Pat Flynn is one smart dude and is a great poster child for the earn online income crowd. If you haven’t visited his blog Smart Passive Income yet, hop on over there and get a good dose of what quality looks like when it comes to blogging.
In fact I was just visiting over there this morning, and was keying away my comment to his post and question What’s more important to you: Quantity, or Quality?” when my flying fingers hit the wrong key and voila! The whole comment vanished.
Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Thoughts were running away and the comment was in danger of gulp! Becoming a post … which is why I decided to tackle Pat’s question here and well, make it a post.
Pat is a master at posting thought provoking content and this was no exception. The devil has a wicked streak of bent humor and easily bounces from seemingly complete irrelevance to “… right on, that hits the nail on the head …” AHA moment for the reader. So bananas to you Pat!
The question at hand quality vs quantity deals with blog content vs frequency of posting, i.e. which do you subscribe to. Predictably most of the commenters opted for quality which is both admirable and intuitive to our “better, inner” selves.
Pat’s own answer to this question is “It depends”
I agree with the “it depends” and have a few thoughts of my own.
#1. QUALITY
The first thought that comes to mind is that quality to some degree is subjective, particularly when it comes to writing. What might be quality to one person may be just recycled drib drab to another. So to some degree quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Some might point to style, or correctness of grammar and spelling as constituting quality, yet, I have read some really good stuff on some blogs where English is definitely a struggle but the info was good, grammatical, spelling errors et al and conversely where the spelling and grammar were stellar but the content was not. And then throw style into the mix … you want to talk subjective?
Another spread in perception of quality would be determined by the demographics of your readership. A blog who’s readership tends to be in the 34-45 age bracket – may not be considered quality by say the early twenties crowd. You can get your blog demographics from Alexa.
#2 QUANTITY
The argument for posting quantity is driven by the attract search engine traffic crowd. The more fresh content on the blog, the more frequently the bots crawl the site, the higher the ranking, the more traffic the search engines send your way.
“Screw the search engines” said one commenter.
OK.
If you blog purely for the joy of blogging and have nary a thought of earning an online income, by all means post as the moment moves you and let the reader decide whether that is a quality post or not and worthy of a return visit to your blog. That of course presumes that you do indeed have a reader. An established blog hopefully does, a brand new one is just whistling Dixie.
Exceptions abound of course – Glen Allsopp at Viper Chill immediately comes to mind as he seems to break every rule in blogging: infrequent posting, long articles, free of monetization(at least on his Viper Chill blog – he does extraordinarily well with his online business) and that domain name certainly doesn’t scream “blogging” but damn! The content is to kill for and his followers boarder on being cult fanatics and the numbers just keep growing and growing.
If on the other hand you are blogging for money then you cannot ignore the engines – they are the lifeline to your earning an online income and frequency of posting should be part of your blog income business plan. I can tell you from experience that how often you post is how pretty the search engines will play with you.
Daily posting draws daily traffic, some of which is return and some new, but more importantly there seems to be a spill over effect. The more new traffic that comes to your blog, the greater the chance that your return traffic also begins to gain traction.
I stop at the 2 to 3 times daily though. There are bloggers who do that, and do so successfully but my thought here is that the post does not have the benefit of time exposure and I wonder if multiple daily posts enjoy a significant return of visitor metric.
#3 : QUALITY & QUANTITY
The perfectionist in us cries out “Both! Both” but I can tell you, it just ain’t a gonna happen! Even the uber bloggers who do indeed post daily, have off days … and many of them have staff!
If you are a part time blogger holding down a 9-5, posting daily may be a stretch, yet if you can do it, its the best way to get your blog off the ground. Many new bloggers bust their keesters for the first three months to gain traffic and ranking, then scale back a bit to say 3 times a week. At this point they have established a presence and a readership and can concentrate more on quality.
So as with the bananananananas … you need to read Pat’s post … the answer is: IT DEPENDS!
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