Quality content is valuable, informative and engaging for your target audience. The main indicator of high-quality content should provide relevant answers to your audience’s questions and adds value to their life, whether by informing, helping to solve the problem or entertaining them.

What is a high-quality content?

There are some elements of content that help identify whether it is high-quality content. Let’s look at some key points that can help you make sure your content is professional and effective.

Originality

High-quality content can not be copied from existing sources and has to be unique. Of course, you may use various resources to research information but make sure to produce original content, even if you use additional sources. Original content helps you strengthen your brand, earn authority and show expertise to your target audience.

Readability

Quality content should be written in a simple language that is easy enough for your audience to understand. Make sure your content contains shorter sentences, headings and subheadings to break long blocks of text and simple vocabulary instead of loading your readers with technical terms they may not know.

Keeping Brand Voice

Content of a high standard reflects your brand’s personality and build trust between you and your target audience. Remember what makes you unique and use it to produce content with a strong brand voice that stays consistent across various channels.

Relevance to your audience

Professional content should address specific problems that your target audience may have and provide helpful information to solve those issues or make informed decisions. High-quality content also includes information that is interesting and engaging for a particular group of people you target, not to everyone on the web.

Timelessness

To keep your content relevant, of course you will have to update it from time to time. However, try to create content that stays valuable over some time instead of choosing something that changes so quickly that no one notices its relevance.

Grammar and spelling

The most obvious but worth mentioning point is to make sure your content is error-free. You can use tool like Grammarly, LanguageTool, Hemingway Editor and ProWritingAid to run your content through spelling check and ensure professional content writing, if needed.

Knowing the elements of quality content will help you evaluate content that is already produced. But how do you ensure that your outsoucring partner actually hands you in professional content that meets your needs? We recommend you set up a quality checklist that will help your provider produce a high standard content and you measure the quality.

Checklist to ensure results of a high standard for your content

Provide the Definition of Valuable Content

First of all, you should make sure both you and your content partner have the same definition of valuable content. Define the meaning and explain to your provider what is the relevance of your content to your target audience, what information it should convey, or what problem to solve.

Explanation of a Target Persona

Familiarize your outsourcing partner with the audience you want to target, including demographics, interests, and behavior. If your provider creates content with a clear persona in mind, there is a higher chance to receive content that will be valuable for them and will bring you positive results.

Outline Formatting Specifications

Carefully outline formatting specifications in the checklist, including font size and style, spacing, margins, headings, and subheadings. That way your content provider can compare the final version of the content with the requirements you presented and hand you results in that match your quality expectations.

Fair Use Guidelines

If your project allows the use of other people’s content, be sure to provide clear instructions on how to cite sources properly in order to prevent plagiarism and copyright violations.

QA Review Steps

In the final section of your checklist include steps that should be included in the review process before the project is finalized. That way, your providers will focus on ensuring the accuracy and relevance and high quality of your content project. Finally, write some common mistakes to look out for, including punctuation errors, grammatical errors, word count, or others. If you need more information on how to make sure your content provider follows this checklist, read how to create an effective briefing.

Steps that help ensure you will get high-quality content when outsourcing it

To increase your chances of receiving content of a high standard that matches your expectations, make sure you carefully select your outsourcing partner as well as evaluate their expertise and credibility. You can ask to look at their portfolio, reviews, testimonials, and ratings from previous clients to see if they successfully delivered content similar to your needs.

If you are outsourcing content to a freelancer, you can check their reviews and scores at Upwork, LinkedIn, or Fiverr.

Also, choose the right KPIs to evaluate the success of your outsourced content, such as your website traffic, conversion rate, and engagement rate. That way you will be able to see whether freshly produced content brings you any progress and improvements in terms of achieving your goals.

Setting up a clear communication process is also important from the beginning and throughout the whole project, including regular check-ins and providing feedback There is a number of tools that can help you set clear deadlines and milestones for your outsourcing partner. For example, you can use project management tools like Trello, Asana, or Basecamp to monitor the progress of your outsourced content.

Finally, Don’t forget about monitoring results and evaluating success based on chosen KPIs. Such as website traffic, conversions rate, or engagement rate. That way you will be able to see whether freshly produced content brings you any progress and improvements in terms of achieving your goals and if your outsourcing partner matches your requirements.

Conclusion

In order to maintain credibility and audience engagement, it is critical to know how to quality-check your content, especially when working with an outsourcing partner. You have to make sure that you are both on the same page regarding your goals, target audience, and brand voice. Therefore, it is important to effectively communicate your needs to your content provider, provide them with a detailed content brief, and then evaluate the quality of their writing according to a checklist.

We hope that you successfully outsource your content to a third party and receive high-quality content that helps you reach all of your goals.

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