Content Brief Template: The One-Page Order That Gets You the Article You Paid For

A keyword and a word count is not a brief

Most briefs that reach freelancers are three lines long: the phrase to target, a length, a due date. The writer fills the gap with the only material available to a stranger, which is whatever already ranks. The result reads fine and says nothing your competitors have not said, because it was assembled from them.

A brief exists to move knowledge from the person who has it to the person who types. A writer can research a topic in an afternoon. A writer cannot research your prices, your warranty, the mistake your customers make twice a week or the town you stopped serving last spring. That is the material that makes a page worth ranking, and none of it is on the internet until you put it there. Our guide to how to write an article starts with a one-sentence answer for the same reason; the brief is where that sentence gets handed over.

A writer can learn your subject in an afternoon. Your business they can only learn from you.

The brief also protects the person paying. When a draft misses, the brief settles whose miss it was. If the brief said the reader is a landlord and the draft talks to a first-time buyer, the writer revises for free. If the brief never said, you are paying for your own silence. The content marketing section covers the system around this one page, from research to refresh.

The ten fields of a content brief, and what each one prevents

Every field below earns its place by preventing a specific, expensive kind of rewrite. If a field would not change the draft, cut it. A brief that runs to six pages gets skimmed, and a skimmed brief is a three-line brief with extra steps.

Field five has its own craft, covered in SEO content and in our keyword intent work; the brief just records the decision. Field nine points to a voice guide rather than restating it, and our brand voice guide shows how to write one that fits on an index card.

A filled-in brief for a hypothetical foundation repair company

Here is the template in use, for an invented foundation repair company in San Antonio commissioning one article. Square brackets mark facts the owner supplies before the brief goes out. A brief with blanks still in it is a brief that gets you guesses.

Notice what the brief does not say. It does not list fourteen related keywords, prescribe a heading count or explain what a foundation is. It says who, what, why and where the proof lives. The writer supplies structure and sentences, which is what you are paying them for.

Researching the brief in an hour instead of a week

The brief takes longer than the three-line version and far less time than a rewrite. With practice it is about an hour per piece, most of it spent gathering facts you will reuse across many articles.

1. 1

   Start with a question someone actually asked

   Pull it from the phone log, the estimate notes or the queries report in Google Search Console. Write it down in the customer's words, misspellings included.

2. 2

   Search it the way the customer would

   Logged out, on a phone. Note what the results page shows and what the top pages leave out. The gap is your angle, and it goes in the brief as one sentence.

3. 3

   Check you are not briefing a page you already have

   Search your own site for the topic. Two pages chasing one question compete with each other; a keyword map assigns each search to one URL.

4. 4

   Collect the facts before the writer starts

   Prices, photos, local rules, the expert's availability. A writer waiting on facts either stalls or invents, and the second one is worse.

5. 5

   Write the answer last, in two sentences

   If you cannot, the topic is not ready to brief. Two answers mean two articles.

For the volume and difficulty behind a phrase, the keyword research tools guide compares the free and paid options. For who the reader really is, audience research shows how to build a profile from reviews and calls instead of a stock photo.

Where the money goes: briefs, rewrites and the freelance invoice

Freelance writing is usually priced per piece, per word or per hour, and every one of those models punishes a vague brief. Per piece, you pay for a draft that misses and then pay again in your own review time. Per hour, you pay the writer to research things you could have told them in ten minutes. A rewrite round costs the writer a day and costs you a week of the article not working.

Run the arithmetic on a hypothetical: a writer you pay for a 1,200-word article, plus two hours of your time to review and correct it. With a good brief, the correction pass shrinks to a read-through, because the facts arrived before the draft did. Across a year of monthly articles, the hours you recover are worth more than most rate negotiations. How to find, test and pay writers is covered in hiring a freelance writer.

One line in every brief should point to the contract, not replace it: who owns the finished piece. The U.S. Copyright Office's circular on works made for hire explains that a commissioned work is made for hire only if it fits one of nine listed categories and both parties sign a written agreement saying so. If it does not qualify, the person who wrote it is the author. DataCram is not a law firm; have your contract, reviewed by counsel, say plainly who owns what.

Briefing an AI draft: the same page, with less forgiveness

A machine given a keyword produces the most likely article about that keyword, which is the average of what already exists. It cannot interview your inspector, knows nothing about your prices and will confidently invent a local rule if the sentence seems to want one. So the brief matters more with AI, not less. Field six, the facts only you have, is the whole difference between a useful draft and a liability.

Google's guide to creating helpful content asks site owners to consider the who, how and why of each page: who created it, how it was produced, and why it exists. A brief answers all three before anything is drafted. Our guides to AI writing and scaling content production cover the editing checks a machine draft needs and the volume traps that come with it.

On sites DataCram builds, Athena CMS has an agent called Prometheus that finds customer questions the site has not answered and drafts the page, and another, Calliope, that drafts articles. A person approves every draft, and the facts in field six are what make those drafts worth approving.

Checking the draft against the brief, field by field

A brief turns review from taste into a checklist. Read the draft with the brief beside it and mark each field met or missed. Feedback tied to a field is specific and fair; feedback like "it doesn't feel right" is neither, and it produces a second draft that also does not feel right.

• Does the opening give the answer from field four? If a reader must scroll to find it, the draft fails the reason it exists.
• Is every fact from field six used and correct? Have the named reviewer check numbers, rules and technical claims against the source.
• Does each section make the claim from the outline? A heading that names a topic instead of a point usually hides a section with no point.
• Do the links and the call to action match field eight? The last screen should point to the service, not to a generic contact page.
• Would a customer recognize their own question? Read the first paragraph aloud to someone who asked it.

Keep the approved brief with the published page. A year later, when the page needs a refresh, the brief tells whoever updates it what the page was for. The content relaunch guide covers what to do when that day comes.

Writing briefs yourself, or handing over the whole calendar

An owner who writes one good brief a month and sends it to a capable freelancer has a working content program. The brief template above is the part of it nobody can do for you without asking you questions, which is why a content marketing strategy decides the topics first and the briefs follow.

If you would rather answer questions than write briefs, DataCram's content marketing service does the research, interviews you or your staff for the facts, writes the brief and the piece, and reports on the calls each page brings in. For a free look at how your current pages hold up, the website audit checks speed, SEO, mobile, security and content and emails a report with fixes.