Week 4: Things Getting into Full Swing at Yazamo

This week at Yazamo, I continued working with our writers to review and edit their content, format everything in WordPress, and get it published to our website. The editing is currently taking more time on my part than expected since the writers are still pretty new.

One of them is producing solid content regularly (about 3 articles per week) which we can work with easily, but the other writer has not been responsive or efficient. We gave him a warning but the quality of his work still didn't live up to what we had expected when we hired him. We ended up releasing him (he was a contractor, not an employee) so we now have only one writer, but she's doing an excellent job of producing high quality articles on time every week.

I had a call with AZ Big Media this week, as well, where we discussed the angle the writer was going to take as well as additional details on the LeadQuizzes story. In other news, we managed to get featured on Entrepreneur as a top app for startups thanks to a contact we had who writes for them (unrelated to me).

Here's the article if you want to take a look: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272084

I'm also continuing my Facebook Ads course and learning a lot on that side of the business as well. A solid week overall, although I need to structure my schedule more firmly next week so I'm using all my time efficiently and publishing articles more regularly.

Week 3: First Publication on the Blog, Other Learning Opportunities

This week at Yazamo, I continued emailing and contacting media writers and journalists about my LeadQuizzes story. After quite a bit of work, I finally landed a piece with a smaller local publication which still has a good niche audience, AZ Big Media. 

I also set up a board on Trello where our team can enter all requested posts and article ideas, and our writers can claim each piece and begin working on them. My two writers began on their first official articles for Yazamo and submitted their work, which I will edit and provide feedback on.

I worked with Jeremy (one of Yazamo's co-founders) to establish a content calendar for the blog so we can publish regularly and spend the rest of our time optimizing the content and promoting it to drive more traffic, comments, and social shares. I also started on a Facebook Ads course to begin learning that aspect of the business, since we use the platform to run all our clients' ads to promote their quizzes. I am also planning to learn more about Google Analytics so I can use it efficiently to monitor our website's traffic and progress.

Week 2: Preparing for Blog Takeoff

This week at Yazamo, I focused on growing the writing team to prepare us to (re)launch the LeadQuizzes blog. Our goal is to publish five long (1500+ word) articles per week, and to create a backlog of content ready to be published if anything goes wrong or we stop producing articles down the road.

Because we were looking for writers who could technically write from anywhere in the world as long as the content was high-quality, we did not need to have people coming into the office for interviews or working with us locally.

We utilized a platform called Upwork, which connects businesses with freelancers around the globe, to look for potential hires. After writing up the job description and publishing the posting, I received around 20 applications within a couple days, of which I first conducted an initial screening to see who was qualified (I ruled out people who didn’t appear to have the required English skills or didn’t align with our goals for other reasons).

I then messaged the smaller pool of qualified applicants -- about a dozen -- about the final test in determining who would win the job: a writing assessment where we would assign a common topic to the applicants which was relevant to our online marketing area, just as they might have to write for our actual blog in the future.

We gave all the applicants the same amount of time, about three days, to complete the article and submit it for review. Not all the applicants even submitted any work, but out of the articles we received I evaluated two which stood out from the rest and we hired those two writers for the blog.

I also continued the PR work, sending out about 10 more targeted emails while following up with my 30 previously contacted journalists as well. I seemed to have trouble getting traction on the PR front, so next week I’ll be developing a new email template to test out-- perhaps a case study on how we impacted one of our clients.