your system — and then investing in making sure they can.

A writer who understands your guidelines, responds well to coaching, and improves across drafts is an asset that compounds over time.

Step #9: Repurpose Content Into New Formats

Content repurposing involves taking a single piece of content and adapting it into several formats.

The same research and expertise that goes into one piece can become a YouTube video, an email newsletter, LinkedIn visuals, a webinar, or a downloadable resource.

You’re not just publishing blog posts. You’re building a content library that works across every channel.

At Backlinko, our written content directly feeds into other assets.

This includes dedicated resources — checklists, workbooks, custom prompts, templates — that give readers something practical to take away.

But it also includes video content on YouTube.

Adapting the work we’ve already done to video is a fraction of the original investment.

Best of all, repurposing is one of the cleaner use cases for AI in a content operation.

The thinking is already done, so you’re not asking AI to generate ideas from nothing. You’re asking it to reformat what already exists.

Here’s a prompt you can use to adapt any article into a LinkedIn post:

That gives you a result that’s 80% of the way there and only needs minimal edits:

That same prompt works for email newsletters, video scripts, or social threads.

Just swap the format instructions and adjust the length guidance.

Step #10: Continuously Iterate and Improve

Your content production cycle is an evolving product.

So, review performance metrics. Source feedback from writers, editors, designers, and, of course, readers.

As lead editor, I update the content guidelines at least once a quarter based on areas for improvement and team feedback.

When you update your guidelines, summarize what’s new for the team. Treat it like a product update: here’s what changed and why.

The same approach applies to processes. Track your production timeline from ideation to publish. Is it two weeks or six? That number tells you where the bottlenecks are — and where to focus improvement efforts.

Another way we iterate on our processes is by running quarterly calls with each writer and editor. On these calls, we discuss turnaround times, editorial updates, and process changes.

Writers share AI workflows they’ve found useful. Editors flag patterns they’re seeing across drafts.

The whole team gets smarter, not just the individual.

It’s become one of the most valuable touchpoints we have for keeping a distributed team improving rather than just operating.

This is what scaling looks like in practice — more than volume, it’s about scaling quality.

Next Steps for Scaling Your Content Production

Going from a handful of articles to 10, 20, or 50+ posts per month (without compromising quality) requires thinking differently.

You go from viewing your content as a product to seeing your entire production cycle as a product.

To get started, go back to step #1. Understand each step in your publishing process.

Then, use our Content Scaling Tracker spreadsheet to benchmark your current state.

Next, read our guide on writing a blog post. This will help you list each production step and create a baseline for your content guidelines.