How to Create a Content Creation Checklist

Checklists aren’t just for project managers or business leaders. They’re incredibly useful tools for anyone who needs to ensure that a task or project is completed thoroughly and consistently—more so if you juggle multiple tasks or work as a marketer.

Think about it: creating a blog post, video, or even a social post involves a lot of steps. 

There is much to track, from research and planning to editing, publishing, and promotion. And then there are all the stakeholders—SEO specialists, writers, fact-checkers, content ops teams, designers, editors, and more. It’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.

Worry not. In this article, we’ll discuss how to create the perfect content creation checklist for your team and share some tactical tips, tools, and checklist template suggestions for creating valuable content.

Ready to create a list and tick it off? 

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Why Do You Need a Content Creation Checklist?

Before we get into the actual content marketing checklist, let’s quickly go over how this checklist can benefit your team:

• Streamlines your workflow: By breaking down content marketing efforts into smaller, manageable tasks, checklists can help you stay focused and avoid getting overwhelmed
• Ensures a consistent brand voice: A checklist can help maintain a consistent tone of voice across all content ideas and blogs, strengthening your brand identity
• Guarantees quality: Ensuring that all necessary steps are completed (for example, formatting checks, design reviews, and content optimization) helps maintain high-quality standards
• Improves collaboration: Checklists can help everyone on your team stay on the same page—everyone knows what their role is and when they’ll be involved in the process
• Reduces rework: By providing a clear roadmap with specific criteria for quality checks, design reviews, and more, checklists help you get things right the first time, minimizing revisions and delays
• Makes onboarding a lot easier: Whether you’re onboarding a new teammate, freelancer, or agency, a content creation checklist can help you outline both your content quality expectations and operational processes

So, whether you’re a freelance content creator or part of a large marketing team that wants to create engaging content, a checklist can be a great tool for streamlining your workflow, producing high-quality content, and boosting organic traffic.

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The Complete Content Creation Checklist

Now that we’ve seen why you need a content creation checklist, let’s explore how to create one. We’ll cover every step of content creation—from planning to promotion—along with additional tips on how to customize the checklist to work for you. 

Step 1: Define your content format, goals, and audience

This is where it all begins—you figure out who you’re writing for, which channel you plan to use, and how you can best resonate with that target audience’s pain points. While a newbie would prefer how-to guides, leadership teams are more likely to read industry reports or expert interviews. 

Additionally, GenZ audiences and B2C customers might resonate with TikTok and meme-based content, while older millennials and B2B companies may prefer more research-backed content. 

Step 2: Conduct thorough research

Once you’ve defined your goals and audience, it’s time to get into the research phase. 

Here’s a breakdown of key areas you can explore:

1. Keyword research

This is your first step for any SEO-driven content piece—blog post, ebook, or white paper. Some points that you can ask your team to check off at this stage are if they have:

• Identified the primary and secondary keywords
• Analyzed search intent (transactional, navigational, informational)
• Included long-tail keywords for more targeted traffic

2. Competitor analysis

This is where you identify gaps in your competitors’ content pieces on the same topic. Are there any topics they haven’t covered? Can you offer a unique perspective or additional insights? 

By understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can position your content to stand out and provide greater value to your audience. 

3. Subject matter experts (SMEs) 

If you’re writing about technical or complex topics, industry reports, or thought leadership pieces, then sourcing insights from subject matter experts is non-negotiable. This is not a one-step process. 

If you’re sourcing SME insights for your content, you can create a separate, more detailed checklist. This will arm your writers with a structured approach to the process, ensuring they follow all necessary steps.

You can then add the link as a note to your ‘Have you interviewed SMEs?’ checkbox in your content creation checklist. This will remind your team to refer to the SME sourcing checklist for specific guidance.

Step 3: Outline your content structure

Depending on your content creation process, your team might need to create a content brief and several types of outlines before getting to the actual draft.

This process helps align stakeholders and reduces back-and-forth during the writing (and editing) phase.

Step 4: Create high-quality content

Now, we come to the main part—producing quality content that’s loved by both humans and search engines. Broadly speaking, here are three key factors that contribute to high-quality content:

I. Compelling narrative

• Do you speak with authority on the topic?
• Is all research sourced from reliable sources?

