There is a lot more that goes into this website than what meets the eye. Whether you’ve realized it or not, this site is actually the result of a group writing effort. Individuals from around the United States (and even a dear friend from the UK) regularly turn their stories and their thoughts into blog posts and media reviews. At present, there are about 10 regular, registered authors who write blog material regularly. Yes, some write more than others, but we pride ourselves on regularly refining our process to better meet the needs of our readers. There may be readers who want to know how a site is put together to handle multiple writers. Here are just a few tips on how we run things here at Brave Daily.
1. Proper Site Hosting
Probably of absolute most importance is finding a hosting service that meets your needs and keeps up with your vision. If you will have growing traffic and multiple writers and readers on your website at the same time, you need a server that can manage your traffic. Not only have I tried a number of website hosting services in the past, but I currently work full-time in digital marketing. Bluehost has been absolutely wonderful to me and my team and at the time of writing this article their services start as low as $3.49/mo. And their always-available customer support chat is good stuff. From here you can easily work with more website building platforms, like WordPress, Weebly, and many others (more about all of this later). Highly recommended!
2. Look the Part
Managing a website is in a lot of ways like running a small business. To run your marketing efforts, you’ve got to have a copy editor, a visionary, a designer, someone to man Social Media and so much more. If you aren’t educated in Adobe Suite or even the more simpler of photo editing software, how are you to quickly and easily create compelling images for your blog posts and social media updates? Canva is a service that, for the time being, is completely free to use and makes creating professional images a breeze. **Quick pro tip, mix Canva’s design abilities with the free image databases of Pexels or Pixabay and you’re set!
3. Stay Organized
Provide your team with an editorial calendar to work from. Creating and maintaining an editorial calendar has been hands-down one of the best steps that we have made in the process. Because Brave Daily is a WordPress website hosted on Bluehost, I searched far and wide for an editorial calendar that would work alongside both editing blog posts and scheduling social media updates. CoSchedule was that solution for us. Nearly a year ago, I wrote a more extensive post about what the CoSchedule WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin offers its users. What they offer their writers has only grown since the writing of that post — including Chrome and Evernote widgets to better integrate with tools that I already use!
4. Communication is Key
Facebook Groups has been our go to for internal team communication. We have toyed with a few other options (Slack, Asana, Producteev, etc.), but nothing added the convenience and simplicity that Facebook Groups offers us. We already use Facebook, we get notifications when others add posts or comments, and we can attach images and website URLs there with ease. What more would you need? A task manager, you might say? Well, the “pages” of Brave Daily are filled by volunteers and once you start turning media reviews and blog posts into “tasks” with hard and fast deadlines, I noticed deadlines weren’t met. We have a pretty loose guide of one post per writer per month. That seems to keep content flowing!
5. Let Your Writers Write
Lastly, let them run with their passions! Let your writers dream. When I give a book or a blog topic to someone and they really care about it, it’s game over. Game. Over. Brave Daily has changed over the years. What we’re about and who our readers are. That is all thanks to the dreams and unique desires of our writers. Yes, you have the make things happen and put a general plan together, but don’t be afraid to let the vision of your website be shaped by your team.
Those are just the points that I’ve found in the four years that I’ve been at this. What am we missing? What are we doing wrong? What have you found from this list that we’re doing right? I’d love your feedback.
