Content at volume: batches & briefings
Most of your content in Steeren gets written one post at a time: you give the writer a brief, it researches and drafts, you review and publish. That works fine for a handful of posts. It doesn't scale to "publish three posts a week, indefinitely, and don't repeat yourself."
Two features cover that volume case:
- Batches - ask Steeren to plan and draft a whole set of posts at once, enough to fill the next week or two. You make one request; you get back a stack of drafts to review.
- Briefings - a standing rule that keeps drafting content for you on a cadence: a daily news roundup, a weekly digest, or a draft whenever something specific happens. Set it up once and it runs on its own.
Neither one ever publishes anything for you. Both produce drafts, and nothing goes live until you click Publish. Think of them as two ways to get a pile of solid first drafts in front of you faster - not as autopilot.
Batches: plan and draft a week or two at once
A batch is a single request that does two things in a row: it plans a set of post ideas grounded in what's happening around your business right now, then it drafts all of them. You start it, walk away, and come back to a set of review-ready drafts.
Starting a batch
You ask Steeren to run a batch and tell it, optionally:
- The period you're filling - e.g. "the first two weeks of July." If you don't say, it plans for the next 7 days.
- How many posts you want. If you don't say, it aims for 3.
- Steering - a sentence or two on what to lean into: "Focus on the agentic-procurement angle; we have a launch mid-July." This is how you bias the whole batch toward a theme or an upcoming event without writing a brief for each post.
- A campaign to attach the posts to, so they inherit that campaign's style and get tagged accordingly.
That's it. The batch runs in the background and you can watch its progress as it plans and then writes.
[!NOTE] Steering is the most useful knob here. It's free text that shapes every idea in the batch, so a single line ("we're launching X," "go deeper on Y," "tie back to our recent report") steers a week of content in one shot.
How many posts you can ask for
Batches are deliberately capped so you can't accidentally flood your blog. Two limits apply:
- A hard ceiling of 12 posts per batch. Ask for more and you'll be asked to lower it.
- A sensible rate based on the period. Roughly three posts per week of the period you chose - so a one-week batch tops out around 3, a two-week batch around 6.
If you genuinely want more than a batch allows, run another batch, or set up a briefing for ongoing cadence instead.
Step 1 - planning the ideas
Before it drafts anything, the batch looks at your business context (who you are, what you sell, who you sell to, how you write) and the signals Steeren tracks for you, including:
| Signal | What it brings to the ideas |
|---|---|
| Recommendations | Steeren's own prioritised "you should write about this" picks. The planner leans on these first. |
| Trends & news | Recent, relevant stories scored for your business. |
| Keywords | Search terms worth ranking for, with demand and competition. |
| Search Console | Queries where you're already close to page one and a nudge could help. |
| Competitors | What competitors have published lately. |
| Gaps | Topics where competitors get cited and you don't. |
The planner proposes a set of post ideas - each with a title, an angle, and a suggested publish date inside your period - and every idea has to be backed by one of those signals. No evidence, no idea. That's what keeps a batch grounded in what's actually happening rather than generic filler.
This is best-effort: if some signals are thin or unavailable, the batch works with what it has. That's one reason a batch can come back with fewer posts than you asked for - there simply wasn't enough to say yet. Steeren would rather give you fewer strong ideas than pad the set.
Step 2 - no repeating yourself
A big part of "content at volume" is not re-publishing things you've already covered. Steeren handles this for you on two levels:
- While planning, it's shown what you've published recently and told to find fresh angles.
- After planning, it double-checks each proposed idea against your existing posts and quietly drops anything that's effectively a duplicate of something you already have.
So you can run batch after batch without your blog slowly filling up with near-copies of the same article. If a batch comes back smaller than you expected, this is often why - and you can see which ideas were set aside as too similar.
[!TIP] The duplicate check is a similarity guess, not a human read. It's good at catching paraphrases of an existing post, but it won't mistake "a genuinely new angle on a familiar topic" for a repeat. If a batch comes back unexpectedly small, glance at what was set aside - sometimes the fix is just sharper steering or waiting for fresher news.
Step 3 - drafting
The surviving ideas become real drafts, filed under the right topic and given a suggested date inside your period. (That date is a suggestion on the draft - it does not schedule the post to go live.) Steeren then drafts all of them using the same writer that handles your single posts, working through several at a time. Each finished draft lands in your review queue.
What "done" actually means
Volume work can fail in part. A batch is considered done as long as at least one post was written - which means a finished batch can still contain a post or two that didn't draft.
