Where are you on the Web-Content Debate?: Quality -or- Quantity

Someone told me “Blogs don’t even have to be good; they just need to be consistantly there. It’s all about content, content, content.”

Is that true?

I wonder:

What’s more important for web-content: A little bit of good stuff, or a lot of meh stuff?

Most SEO and blogging advice sites say you need to have at least this many words, optimized for SEO with such and such headings, content words at so many places, and on and on…

They also say something to the affect of, “Writing should be good or people will think it’s bad.”

No shit, homie.

But how good does it have to be?

This is just my opinion, friend…

It should be as good as you can make it in the time it should take to make it. Figure out how long you have to make the post. If it’s a personal blog, take all week writing, editing, revising, re-writing. Make a masterpiece once every 53 days. Whatever. But say someone pays you to blog. How much should you charge? Maybe that’ll be the next blog…

But when you have a price set for a product, it doesn’t matter how long it takes–you get paid what you get paid. So make it worth the time you spend on it. If you agree to write a blog for $20, you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on it. Make it what some call an Op-Ed. Which–if you care–means opposite the editorial, not opinion editorial, though that kind of makes sense, because it basically means, Here comes a writer’s opinion about something…

You can knock out an opionion on something in less than two hours, making your pay $10-$20 (at that rate), depending on your efficiency, for fairly easy writing work.

If you know you need to do some college-essay-style research (with links to proofs and all that), and some pictures to make it look good, you’ll probably spend equal time (in my opinion) researching and actually writing. You have to find good references, insert it into your writing, add the link, make sure you give credit….

You do that for 3-5 links, that takes a good chunk of time.

Then you get a picture or two.

Then you put in tags, SEO content words, check your title, set up automatic social updates….

If you get double the money from the earlier example for a different blog, but this time they expect higher quality, convincingly persuasive writing, with internal and external links, sponsor mentions, a title that has a high SEO rank using a jetpack add-on, you might end up making the same per hour–possibly less–as you did doing the easy op-ed blog.

So that makes it easier and more profitable in the short-term to do some quick whatever blogs. But people won’t want to pay for that, or come back to keep reading it.

Ultimately, I say every blog should get the best you can give it. For personal, make it as good as you can with whatever time frame you want. If you’re getting paid, make sure you think about the total time going into the entire project, and make sure the time the project takes is a good fit for how much you’ll make per hour.

I’d rather read good writing once or twice a month from the same source than daily mediocre writing from the same source. What are you trying to do, make sure no one has time to read anything but the crap you hurriedly wrote?

Balance Is the Key (buh-doi…)

I read a very good article about Quantity vs Quality that said, more or less, you need to have both. And they give a little bit of a cheat code:

“Use your expertise as a thought leader and repurpose previous content to create fresh new perspectives…”

 Michael Brenner on May 27, 2020 in Content Marketing

Write great content, then find ways to repurpose it. And every time, link it to as many other relevant posts as possible (they read it once, maybe they’ll read it again…) and keep your bounce rate low. With that in mind, I will go ahead and write about negotiating price, using a lot of what I said here. So…be on the look out for that.

Real Quick, before You Go…

I recently started writing officially for Hey Guys Media Group and they have a bunch of great podcasts on their site, including mine: Creative Ops. Please visit their site and listen to my show first, then pick whatever else looks good and try that too, I suppose.

If you like anything of mine you’ve read or heard–or you’re just a generous person!–you can Buy Me a Coffee (or whatever…). Whatever? I mean it doesn’t even have to be a coffee. If you’re like, “Take this money and eat at [your choice!], or have a drink of [you choose!].” I promise I’ll do it. I’ll even take a picture, post it on my Instagram, and mention you!

-CT

(Normally I put more stuff down here, but this is my personal blog and I just don’t feel like it today. You can go to Buy Me a Coffee and say, “Here’s a couple bucks. Go put your picture and links up, lazy ass!” and I’ll do it (and give you a shoutout!) Go to www.christophertallon.com if you want more. If you don’t want more, reconsider your life choices up to now.)