Building a service like EditorNinja is an interesting experience. While this is not my first rodeo building a productized service like this, EditorNinja has moved significantly faster than the others and my experience from past businesses has also allowed me to move a lot faster to meet market demand.
I make it a point to listen to our customers and notice what they are asking us for. Whether it’s what they’re submitting and asking for, or what I am asked on sales calls, I’m always listening and trying to learn what else our customers want that will add value to them.
Because we have chosen to focus primarily on marketing content right now, the questions we get are around:
- SEO and content optimization
- Turnaround times
- If writers can add content to EditorNinja under their client’s account
- CMS uploading, and
- Content promotion
The biggest challenge I have, I’ll admit, is figuring out the line, or at least the fuzzy border, between writing and editing. Further complicating the picture is that it’s all under marketing, which also includes strategy and promotion.
EditorNinja focuses on editing (surprise!) and filling that specific gap in the market. Writing is well captured as a market, and there are great tools out there for promotion (and each company does promotion differently).
So within the context of editing, we want to build the most complete service we can while also keeping it accessible to as many as possible price-wise. So, I don’t want to bloat our main packages with all of these things that only a minority need.
My framework, which may be wrong, is basically:
- If it’s a main editing function or step, like developmental editing, then it is included in a package, and customers who want that specific type of editing need to subscribe to the package including everything they need.
- If it’s something that is a value-add to the customer who is hiring us for editing, and someone is willing to pay for it, I’ll make it an optional add-on.
- If it is a product or offering feature that will encourage customers to use our services more, while simultaneously making their lives easier, I’ll work out how to add it to the service.
With all of that said, there are a few add-ons I’ve already created that can be purchased today with a membership. There are others to come, I’m sure. These have also been offered for a while, but I’ve been so busy building the business, hiring, and onboarding customers that I’m just now getting around to telling the world about them!
Same Day Turnaround
An objection I heard quite often from potential customers in the past was around turnaround times. While I know that the average content manager takes 3-4 days to edit a piece of content, and therefore our 1-day turnaround for most documents dramatically increases their output, there are some customers and some instances in which they need a document edited and returned quickly. But, not all customers need this.
To better serve customers like these, we’ve implemented a Same Day Turnaround add-on with a 3-hour service level agreement (SLA). This means that subscription customers who have the same-day add-on can request same-day turnaround, and we’ll drop everything else and do that document for them.
There is the chance of abuse here of course, which is why we carefully watch and if a customer is abusing it, we’ll have a conversation with them. But that hasn’t happened yet.
SEO Formatting
Because we focus on marketing content like blog posts and big guides, I’m constantly asked if we do any SEO formatting for documents. I am very adamant about not building a traditional SEO agency, but I’ve come to realize that this is actually something that a lot of marketing content needs and that content managers, who are not trained SEOs, are trying to do themselves or are trusting their writers to do.
I have done SEO professionally since 2010. I’ve done SEO for some of the largest websites in the world. I know how to do SEO.
So, I created an SEO checklist that covers the basics of SEO for every blog post/piece of content meant to rank, including (but not limited to):
- Optimized URL
- Optimized meta description
- Proper heading structure
- Keyword in title, H1, H2, etc
- Keyword in the first paragraph
- And more
Document Formatting
A third option we get asked for by a subset of customers is document formatting. In these cases, the customer needs their content put into a specific template to then deliver to a client of their own. Maybe it’s a website audit that needs to be in the agency’s template. Maybe it’s a recruiting firm that needs a candidate report formatted according to their designed template.
We can do this. Provide us with your required template and select “Needs Formatting” when adding the document to your queue. We’ll make sure your document is formatted according to your requirements before it’s returned to you.
Ready To Get Started?
If these resonate with you, and you want us to help you improve your content workflow as well as your results from content marketing, as we’ve done for hundreds of companies already, let’s chat.
Schedule a free Editorial Assessment and let’s see if EditorNinja is a good fit for you.
