So your CEO approved the budget for you to launch a new content marketing plan. Whether you’ll be hiring an in-house editor, or working with a content management company, there’s a lot to do between now and three months of content from now. Here are 5 tips on how to get organized, because the sooner you get your editor up and running, the sooner you can get back to the 4,000 other marketing projects on your docket.

1-Find your voice and stick with it.

Chances are, your company already has a corporate voice, whether it’s whimsical/friendly (Jet Blue), sharp/modern (Glaceau) or serious/informative (Honeywell). Now it’s your job to ensure all of your collateral maintains that voice, from the corporate blog to the case studies to the cocktail napkins at your next big event. Nothing says “what they heck are they talking about?” like a funny newsletter linked to a dry corporate website.

2-Outline your content plan.

Will you publish four new articles on your site each month, or ten? Will your customers receive four magazines a year, or six? Does your email newsletter go out every Tuesday, or every other Thursday? We’re big on consistency, and so are consumers, so create some rules and stick to them. Even better, make sure everyone in the company receives a copy, so the next time your sales director wants to blast your entire email list about an upcoming trade show, you can hand him a copy of the content calendar and let him know the date of your next opening.

3-Decide who makes the decisions.

Now that you have your content plan, it’s time to start filling in the gaps. At first, everyone from biz dev to IT will want to have a say in the master story list. But by your second month, you may be pulling teeth to get any responses to the next batch of story ideas. Determine up front who needs to give story ideas the green light, and who needs to sign off on final content before you press “publish.”

4-Create or update your style guide.

If you do have one, update it. If you don’t have one, gather those with buy-in and jot down some notes. Are you going to use serial commas? Is the tone of the interviews going to be more conversational or corporate? Will you follow Chicago or AP style, or some combination of the two? Do web addresses get www or http://? What gets bolded and what gets italicized? And what is the naming convention for your various products and services? These may seem like nitpicky things, but when you are in the midst of landing a national account or being acquired, you don’t want to look like an amateur.

5-Build a process for the handling the nitty-gritty.

When it comes to figuring out which file is the one the proofreader approved vs. the one management signed off on, we can tell you that email doesn’t work—which is why we use the online project management system Basecamp. MS Word’s track changes feature is great, but only if you have a system for gathering everyone’s edits on one doc. During important meetings, use a digital recorder to capture all the details, and work with a transcription service to convert it to text. It’ll cost you about a dollar a minute, but will pick up all those little details various members of the team may have missed or forgotten. Create a process and a chain of command and give your editor or writers feedback all at once. Nothing frustrates them more (and risks missing deadlines) than edits from the same organization that go against one another.

BONUS. And finally, our own pet peeve: Just say no to distracting widgets.

Twitter, Utterz and Sphere—the list goes on and on. Put the clamp down on the umpteen Web 2.0 widgets cluttering your site (or at least take them off your homepage and put them onto your blog—tastefully). When widgets are scattered across your homepage, it looks much too “flavor-of-the-day” and distracts from the overall design of your site. Rarely have we seen it done well (although Liveperson might be an exception). Before downloading the latest “nizzer-keen” content generating widget, ask yourself how its features align with your original content plan and how much control you have over the content it pulls in—you may not want that news about Britney’s latest breakdown on your corporate homepage.