[!WARNING] "Done" doesn't guarantee every post wrote successfully. After a batch finishes, scan the set: any post that came back empty can simply be deleted or re-run. Everything that drafted is sitting in review, ready for you.
Briefings: a standing brief that keeps drafting for you
Where a batch is something you trigger once, a briefing is a standing rule Steeren runs on its own. You set it up once, and it keeps producing drafts on the cadence you chose - no need to come back and kick it off each time.
A briefing answers three questions: when should it run, what should it draw on, and how many posts should it draft each time.
When it runs
You choose one of three triggers:
- On a schedule - every morning at 7, every Monday, whatever cadence you set. This is the common case: a daily roundup or a weekly digest.
- On demand only - it never runs itself; it just sits there as a saved recipe you fire whenever you want a fresh draft from it.
- When a condition is met - it runs on its schedule, but only actually drafts if something you care about has happened (for example, "only if a high-severity security advisory landed"). This is the newest and most basic of the three; it's good for a single, simple "fire when X happens" rule.
Whatever the trigger, you can also fire any briefing immediately if you don't want to wait for its next scheduled run.
What it drafts
There are two flavours of briefing, depending on the kind of cadence you want:
- Digest style - Steeren pulls together one shared pool of context and drafts a few posts from it. Good for a "weekly digest" where several posts should draw on the same material.
- Daily-news style - Steeren scans everything that came in recently (say, from your news or RSS sources over the last day), finds the handful of distinct stories worth covering, and drafts one post per story. This is the "three to five fresh articles a day, each on a different story" workflow.
The daily-news flavour is built specifically so a busy news day doesn't turn into five near-identical posts on the same headline - it groups related items into one story and writes about it once. It also skips anything you've already covered recently, and it's told to write across the sources it found rather than rewrite a single article.
You control the cadence, the number of posts per run, the language, and a title template for the drafts it produces.
Honest expectations
A briefing is a draft factory, not a publishing robot. A few things worth knowing:
[!WARNING] A briefing run can finish successfully and still produce fewer posts than you'd expect, if an individual draft hiccups. After a run, it's worth a glance at what it actually produced versus what you asked for.
[!NOTE] A daily news briefing will sometimes show a run as skipped - that's normal, not broken. On a quiet day with no fresh, non-duplicate stories, the briefing simply has nothing new to write, so it stands down for the day and runs again the next. It's working as intended; it's just refusing to invent news.
And, as always: everything a briefing drafts lands as a draft for you to review. Nothing a briefing produces goes live on its own.
When to use which
| You want... | Use |
|---|---|
| To fill the next week or two with a varied set, right now | A batch |
| Posts grounded in your current SEO, competitor, and trend signals | A batch - it's the one that plans from your signals |
| A daily post per fresh news story from your sources | A daily-news briefing on a schedule |
| A few posts off one shared pool of context, on a schedule | A digest-style briefing |
| A draft only when something specific happens | A conditional briefing (the early, simple version) |
| A saved recipe you draft from on command | An on-demand briefing you fire when you want it |
The two features don't overlap: a batch plans from your signals and runs once; a briefing runs on a cadence from the context or news you point it at. What they share is the writer at the end - both hand you drafts to review, and neither one publishes.
FAQ
Do batches or briefings ever publish automatically? No. Both produce drafts. Publishing is always a separate step you take by hand. A batch leaves its posts in your review queue; a briefing leaves them as drafts. Either way, you decide what goes live.
Why did my batch produce fewer posts than I asked for? A few possible reasons: the cap kicked in (roughly three posts per week of your period, twelve at most); the signals were too thin for the planner to propose more solid ideas (it would rather give you fewer than pad); the duplicate check set aside ideas too close to posts you already have; or a draft or two failed to write. After a batch, you can see which ideas were set aside and which posts came back empty.
My daily briefing shows "skipped" runs. Is it broken? No. On a quiet day with no fresh, non-duplicate stories in the last day, a daily-news briefing has nothing new to write, so it skips that run rather than padding. It keeps running and fires again the next day.
Can I tell Steeren how aggressively to avoid duplicates? The daily-news briefing's duplicate sensitivity is something you can tune per briefing. The batch duplicate check runs the same way for everyone and isn't a per-request setting - but in practice the better lever is your steering: a sharper angle is the surest way to get a genuinely fresh post past it.
What happens if something interrupts a running batch? A batch that gets stuck is cleaned up automatically within a couple of minutes - its progress indicator clears and you can simply run it again. Any posts that already drafted before the interruption stay safe in your review queue.