II. Relevance

• Are you empathetic to your audience’s challenges and pain points?
• Do you go beyond surface-level explanations?

III. Design

• Have you added screenshots and other visuals to the blog, along with captions and ALT text?
• Have you added a ‘design brief’ for the design team on what visuals you’ll need for the piece?

By focusing on these areas, you can create content that is not only informative but also engaging to your audience.

Step 5: Edit and proofread your content

Writing your content is only the first step. The next step is to review it thoroughly to ensure it meets your standards. A structured framework (aka editing and proofreading checklist) can help you standardize this review process and maintain consistent quality. 

Here are some points to include:

I. Alignment with brief

• Have you covered all the topics mentioned in the brief?
• Does each section connect back to the blog’s thesis?

II. Readability 

• Have you used headings, subheadings, and bullet points to improve readability?
• Have you used clear and concise language? 
• Have you thoroughly proofread your draft?

III. Brand

• Have you maintained a consistent tone and style that align with your brand (and target audience)?
• Have you aligned your content with your brand’s values and mission? 

IV. SEO

• Have you incorporated relevant keywords naturally throughout your content?
• Have you optimized your meta title and description?

V. Links

• Have you included all internal links mentioned in the content brief?
• Are all linked sources less than 4 years old?
• Have you removed the UTM parameters from external links? 

VI. Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

• Have you included a clear and compelling primary CTA?
• Have you added any soft CTAs to nudge readers to other pieces of content like templates or free tools?
• Have you added a UTM tracker to your CTA links?

Apart from this, you can also add a section asking writers if they’ve run their drafts by a plagiarism checker or AI content detector. 

Step 6: Finalize visuals

Even if your design team has its own checklist, it’s a good practice to include key design steps in your overall content creation process, especially if you’re sourcing your images. 

Step 6: Publish and promote your content

Once your content and visuals are finalized, it’s time to publish and promote your piece.

1. Publishing

• Create checklists for each task in your content marketing plan to ensure you have everything in place
  • For blogs: Banner images, meta tags, search engine optimization
  • For emails: HTML code, subject line, call to action
  • For social media: Platform, visuals, captions, hashtags
• Publish your content to your chosen platform
• Check that the published version is accurate and free of errors

2. Promotion

While the first step here is creating your content promotion strategy, the following steps can vary depending on your promotion channel. 

Step 7: Analyze your content’s performance

Finally, it’s time to check if your content marketing strategy is successful. Revisit the goals you set for your content and determine whether it has met or exceeded those goals. To get a complete picture, include both quantitative and qualitative results.

We suggest reviewing your content’s quantitative and qualitative performance monthly or quarterly to identify areas for improvement in your content marketing efforts. This way, you can analyze your content’s results and make data-driven decisions for future content marketing strategies.

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Managing your Content Creation Checklist (and Process) with ClickUp

According to a 2023 McKinsey Survey, middle managers spend more than half their working time on administrative work. For content leads, this could also include creating and managing content checklists. 

The solution? 

Use a project management platform like ClickUp, which allows you to create checklists, save them as templates, and integrate them into your larger content production operations. 

This means you can use ClickUp as a content management tool to do it all—manage your content operations, create content, and analyze content performance.

As Cristina Willson, Director of Content at Graphite, put it,

Graphite scaled their content production by an impressive 12x using ClickUp!

Here’s how you can leverage ClickUp’s content management capabilities:

Create your content creation checklist 

First, you can elaborate on the various steps in your content creation process with a checklist. For this, use the ClickUp Checklist Templates feature. You can easily build and reuse content creation processes across your team. 

ClickUp Checklist Templates

Here are a few standout features:

• Reusable templates: Save your content creation checklist as a template and reuse it across different projects.
• Nesting and drag & drop: Organize checklist items by nesting them or adjusting the order through an easy drag-and-drop feature.
• Assign and track progress: Assign checklist items to specific team members, ensuring accountability at every step.
• Real-world use cases: Apply checklist templates for processes like pre-blog, post-blog tasks, landing page creation, or feature releases, ensuring each step is efficiently tracked.

ClickUp Task Checklists

Then, you can use the ClickUp Task Checklists to create simple to-do lists within a task.

