Balancing Quality and Quantity in Blogging
If you’ve spent any time looking through the blogosphere, you understand that it’s a wild mix of quality and quantity (and other, less useful stuff as well). The best blogs manage to pull off both, putting out a constant stream of excellent content that stands well out from the rest of the blog universe noise. But these are typically very professional blogs, with tons of employees and many contributors. How can smaller blogs, with many only one content creator, hope to keep up?
Well, it’s all about finding the right mix of quality and quantity. If you simply go for quantity, you won’t build a loyal following. It will be obvious to the casual reader that you are just throwing up a bunch of content all the time, and you are likely to see your traffic plateau. But if you focus solely on quality, you will find that your perfectionism is likely to keep you from taking your blog to the next level. Sure, you may have valuable material, but this content is time consuming and sometimes expensive to produce.
So as an aspirational blogger, you’ve got to find a balance, one which will propel your blog to success, at which point you can start investing in both quality and quantity. Here are some great ways to start.
1. Make Every Piece of Content Count for SEO
The title is the most important piece of each article. If it contains important keywords for your niche, this will help drive fresh traffic to your site. When using WordPress, make good use of your tags and topics, which help Google’s algorithms to find your content when it is trying to match the search terms of its customers. Whatever the piece of content, it should serve you in this way. So even if an article isn’t a model of journalistic standards, make sure it at least works for SEO.
2. Invest in Good Work Occasionally
Sometimes it pays to hire a real writer to craft something of value for your readers. If you can only afford this every once in awhile, make this stuff count. Link it all over the place, feature it on your homepage, and try to get it shared wherever possible. A trending website is a visible website, and quality material is the best way to make this happen. If you can manage to make your site visible several days every month, you’ll start to get some headway and income to help pay for the endeavor.
3. Hone in on a Specific Topic
If you can own a specific sub-niche, you’ll make it a lot easier to make all of your material pay off. You’ll also draw more of a specific kind of reader. Becoming an expert on one topic is often worth more than being a great writer. Great writing is about content and communication. If you have the information and communicate it, even when you repeat yourself sometimes, the message will start to get through. Keep it up, and you’ll find that you have quality and quantity which you can maintain.