March 14, 2016 | 1 minute read

Why quantity leads to quality (sometimes)

Passle

One of the excuses we frequently hear from professional services firms on their lack of blog content is that they are concentrating on quality rather than quantity. That’s a very laudable excuse, except that the content they’ve produced ranks generally low on the quality scale too.

Why is this?

If you think about it, it’s not too surprising.

Firms that are creating regular content are more likely to be creative and disciplined in their output. After all, they have to keep creating content! This means that we can assume that they are keeping up to date with trends and reading industry news in order to find inspiration for their content. Chances are, they probably have a documented content strategy in place.

In other words, you can make the safe assumption that they have their finger on the pulse. Wouldn't you trust content more from someone like that than Joe Occasional Blogs?

Let’s not forget the saying that ‘practice makes perfect’. Creating regular content means they can learn from their mistakes and get a little better every day. Yes, some of their early content might not be superlative, but the more you create content the more data you get. These creators know which content worked and which didn’t, which headlines tanked, and which posts were shared across the social media networks. If you create content once a year during bonus season, you have no idea what your audience is interested in and have to teach yourself everything in one go.

Finally, by not creating regular content you are also missing a trick when it comes to SEO. Focused content and a regularly updated website guarantee a higher ranking.

The caveat

Of course, for all the above to make sense, you need to be creating content that is relevant and targeted to your niche audience. There is absolutely no point creating blogs on a topic irrelevant to your business.

So focus on your audience, and their pain points. What would they find useful? entertaining? thought-provoking? Give them regular content they want to read and share and you’re on to a winner.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.