Here’s how this helps:

• Whenever you start a new content project, create a fresh checklist from your checklist template
• Tailor the checklist to match the specific format and goals of your current project
• Assign individual checklist items to the responsible team members (e.g., SEO specialist, content writer, content ops)

This not only saves time but also ensures that everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities, leading to an efficient and effective content creation process.

ClickUp Automations

Use ClickUp Automations to automatically assign the task to different team members based on the task’s status. 

For example, if the writer moves the blog to ‘editing,’ you can automatically assign it to your Editorial Lead, who can then re-assign it to one of the editors.

Set up a content database

Now that you have your content creation workflow finalized, the next step is setting up a system to actually create and publish your content. For this, you can leverage the ready-to-use ClickUp Content Production Scaling Template.

ClickUp Content Production Scaling Template

This pre-built template is based on ClickUp’s own content production process—so you know it’s scalable. While the default template focuses on blogs, you can easily customize it to accommodate other content formats like videos or webpages.

Download This Template

Here’s how to use the template:

• Content backlog: Create a backlog to store all your topic ideas
• Custom Statuses: Use statuses like Drafting, Editing, Designing, Publishing, and Promotion to track progress
• Detailed tasks: Customize task details to include writer, editor, and relevant links (checklist, outline, draft, etc.)
• Monthly views: Utilize ClickUp’s default monthly views (last month, this month, next month) to visualize your content delivery schedule
• Comments: Update your team on blog status and use comments for discussions within tasks

This template is a great option to manage all the operational aspects of your content creation process and streamline your workflows—so you can scale your content production process. 

Draft, edit, and localize your content 

Whether it’s documenting your research, creating your content briefs and outlines, or drafting the actual content—you can do all of this with ClickUp Docs, the built-in document processing solution. 

And the best part is that ClickUp Docs comes with nested pages—unlike regular document processors—so you can consolidate all your various documents easily. This includes your briefs, outline, research, SME interview recordings, drafts, and more. 

Moreover, ClickUp Docs comes with a variety of collaboration options like commenting, live editing, and tags so you can get stakeholder feedback and ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Another excellent feature is ClickUp Brain, the writing assistant that acts as your AI content marketer—helping you create and localize your blogs faster. It can correct your grammar and spelling errors, change the tone of your blog to match your brand’s voice, and even repurpose your blog into social media posts for distribution. 

It can also draft emails for your clients to speed up the review and approval process.

ClickUp Brain quickly answers any questions you have about your content progress, from finding specific checklists to accessing distribution plans or research. All the essential information is at your fingertips, saving you time and effort.

Manage your publishing and distribution schedule

Once you’ve drafted your content, the next step is publishing it. 

But this is not so simple. You don’t only publish your blog but also a series of shorter content pieces to distribute and promote it. This can be email, social media posts, engaging in community forums, and more.

Here’s where a content calendar can help. It provides a visual representation of your publishing schedule, ensuring that you stay organized and avoid missed deadlines. 

ClickUp Content Calendar Template

We suggest using the ClickUp Content Calendar Template to manage your publishing and promotion schedule.

Download This Template

Here’s how this template works:

• Start by adding your content topics along with which stage they are in the content production process—writing, editing, and such. This is important because the statuses are color-coded, allowing you to get a gist of the blog’s status on the calendar
• Add which content pillar each topic falls under. This will keep your content aligned with your overall content strategy and avoid straying into irrelevant topics
• Then, add the publication date for your blog post and switch to the Calendar View to visualize your upcoming deadlines. This will provide a clear overview of your content schedule

Now, you can focus on upcoming deadlines and plan projects accordingly, spot scheduling clashes, and monitor the status of your content pipeline. Super convenient, right?

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Streamline your Content Ops with ClickUp

A content creation checklist is a must-have tool for any content or digital marketing team. It’s your roadmap to non-chaotic content production—guiding your team through each stage of the content creation process and ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

The real power of ClickUp lies in its ability to centralize your entire content creation process. 

You can host your checklists, project management tasks, and content drafts on the same platform. Your team doesn’t need to switch between multiple tools.

Bringing all your content creation operations into ClickUp has many more benefits, but we’ll let you see for yourself. Sign up to ClickUp for free and get started right away.