Hey agency owner,
You know what frustrates me? Debates that are never settled. I HATE it when people are “just asking questions” but not actually looking for answers.
So today, I’m going to settle a debate, or “question,” that I’ve seen too many times in my content marketing career of 14+ years.
It’s the “quality vs quantity” debate.
It goes like this, usually:
Person 1: “Should we create more or better content?”
Person 2: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s it. There’s no substance to it. It’s not helpful.
Here’s the reality of quantity vs quality:
A higher amount of high-quality content will always outperform a lower volume of high-quality content.
When you produce a higher volume of great content, you’ll get:
More traffic
More leads
More customers
Quality Is The Baseline
One of my biggest fears about this article is that people are just going to try to go scale crap content. It’s like what my friend Andy Crestodina said on a webinar recently:
“AI lets you scale what you already have. If you have crap, you’re just going to produce more crap. If you have good content, you’ll produce more good content.”
As content marketers, we should always aim to produce stuff that our audience wants to see. They want to read it and take action on it, and it drives their decisions. The goal is to get more business from your content. If you don’t, then you’re not investing in something.
You’d be wasting time and effort in that equation.
Once you know your ideal customer/client, you can know their needs. Then, you can create content for them.
But what then? When you want your business to grow faster, it’s not going to happen unless you change something.
You Need More Volume To Get Better and Win
Are you familiar with Moz? Moz, formerly SEOmoz, is an SEO software suite. They were the leader in the space for a really long time.
Want to know how they achieved that?
Their founder, Rand Fishkin, blogged 5 times a week for years.
Seriously.
His first stuff wasn’t great, either. If you go find his original Whiteboard Friday videos, the lighting and camera framing are bad and he stumbles over his words.
Same for his first blog posts. Many are short and a bit unfocused.
But then look at his content a few years later. He’s eloquent. He’s focused. He’s principled. And he maintained a volume of output through all of this.
He got better because he put in the work, consistently.
And then he kept putting in the work consistently even once his output was higher quality.
Over time, Moz then got others to write on their site. The agency I worked for in New York, Distilled, did the Monday post. Other agency partners had other dayss.
Moz kept a high consistent volume of good content for many years. They only really lost the race to be the industry leader once that stopped.
Ending The Debate
So, quality or quantity?
Yes.
To get good, you have to do volume.
Once you’re doing volume, your content will get better.
Then the trick is maintaining that volume once you’ve achieved consistent quality.
If you produce more good stuff than your competitors, you will win.
What do you think? Hit reply and let me know.