This is a big debate in marketing and content creation. Should you focus more on quantity? or quality?
Should you release more content? Or focus on making a few very high quality pieces of content.
This is an important question to think of for any kind of content creator.
We create content on our company blog: www.china-admissions.com/blog, I also create content on this blog, videos on Youtube, and a podcast.
I don’t think it’s the most important question, and I don’t think there needs to be a trade off. I think that you can have both quantity and quality but the most important thing is to have a great content strategy.
Effort Is Important
There is a third missing part to the question which is effort. The trade off between quantity vs quality assumes that you have fixed resources (such as time) to invest. You can spend 10 hours making 10 articles, or 10 hours making one article or somewhere in between.
If you can increase the resources that you put into it, then you can have both quantity and quality.
But the resources are not fixed.
The Learning Phase
Just like with any skill, there is a learning phase. The effort needed to create content is going to be substantially more at the start and is going to go down as you get more practice and better. Practice makes perfect. Quality does improve with quantity.
That is why I think it is a good to focus on quantity at the start. It is important to experiment, fail, find your style while you are in the learning phase.
What is quality?
How do you define quality?
Quality is subjective. It depends on the medium and the reader. My definition of quality is related to how big of a problem the content is looking to solve, and how well it solves it. With two equal pieces of content, the one with the higher market reach is better quality.
Longer Vs Shorter Content
In terms of longer content on google, it is usually better because it contains more information, but only up to a point.
However, I consider articles to be high quality that are interesting, engaging, and concise.
In his Lettres Provinciales, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
I think that concise content is higher quality. A 3 minute video on youtube can be better than a 1 hour video if has the most important content. It saves me time which is better.
What is the bar of quality required?
Another important factor is – “How good does it need to be?” This depends on the topic, the medium, and the competitive content.
The Advantage of Being the best
It’s true that just like for income in the economy, the good, get average returns, the great get better returns, but the best in the world get exponentially more returns.
There is a huge advantage in being the best. Being the no.1 ranked video or article means you will get 80% of the traffic. It also means that when people discover your content they will be interested to check out the other content (if it is of equally high content).
Anyone who has created really excellent content knows how true this is.
But if you are creating average content that is not the best, you are going to get lost in the sea of the masses.
It doesn’t have to be a trade-off
So I think it doesn’t need to be a trade off. You can have both!
At the start I think it’s important to set a consistent quantity and focus more on quantity, and you can keep learning as you go. Consistency pays on most mediums of content. You can then focus more on quality while also finding ways to do both by improving the efficiency and the effort needed, or increasing the effort.
Doing more quantity also improves the quality.
For this blog for example, I am focusing on creating content every day, and then the articles that are the most popular, I am continually improving them to make them better.
