The Cost of Manual Content Distribution, Worked Out

Nobody sends you an invoice for turning one blog post into a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, and three captions. The work just gets done, across a lot of people's afternoons, and it doesn't show up anywhere until a retainer starts to feel thin.

So work it out. The cost of manual content distribution isn't a figure we can tell you, and we'd be wary of anyone who says they can, because it depends on your roster and your rates. What we can give you is the sum, and the places it's easy to fool yourself.

The Sum Takes Five Numbers

Clients, times posts a client each month, times formats from each post, gives you formats a month. Times the minutes a format takes by hand, divided by 60, gives you hours. Times what an editor hour costs you gives you the bill.

Here it is for a made-up agency with eight clients.

At 50 dollars an editor hour, those 67 hours come to about 3,333 dollars a month, or 40,000 a year. Again, that's made up. It's the same sum as the Hidden Bill on our pricing page, where you can tap any number and enter yours. The figures it opens with are only a starting point.

The one number most people guess is the minutes. Don't. Next week, have someone time five real formats, from opening the source to a version they'd show an editor, and use the average. A guess tends to be the time spent typing, and it leaves out the time spent working out what the client would say.

Divide by clients too. "About 8 hours a client" tells you more than the total, because you can hold it up against one retainer and ask whether that retainer was priced with those hours in mind.

The Sum Counts Less Than You Think

The sum covers writing the formats. One post takes a longer trip than that, and the other stops don't appear on any bill either.

For one client, over one month, add a line for each:

Use different rates where different people do the work. An account manager's hour isn't an editor's hour. If you pay freelancers by the piece, use that fee instead of minutes and a rate for that line, then keep the rest as hours.

We've written about these stages in full in the content creation process for agencies, and about how they strain as a roster grows in what breaks first when managing multiple clients.

Which Hourly Rate to Use

Use what the hour costs you: pay, plus what comes with it, such as taxes and benefits. That's the number that tells you whether a retainer holds up.

What you could have billed for that hour is a separate question and a fair one to ask, but only if you'd really have sold it. Keep the two apart. An agency that multiplies every hour by its top billing rate ends up with a scary figure and nothing to do with it.

What Moves the Total

Change one number at a time. It's the most useful thing the sum does, because it shows which decisions cost the most.

A client who's set up well takes less looking up, which is why we keep a list of what to gather for a new client.

Formats are the quiet one. Nobody decides to deliver five formats per post forever; it just happens during a good month with one client, then spreads to the others. Ask which formats that client has really used lately, and whether any of them could go. That's a conversation about value as well as hours.

Clients are the loud one. Four more at the same settings add 33 hours a month in this example, before anyone has chased anything.

The Part of the Bill That Stays

Please don't take the full number and assume it can go to zero. A good part of it is what clients pay you for.

Someone still reads for tone, checks that a figure is right, and knows the word the client's founder can't stand. No software takes that off the bill, ours included. So when you look at your total, split it in two: hours where someone is judging, and hours where someone is looking things up, retyping, or chasing. The second pile is the one worth doing something about, whatever you end up doing.

Where GoMimic Fits

Create client content. Get it approved. Deliver it. We make GoMimic, the Connected Content Distribution System for Agencies, for the stops on that trip: the formats, written with the rules and facts you keep for that client, then the approvals across every client, then approved work going on to your own tools. GoMimic never posts.

We won't tell you how many hours you'd save, because we don't know your month. The Hidden Bill on our pricing page shows how many hours a plan would have to save to cover its price, and leaves the rest to you.

The fairest test is your own stopwatch. There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card, so run real posts for one client, time the same stops, and compare. Before that, you can try it with one real post, with no account.

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