How to Scale Content Creation [New Step-By-Step Guide]

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

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:

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:

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:

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:

I’m researching real reader pain points on [topic]. I’ll use this research to plan out new content topics for [website]. I want you to analyze Reddit threads (such as [relevant subreddit]) to identify what people have been asking and saying about this topic recently.

Based on your research, identify the three most urgent, unresolved problems these readers have. For each one, suggest a content angle that hasn’t been covered well by existing articles on [your website].

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:

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:

I’m creating a content brief for an article targeting the keyword [keyword].

Here are the top three ranking articles on this topic: [paste URLs or summaries].

Analyze what these articles cover well, what they’re missing, and what a genuinely differentiated angle might look like for my site [site name/description].

Then suggest a brief structure including: primary angle, key sections to include, and one information gain opportunity — something I can say that none of these articles do.

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:

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

Agent-based setups sound cool, but hallucinate way more in practice.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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