Writing <200 word pieces of content in a 7.5 hour day

[crystal.fde]

My employer has a content writer who is currently working on writing unique descriptions for many pages, on the order of around 150-200 words per piece of content. A recurring theme in this content is to write a list of features such as "it does X, X, X, X, X and X", which can sometimes happen a couple of times during the content and takes up a decent chunk of wording.

This content does not require in-depth research over and above reading the about us page of some sites and looking at what services they provide, as well as some quick details like their payment and delivery methods etc.

As well as that the writer also writes the Meta Description and then uploads these to a CMS. There are no other tasks.

Considering the writer is doing this 5 days a week, 7.5 hours a day, and isn't getting paid a poor or trainee-type wage, what would you say would be an acceptable amount to achieve on the average day?

The current average works out to around, or slightly less than 8 of these pieces of content each day.

Thoughts?

[Joe.Robison]

Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.

I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.

One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.

I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.

Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!

[EGOL]

Sit down for three days and try doing the job.  Then compare your work with theirs.

It's really easy to think that a writer is not producing when you have no experience doing the same work.

So, get to work.  Write 50 of them.  It will be good for your soul.  More important is that your experience might streamline the process, discover quick and easy methods, learn how to improve quality.

And, is this worker just blathering features or including cues and triggers that stimulate sales?   I've spent entire days just tweaking three or four important pages.

We must avoid considering a page of content as a commodity.  There are enormous differences between bad, pedestrian, great, and kickass work.  One has very little value to your business. Another can MAKE your business.

[crystal.fde]

Thanks for the input EGOL,
Just a bit of feedback;

The content is a kind of an overview and is something that makes very little difference to conversions.

The written content is replacing pre-exisiting content that is usually taken from the about-us pages of the sites the content is about, so the purpose of this is to remove duplicated content from the pages, rather than to fill a gap.

From our testing, there appears to be no difference to conversions whether the site's about-us content is used or this unique content is used. Cues and triggers are not generally used apart from stating what benefit the visitor will get from our site, which is a little bit generic (the same benefit is stated using similar wording across all several thousand of these pages).

In essence, this particular content is more of a commodity, at least in its current form.

For personal experience, I have worked with this department but generally focused on writing larger and more extensive guides and blog posts. My content required more depth and research from numerous sources, so obviously took longer to write, but my role wasn't to write multiple pieces of content 5 days of every week, every month.

Based on word count, I could achieve 3-5x this writer's volume, but they are working on multiple topics every day, whereas I might have only worked on one topic maybe once or twice a week.

[crystal.fde]

Thanks Joe,

I would agree that around 30 minutes per article, so around 15/day should be fair, as you say it is fairly straightforward.

I'll see what we can do about using excel and other tools to speed things up. I already worked on something like this to organise keywords and topically relevant phrases so it was quicker to work with when I had input on content, but I'll see how we can optimise and scale up this current project.