When talking content, there’s an endless debate – should you focus on quality or quantity.
I can give you my answer right away, but understanding the thought process is more important.
There is a mis-consumption on the impact of creating a lot of content in oppose to creating right targeted content every once in a while.
Marketing Examples
If we’re looking at the marketing examples – You can easily compare Neil Patel’s methods to Brian Dean’s (Backlinko’s) approach.
Neil publishes new content almost everyday. Admittedly, it’s always high quality content, but he also dedicates quite a lot of resources into it. Brian on the other hand, doesn’t publish as much new content but when he does it’s always high quality and gets a lot of traffic as well.
Neil is totally leading in terms of brand – but he didn’t coin a term or a marketing phrase.
Brian on the other hand – has established both the “Skyscraper technique” and “guestogrphics”
In terms of engagement – Brain’s website outperforms Neil, but Neil has double the traffic.
The question is – Does Neil puts only double the effort or more? How much time does Neil spend on creating content VS. Brian, and is it worth it.
Neil gets double the traffic but publishes about 10-12 pieces of content a month and gets 1.7 M visitors (based on SimilarWeb) while Brian publishes around 1 piece of content and get 800K visitors. It’s almost as Neil is putting 10 times the effort but only gets double the results.
Of course there is more to the story than just this simple facts (like goals, brand, collateral profits, target audience, etc). But you see where this is going.
You get the impression that Neil is doing better than Brian, based on the amount of content he puts out. If you’d look at the amount os shares and comments, you might realise it’s the other way around.
Quantity, creates the illusion of quality, just by being more present.
A movie example
We just came back from seeing Leonardo Dicaprio’s new movie ‘Revenant’. I was making the case that Leo is a good enough actor, but he is not an amazing actor.
Of course each one of the people at the conversation gave different arguments (with the Oscars coming soon of course). I had only one claim – The wolf of wall st.
If you think about this move, in which Dicaprio plays a major role – most people remember one moment in particular. The only 10 minutes Matthew McConaughey appears in the movie.
Why? because it’s a great scene and he plays his part amazingly. That’s why it overshadows the next 2 hours of the movie.
This actually happens to DiCaprio quite often. But because he gets the “big” roles you assume he’s the best actor in the movie. But it’s based on quantity and not quality necessarily.
It’s all about impact VS. effort
The real question is what matters more – impact or effort.
A lot of effort will sums up to have an impact but with a certain focus and attention cost. But if you think of your content is impact first – you won’t write as much, but your content will perform better.
What you need to ask yourself, is what’s easier for you? Which way would be easier for you to leverage to eventually make impact on your market and readers?