5 things to do

Kaleigh Moore ran her business as a solo operation for a few years when burnout and illness intervened. To sustain the business, she needed a backup solution. That’s when she started to expand the team, adding a freelance content creator. Now, she works with anywhere from three to 15 subcontractors – and her income has grown substantially.

Here’s some of the advice she shared at Creator Economy Expo 2022 (and a little of my own) to help your business survive because you can’t do everything all the time.

1. Find pre-screened candidates: Instead of putting out an open or cold call for creator help, get referrals from people in your niche. Ask people in your network who they work with or might know. Post your inquiry in the digital communities to which you belong. If you have a strong subscriber base, consider asking them, too.

2. Conduct a thorough screening: Yes, you’ll need to learn if they have the skills to create the content as any traditional employer would want to know. But you also need to understand their freelance business. So ask questions like these – How long have you been freelancing? What is your area of specialty? What are your rates and average turnaround times for content? How soon are you available to begin a project?

3. Develop an onboarding guide: To help the contractors who work with your business, create a welcome-to-your-business kit. Detail your background. Explain the business – your target audience, partners/sponsors/advertisers, content tilt, content distribution, business goals, success metrics, etc.

Detail your basic expectations of good content creation. To reinforce that, share examples of your content products. Get into granular details such as your style guide of choice, content submission process, edit-and-review workflow, etc.

Yes, this work often requires documenting processes and preferences that you’ve just been doing as a one-person business without giving them much thought. So use the time to think about if what you do is still the best way to do it with multiple people – change as necessary.

(The onboarding guide is a separate document from the written agreement spelling out the contractual relationships between your brand and the freelancer. It also is different from a content brief that details the specifics of an assignment.)

4. Stay involved: Don’t just make an assignment and forget it until the due date. Use a project management tool to track what’s happening. Conduct regular productive check-ins with your freelancers to understand what’s working, what they may need help with, and how you can better the relationship and product.

Kaleigh recommends documenting their performance, so you understand (and remember) the strengths and weaknesses of each person’s work.

5. Implement a two-strikes policy: If the freelancer’s work is subpar quality – and you provided feedback – end the relationship after two strikes. As Kaleigh explains: “This is an indicator that they’re either overworked, not a good fit for the material, or struggle to follow directions.”
– Ann Gynn

Resources:

Get more of Kaleigh’s great advice, including more screening advice and tips for giving feedback, in her 39-minute Creator Economy Expo presentation. It’s free!

Know When To Outsource in Your Creator Business and How To Hire Freelancers

5 things from the tilt

Recognize the unsung creators! Nominate your favorite creator (it’s OK if it’s you!) for The Tilt’s first-ever Content Entrepreneur Awards.
Joe and Robert host a special episode on AI Content: What’s Next for ChatGPT for Content Creators? [This Old Marketing podcast]
Joe talks about patience and Hadestown in a lesson all content entrepreneurs need to hear. (Content Inc. podcast)
Want to know what the brand sponsor dealmakers look for? We found this interesting thread where the co-CEO of Kynshipco explains their multi-step influencer assessment process.
ICYMI: 5 tips for creators for the upcoming tax season

5 things to know

Money

Mystery program: TikTok’s new Creativity Program is in beta phase. It’s the new creator fund, designed to generate higher revenue and expand opportunities for creators. Videos need to be original and longer than a minute. Other media reports the program will require creators to have at least 100K followers (not the 10K currently required). (Tech Crunch)
Tilt Take: Given the paucity of details, we’ll hold off an opinion except to say a change was necessary to allow more creators a share of the TikTok creator fund.
Win for the AARP crowd: Adults aged 55 to 64 were the highest-earning influencers for the first time in The State of Influencer Equality 2023 report. (IZEA)
Tilt Take: Revenue matters more than follower numbers to content entrepreneurs.

Audiences

Put a ring on it:: TikTok wins the engagement game hands down. Brands saw their posts’ average engagement rate was 5.69%. Activity on all other social channels was less than 1%. (RivalIQ)
Tilt Take: Do you want to invest more of your time on social media, where even the best engagement is almost six in 100, or products like newsletters, where an open rate of even 18% is three times better?

Tech and Tools

AI hums along: Microsoft’s “next-generation” GPT will let its Bing search engine incorporate links to website sources within the relevant contextual output. (Search Engine Journal)
Tilt Take: We may start using Bing all the time. And as content publishers, we’re glad to see the original sources receiving the proper credit.

And Finally

Promote it: Community success requires promotion. But don’t do it yourself. Use the positive feedback shared in your community as the more helpful social proof. (Forbes Council)
Tilt Take: The whole article is worth a read as the author champions the need for creators to stop relying on social platforms and gives advice on how to do that. (See what we did there? That’s social proof of what The Tilt proclaims about rented land almost every week.)

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the tilt team

Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Pam Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony.

Your Backup – February 24, 2023