How to Create a Writing Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

Most people think of writing as a creative pursuit. And for the most part, it is. Writers spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts, figuring out how to weave a collection of information into a compelling narrative. 

But if you want to be a successful writer, you have to approach it as a business. Businesses have plenty of things that creatives might consider boring: processes, frameworks, systems. But without these organizational elements, the actual work of writing would be nowhere near as efficient as it can be. 

This is especially true for writers that work with other people: people like marketing agencies, content teams, and subject matter experts. If you have multiple people involved in a piece of writing, at multiple stages, you can’t just wing it. You need an established workflow to follow. 

Meet Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). They exist everywhere from the military to content marketing agencies, and they're instrumental in bringing complicated pieces of content to life. 

But what exactly are SOPs, and how can you use them to improve your writing process? 

Let’s find out. 

What is a Writing SOP?

The easiest way to think of a writing SOP is as an instruction manual. 

It tells you who has to do what, by when, as well as what’s involved in each task. 

In practical terms, a writing SOP might be something as simple as a Word Doc that outlines all of the key tasks that have to be completed for a piece of content to be completed. Alternatively, it could be a workflow built out in a project management tool. 

Below, we’ve included an example writing SOP that we use with some of our clients at Hire a Writer. Let’s take a look at it together. 

Example Writing SOP

Before we dive into the various elements of this example SOP, it’s worth noting that this is a relatively lengthy SOP. The majority of content writing projects have fewer steps, fewer stakeholders, and can be completed much faster.

We’ve chosen this one deliberately. If you can understand a complicated SOP, you can easily understand a more simple one. But the opposite isn’t necessarily true.

This SOP breaks the process of creating a piece of content, in this case, a blog article, down into every individual stage. For each stage, the SOP specifies both who is responsible for taking the action, and how long that stakeholder has to complete their task. 

All in all, this process typically takes about a month. 

That might seem like a long time, but all the steps in the process mean that this is some real high-quality content that the client is really happy with. Everyone’s had their input into the piece: it’s been checked for factual accuracy by the expert, the marketing team has put their messaging spin on it, and the writer has worked their magic.

Often, you have multiple articles that are at various stages of this process at any time. Without a prescriptive system like this, you’d have no chance of remembering which article is at which stage or what you have to do on a daily basis. And that leads to missed deadlines, bad content, and unhappy clients. Not good. 

Writing SOPs are important in enabling teams to create great content at scale––something that’s vital if you want your content strategy to make a big splash. If you run an agency or a content marketing team of any size, you’ll quickly find that SOPs have great utility far beyond the field of writing: you can use them for almost anything in your business. 

Hire a Writer: Your Content Marketing SOP-erstars

Not sure where to start with building SOPs for your content marketing team? Hire a Writer can help. We provide a wide range of content consulting and writing services, and SOPs are at the heart of everything we do: both internally and for our clients. 

We’re a small but mighty team that produces great content at a scale that belies our size. Don’t believe us? Find out for yourself––get in touch today.