As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, if brands want to improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts, they should think less like traditional marketers and more like publishers. And, it’s not only blogging brands would benefit from a more publisher-like approach to the planning of content creation. To be highly effective, bloggers can’t just generate topics on an ad-hoc basis. They need to develop a coherent content program so they know what needs to be written, when it will be published, and who is responsible for researching, writing, editing, and hitting the publish button.

There are several extensions for WordPress which implement some of the features more usually found in bespoke publishing content management systems, but one of the best I’ve encountered is Edit Flow . I’m going to take a look at what professional editorial workflow looks like, and how Edit Flow helps brands and bloggers implement an effective editorial workflow on WordPress.

Planning

High-quality content isn’t just dashed off in a couple of hours. It needs to be planned in advance to ensure everyone in the team is aware of deadlines, where the articles are in the editorial workflow, and, perhaps even more importantly, that sufficient content is planned with enough of a lead-time to allow for a regular and consistent publishing schedule.

Edit Flow includes an excellent editorial calendar with custom statuses. Custom statuses allow editors to define a process suitable to their publication through which content must pass. Example statuses might include: idea, pending, in progress, draft, awaiting review, and published.Edit Flow also allows for the inclusion of editorial metadata within posts, for the addition of any arbitrary data, such as draft deadlines, word count limits, and the contact details of sources.

Before the scheduling phase is ever reached though, there is the idea generation phase, where editors and writers create a list of potential articles from which the rest of the editorial process flows. These are often known as “story budgets” and include a variety of information about what resources are required and what actions that need to be taken to prepare an article for publication. Edit Flow includes a useful story budget view which can include editorial metadata and be filtered by various criteria, such as status or author.

Collaboration

WordPress, especially in recent versions, is already fairly useful for collaborating with teams, but one feature it does lack is an decent way for editors and others to comment on articles as they progress through the editorial workflow. If it can be at all avoided, it’s preferable to keep article related comments within the article, rather than using a third-party tool like email. Edit Flow implements editorial comments effectively, allowing for articles to be shaped by writers and editors in collaboration. Edit Flow also includes an excellent notification system for keeping everyone up-to-date with the status of an article.

For brands and bloggers who is serious about creating an effective editorial workflow for their WordPress site, Edit Flow