Quantity Over Quality? Sometimes, Yes.

bynathaniell

101K followers

5 years ago

The standard advice for pretty much everything is "quality over quantity". You'd never want to put out a low-quality product, right?

However, I think when you are starting your first website, QUANTITY is more important than QUALITY.

Reason #1: Quantity = Practice

Chances are, right now, you are not an excellent writer. Neither was I when I got started. My first blog posts were 500 words long, and it was a real struggle to get there. 80% of my articles were incredibly promotional and I was just basically rewriting the ad copy over and over again.

It was terrible, but I learned from my mistakes.

After tens of thousands of words, I started to get better. I'd re-read my old content and cringe, then write better stuff the next time around. I'd read other articles and think about what I liked or didn't like.

What I learned by writing garbage articles for my old websites I couldn't have learned in school. For example, I was always taught that a paragraph was a "complete thought". A single topic. It was OK if your paragraphs were more than 10 sentences long.

Then I read my website one day and got lost reading my own content on a mobile phone.

That was when I stared writing in much smaller paragraphs.

You can read and read and read all day, but in the end, you have to practice. You can read a thousand books on how to play the violin, but without picking one up, you can't really understand how to play one.

You shouldn't write bad content on purpose, but don't be afraid to publish low quality stuff if that's the best you can do right now. It'll get better.

Reason #2: Quantity = Data

The more you publish, the more you rank for. The more you rank for, the more data you have to analyze.

With just a few posts and pages on your affiliate site, you probably won't rank for much, so it's hard to tell if your writing is bad, or the competition is stiff, or your site isn't old enough, or you aren't doing SEO properly, or what's going on.

When you have a couple hundred articles on your website, now you have some data to work with!

• Which articles are ranking?
• What keywords are you ranking for?
• Which links are getting clicks
• Which pages have the best retention?
• What keywords can you find similar to your ranked articles?
• What topics can you branch out to?
• What are affiliate products related to my ranking articles I could promote?

All of those questions can be answered using Google Analytics and Search Console.

With more data, you have more direction for the future of your website and what steps you might want to take next to optimize your time and energy.

Reason #3: Quantity = Small Successes

It's a real bummer to put your heart and soul into a single article, only to have it not rank for your keyword. So you spend 40 hours on a 5000 word product but it's stuck on page 3? Frustrating!

When you shotgun out a bunch of content, it's much easier to count your successes. You'll most likely, simply stumble upon at least a couple of page 1 rankings just by random. You may even get some clicks and sales...just by random.

It's much easier IMO to feel good about what you've done when you start getting some traffic and sales so you can see results. Without those clicks and sales, it can feel like you're just creating content for nobody, so it feels like wasted time (it's not - some websites do very well with just a few high quality articles - but it feels like it).

In my experience, more content leads to more rankings, which leads to more clicks, which leads to more sales. A higher publishing volume just means more chances to rank. I think of it like a spider web. More articles is just more threads, and a stronger web.

It's nice to eventually develop some kind of strategy or workflow, so you get some kind of control over your business, but in the beginning? Meh. Go crazy. Write as much as you can and see what happens.

Final Thoughts

In my experience, I learned much faster by doing rather than reading. That's why sometimes, I do actually recommend quantity over quality.

Of course, it's best to have both. And as your site grows and gains authority, that balance may shift to more quality over quantity. Also, cleaning up the aftermath of this method is not fun. After a year of writing, you'll look back on 90% of what you did and think it's trash.

I didn't say this was the "best" method out there. I'm just saying it's worked for me, and there are some good reasons do it this way!

With practice and time you'll be a better writer, better keyword researcher, and have a clearer vision of what you want your business to be. There are plenty of people out there who teach very specific methods of what to do for "guaranteed results", but personally, I'm all about spaghetti on the wall!