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Complete Guide to Creating Instructions for Writers and Editors

How to give freelancers what they need to rock your content creation jobs on Crowd Content 

When you’re working with freelancers to create content at any scale on Crowd Content, the first step is providing comprehensive, helpful, and actionable instructions. Good instructions provide multiple benefits for everyone involved, including:

  • Instilling confidence in freelancers. When instructions are clear, concise, and aligned with the star level you choose to pay, freelancers are confident you know what you want and how to interact with the platform well. That makes them more confident in their ability to work with you toward mutual success.
  • Speeding up your content creation. When instructions aren’t clear, concise, or aligned with star level, your job may sit. Freelancers won’t be sure they can provide what you need, as they aren’t able to understand the ask in your instructions.  
  • Ensuring you get what you need. The right instructions help ensure you get the content you need as quickly as possible without going through multiple rounds of revisions or more than one freelancer.
  • Creating consistencies in writing. When you’re working with numerous writers and editors, good instructions create consistency across all orders. They help everyone write with your style and voice preferences in mind so that it all sounds like it comes from one source instead of a crowd of freelancers. That’s good for your authority and brand online.
  • Providing everyone with an alignment tool. When working with a process that involves a writer submitting content, potentially an editor editing it, and you making a call at the end whether it meets the needs you articulated, strong instructions provide an alignment tool everyone can use as a measuring stick.

So, how do you write these stellar instructions that make your content processes easier for everyone, including yourself or your teams? We’ve put together a step-by-step guide and lots of templates to help!

Understanding Content Briefs vs. Order Briefs

On Crowd Content, you may have occasion to use two levels of briefs (or instructions) for each order. Project/content briefs provide overarching style and voice guidance while order briefs/task instructions address the specific needs of the task at hand.

What Are Project or Content Briefs?

A project or content brief is the top-level guidance document for an ongoing content project. You create it once for the project and update it as needed as you want to make things more clear or address changes to voice, tone, or overall style.

Here are some examples of when you might need a project brief:

  • You want to order 500 project descriptions
  • You’re planning to order 3 blog posts a week
  • You’re placing orders for an entire site update, but each page is a separate order

In all of these cases, the project brief lets you communicate high-level style requirements that all your writers and editors should know about, regardless of the task they’re working on.

Consider creating the project brief as a single Google Doc and setting it so that anyone with the link can view it. You can include that link in the task instructions for every order so freelancers can refer to it as needed.

We’ll dig deeper into the specifics of creating a project brief in the section on Project Brief Details and Templates.

What Are Order Briefs or Task Instructions?

Order briefs or task instructions are the details someone needs to create a specific piece of content.

For example, you may have a project brief that provides voice and overall structure guidance for project descriptions. But you’ll need to provide details in each individual order that include items such as the name of the product, links to the product, and potential keywords.

Some things that you might include in task instructions or order briefs are:

  • Keywords
  • Outlines for specific content
  • Research links
  • Questions to answer or topics to address
  • Suggested titles
  • Word counts

When you’re adding task instructions/order briefs to orders you place on Crowd Content, you have two choices.

You can add the instructions as text-only copy into the “Instructions for Writer” box in the platform.

This is recommended if you have simple information to convey, such as a list of keywords or links to include in the piece. Don’t forget to include the link to your project brief here too!

The other option is to create another Google Doc with your order brief and include the link in this box along with the project brief. You might take that extra step if your order briefs are especially detailed and include complex outlines you want the writer to follow.

In the Order Brief Details and Templates section, you’ll find advice on how to create great task instructions/order briefs as well as templates you can use for a variety of project types.

Project Brief Details and Templates

The goal of a project brief is to provide writers what they need to:

  • Emulate the writing style for your brand
  • Make any content created for you as consistent voice and style-wise as possible
  • Follow general guidelines for content structure

What to Include in Your Project/Content Brief

To that end, your project brief should address any of the following elements that are a concern to you. If you don’t have a preference or an element isn’t relevant to your content, you don’t have to include it in your brief. However, if you don’t cover something like whether you want Oxford/serial commas used or subheadings in title or sentence case, you may see inconsistencies in these factors between writers.

Style/Grammar Preferences

Our writers follow fairly standard grammar conventions and may default to AP Style if not otherwise directed. So, you can rely on content being grammatically correct regardless of what you put in this section. 

However, if you have a preference for style or grammar items — or you’re just a stickler for a specific grammar rule and want it followed to the letter every single time — highlight it here.

