The following is a guest post from Gloria Kopp, a digital marketer and a business consultant from Manville city. She works as a content manager at Paper Fellows and is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Academized, and Huffington Post.

A well-planned workflow is crucial to keeping your content marketing efforts on track and ensuring that you meet your goals.  You may often find that you are receiving content late from your team, that it’s not up to scratch, has been rushed, or just never materializes. The tips in this article should help you to get back onto the straight and narrow.

Before you or your team get stuck into creating more content, make sure that you’ve read through the following points to keep your projects flowing productively.

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I’m writing this blog post to solve a very specific problem.

During one of our regular marketing meetings, Vinay assigned me this post and said he wants it to be written so he can link it to everyone who messages him just “hey Vinay” on Slack and waits for a response before saying anything else.

Like many managers in remote teams, Vinay’s sick of our tendencies to under-communicate. Just saying “hey Vinay” and hoping to get a synchronous chat going is a waste of time, especially if there are time zone differences, or if general busy-ness prevents a polite, fully-fledged chat.

And so, in the spirit of that real example, this article will solve the problem of communication in remote teams.

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Processes aren’t just a set of documents and rules that help your business run efficiently and reduce human error…

They’re also something that needs to be part of your company culture. Process adherence is the culture side of systemization, and that makes it one of those hard to grasp concepts without many solid rules.

The culture of processes — instead of the act of writing and optimizing them — is something we’ve been meaning to cover for a while because we know it’s a big problem for our users.

Incidentally, we got an insightful comment on our article about creating an operations manual from MamaRed Knight. She outlined an age-old problem with process adherence:

“[Process adherence] is something I’ve been dealing with since I started formally creating documentation in ’83. It really must start at the top level where they don’t answer questions, they ask if it is “in the manual” and it ripples down.

It does take time because, frankly, a very teensy tiny percentage of people want to look something up… 98% want to ask someone and be done with it.”

In this quote, she highlights two main issues:

• Employees don’t want to look up processes
• Procedures are passed on informally by hearsay

In this post, I’m going to explain why processes fail because of human nature, and then unpack each reason with an explanation of how you can improve process adherence in each area.

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Is your team confused about responsibility, hierarchy, or who reports to who?

Do you have a clear idea of where there’s room to give a promotion, or which department could do with more hires?

You need to make an organizational chart for your business, no matter what size your company is because it ensures your company can scale consistently with a clear view of its structure. It’s just as important as solid processes because it’s the single source of truth for the architecture of your business.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to create organizational charts using simple free tools, or powerful paid alternatives.

You’ll learn:

• The definition and components of an organizational chart
• The hidden benefits of organizational charts, and why they’re not just a formality
• Creating a cloud-based organizational chart in Google Sheets that you can automate
• How to use templates to create a simple org chart in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and dedicated diagram tools
• How to use different types of charts for alternative organizational structures, like matrix and flat

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Do you know how long a prospective candidate will spend reading your job ad?

Six seconds.

With more than three billion job listings online at any given moment, standing out from the crowd might mean the difference between finding the greatest team member possible or having to settle for the best of a bad bunch.

Data from 2015 suggests that 100 million startups are launched annually. And, as the number of competitors rockets up, the pool of available talent is diluted, leaving you with less choice.

The solution?

A clear and compelling job description. It’s more complex than it first seems, but in this article I’ll be sure to make it easy.

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When I was about 7 years old, I made a deliberate decision to stop caring about math.

I remember the moment clearly. I started sitting closer to the back of the class, stopped answering questions, and, eventually, I stopped being asked questions by the teacher.

I told myself that it wasn’t worth learning because we have tools like computers and calculators. Consistently, I got mediocre grades in the topic and only scraped through the finals with a borderline passing grade…

It wasn’t until I started working at Process Street that I cared about data, charts, spreadsheets and correlations.

Research and data manipulation skills are extremely important for pretty much anyone that has to devise their own solutions.

Not only that, studies are incredible marketing tools. Original data attracts links and shares like nothing else because it’s one of the few newsworthy things a company can do. You’ve got product releases, funding announcements, and research.

And it’s not just my own theories that say studies attract high-quality backlinks…

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Imagine if you had to send marketing emails manually, or keep your records in a tattered binder on your desk.

Every company, even startups, needs to make a minimum investment in SaaS tools for work like email marketing, project management, and tracking sales.

But the catch is that some of these startup tools can cost huge amounts of money, and when you’re a young startup you don’t want to be forking out in excess of $2,000/user/month for just one piece of software.

The point of this post is to explain the minimum viable SaaS stack your startup should invest in, based on what we’ve found out at Process Street in our many (many, many, many) tool-testing escapades. I’ll even do the math for you, and collate the estimated annual cost at the end.

Ready to start building up your toolbox with the best SaaS out there?

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Are you using a messy network of spreadsheets and software to hold reports and get insights on your content marketing?

That kind of setup can leave you in the dark, or constantly spending time updating your records manually. No one wants to waste time on data entry, but everybody wants a place to store their content marketing data for analysis (and tons of cool automations).

So, what if you could compile it all into one database that integrates with over 750 other apps, lets you sort the data into views to generate reports, and acts as the ‘single source of truth’ for your marketing team?

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For startups and small operations, virtual assistants can be vital.

The general idea is: instead of hiring a full-time specialist or wasting time on data entry, you hire a VA.

It sounds easy. You just hire a VA, right?!

But what happens after that is the hard part. Straight after hiring comes the onboarding and training. That’s the part where you get your new VA up to speed with how your company works, and how the tasks, rules, and responsibilities are going to be different from the other companies they’ve worked for.

You’ll need to explain how to use your stack of tools, and how they can work as efficiently as possible. It’s also a process for you: you need to remember to check in, make sure everything’s set up properly, and review their performance.

In this post, I’m going to go over some of the key things to keep in mind when onboarding a virtual assistant, and share two of our internal processes with you.

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Want to add every post on your blog to your Buffer queue, complete with images and automatically generated hashtags?

Recently I realized I hadn’t added my old blog posts to Buffer, and needed to go back and queue them all up. While I was doing it, I decided I could grab the images and use a free API to generate the hashtags for me!

So, I thought I’d record how I did it so I can tell you, too.

In this post, you’ll learn to:

1. Export a CSV of your posts from WordPress
2. Tidy up the CSV to include only URLs and titles of your posts
3. Automatically include hashtags in the tweet text using Aylien
4. Use import.io to scrape images for your tweets
5. Push the tweets and images to your Buffer queue using Zapier

Oh, and by the way: all the tools used here are used in their free versions. 🙂

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