How to Built An Amazing Team of Contributing Writers on a Budget of Zero

I have worked with Search Engine Journal for the past 3 year as a Writer, Editor and now Editor at Large.  I love sitting down with people that are in that same situation and doing well at it. A lot of publishers wish they had the high quality of contributed content that Technorati’s enjoyed the past few years. The company, once known as the go-to blog directory, has an editorial side that publishes thought leadership pieces on technology, product reviews, expert interviews, and tech industry event coverage. Tech Entrepreneurs and expert business thinkers from Amazon, About.com, Altimeter Group, CNBC, Copyblogger, Dell, Hootsuite, Hubspot, IBM, MarketingProfs, StumbleUpon, and others, have all been interviewed via this niche property. At the same time, a recent San Francisco growth hacking conference had an army of writers in attendance. Hardly newsworthy for a fully-staffed content and journalist team, however, extremely noteworthy for a publication consisting solely of dedicated contributing writers. And it’s the “dedicated” element that had me curious to learn more. How are these Technorati writers motivated? How is content kept at consistent quality levels, having been generated from a vast variety of disparate sources? I sat down with former Technorati managing editor (now editor emeritus), Andre Bourque (SocialMktgFella) to better understand his experience managing event coverage, op-eds, PR firms, and most importantly, contributing writers to generate over a million and a half monthly uniques.   John Rampton (Question): You once told me, “Care for your contributor.” What do you mean by that? Andre F. Bourque (Answer): I started as a contributing writer, so I knew the type of passion it takes to stay up late and write tirelessly about someone else’s product, event, or idea. When you’re doing that for free, there are certain things you need, to keep you motivated, satisfied, and able to continue to contribute. When you do that, you can begin to tailor the type of content you’re receiving from unpaid writers, not merely sift through submissions of list articles, and obscure opinion pieces. For example, creative tech writers find little value in a press release. When’s the last time you tweeted one to your followers, or posted on to your Facebook page? We don’t, because they’re boring. So I set up a Google Form survey we distribute to brands and PR agencies. It includes questions that guide the writer into more of a story, less of a product “update.”