Some things to consider including in this section:

  • Oxford/serial comma yes or no
  • Title or sentence case subheadings
  • Short or long sentences/paragraphs
  • Whether writers can use bulleted lists and subheadings to break up content
  • How you want numbers handled, such as “spell out numbers under 10 and unless they are units, such as 9 inches”
  • Em dash or en dash—and whether you want spaces around them or no spaces, as in this bullet
  • Prohibitions on certain punctuation, such as if you don’t want quotations marks, semicolons, or parenthesis used because they mess with your CMS
  • POV: Do you want content in first person (I/we/our), second person (you), or third person (they, he, she)?

These are just some common examples. If you have a preference on anything, go ahead and include it!

Just remember, the more you include, the more writers have to read and learn. That makes it harder to ensure all the details are correct. Make sure you’re only including things that are relevant and you actually need.

Voice/Tone Preferences

In this section, let your writers know how you want your content to sound. 

Start with a high-level tone preference. Some options include:

  • Formal. Academic or encyclopedic writing. Content may sound like a textbook or Wiki article. Potentially a choice for an informational copy (glossary pages, instructional copy, explanations of processes) when you want to sound like an authority but aren’t concerned with personal rapport. Typically third person.
  • Journalistic. Sounds like a news article or press release and may follow a journalism pyramid structure. May be a good choice if you want to sound like a magazine, are ordering press releases, or want to provide current news for readers. Typically third person.
  • Conversational. The primary choice for brand and personal blogs, this content sounds as if you’re talking to the reader in person. Almost always second person.
  • Marketing with feature/benefit. Good for product, category, and brand descriptions. Also works well for service pages and blogs about services. Typically second person.
  • Salesy. Similar to marketing tone but with a bit more emphasis on the conversion. Useful for landing pages. Mostly second person. 

Once you decide on a high-level tone, give your writer some details about the voice you want to convey. Can they be funny and witty, or do you want them to remain straightforward and professional? Is your voice playful, authoritative, neutral, professional, expert, or excited? 

You can provide a list of words that describe your voice, like some of those used above. But remember that concepts like funny or professional are subjective. Provide a few links for writers to content online that demonstrates the type of voice you like. This can be content on your site or on any site on the web—it’s just easier for freelancers to understand what you mean when they can see it in action.

In this section, also include who your target audience is. This helps writers better understand the voice requirements. Writing professional content meant to be read by lawyers, for example, is very different from writing professional content meant to be read by college students. 

Linking Strategies, if they’re the same for all pieces of content

If you have standard linking strategies, spell them out here. This should be brief and let the writer know:

  • Do you want external links?
    • How many? (Example: Include 2-3 external links)
    • To what types of pages (Example: Link to high-authority pages like news sites and .gov pages)
    • When should they link? (Example: Include links for any statistics you source)
    • What competitors or types of sites should be avoided?
  • Do you want internal links?
    • How many?
    • How should writers pick pages (Example: Link to other blog posts.
  • Will you provide links in the order briefs/tasks instructions that writers must include?
  • Anchor text requirements, if any, such as:
    • Do you want anchor text to always be a keyword?
    • Do you want anchor text to always be 1 to 3 words?

Research Requirements

If you expect writers to do research, provide some guidance here about what types of sites they should use and if you have any sources they can start with.

If you want items cited via any method other than links with anchor text, spell that out here as well. For example, you might ask for a source list of links at the bottom of the content or want actual footnotes.

Requirements for Keywords

You’ll include specific keywords for each order in the task instructions, but you can include requirements for using keywords for your project here.

For example, you might ask for primary keywords to be included in the title, one subheading, and the first paragraph while secondary keywords are used once throughout the copy.

Project Brief Dos and Don’ts

  • Do include anything unique to your project
  • Don’t include irrelevant information or long backstories
  • Do use bulleted list structures to make things easy for writers to scan 
  • Don’t include information that’s only relevant for a single task; that’s what the order brief is for
  • Do be cognizant of tone; if you sound excessively demanding, writers may be turned off from picking up a piece
    • Example: 
      • Yes: Writing should sound expert and professional as if our brand is speaking directly to the reader to offer authority advice
      • No: If your content doesn’t sound professional, IT WILL BE REJECTED
  • Do use a different project brief for each project. For example, if you’re ordering content for product descriptions as well as blog posts, you may need two different project briefs.
  • Do include the project brief in task instructions/order briefs. Make sure you include the right one if you have multiple projects!

Project Brief Template

Start with the Project Brief Template

Order Brief Details and Templates

The goal of an order brief/task instructions is to provide writers what they need to complete a SPECIFIC task for one of your projects.

What’s included in each order brief depends on the type of order you’re placing, so we’ve put together a few templates to get you started:

Follow the same dos and don’ts for order briefs as you do for project briefs.

Updated on May 31, 2022

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