The Question of Frequency: Quality vs. Quantity in Blogging

How many blog posts should you be publishing?

Twenty posts a month? Ten? Five? Or can you get away with less?

With 86% of businesses using content marketing, there’s more content flooding inboxes than most people have time to read. (‘Fess up. You’ve probably unsubscribed from at least one list because you couldn’t find time to read everything they sent you.)

And that being the case, it’s time to re-evaluate the question of content frequency.

As you might guess, there are two extremes.

One comes from the experts who are getting traction from “being everywhere” online. They publish tons of content, sometimes multiple times a day, so people see them everywhere they turn.

This is the mindset that’s been in force for the last five to seven years, and it’s how some of the top brands in marketing got their start. Obviously, high-volume content marketing works.

Or does it?

High-volume blogging is especially hard to sustain long-term for two reasons.

First, the more content you create, the lower the quality tends to be. That’s because content creation isn’t actually scalable, no matter how much you may recycle or repurpose.

Put simply, it takes time to come up with ideas, research them, write them and edit them to perfection. Reduce the time, and you diminish the quality of the end result.

Second, creating too much content too fast almost always results in burn-out. I’ve seen it time and time again. When someone tries to adopt the “everywhere online” approach to content, they not only run out of ideas, they grow tired of saying the same things over and over.

I’ve had people tell me they feel like they’re repeating themselves ad nauseam, and if they ever see another list post, they’ll run away and hide.

Low-volume, high-return content creation

It may look like a knee-jerk reaction, but I don’t think it is. I’m talking about a new type of content marketer, who worries less about what everyone else is doing than about their traffic and conversion rates.

The approach? Less content with far better results.

The first person I noticed taking this approach was Jon Morrow, when he started his blog, BoostBlogTraffic. Rather than frontloading his site with blog posts before launching, he did the complete opposite. He posted an introductory post and asked people to sign up before he developed his site. In that post, if I remember correctly, he said he wasn’t committing to any frequency. Instead he wanted to focus on promotion, so he wasn’t promising daily (or even weekly) posts.

That got my attention, but I still wasn’t convinced. Until now.

Brian Dean is respected in both SEO and conversion rate optimization. He knows how to build a successful site that gets traffic and conversions. What’s more, he’s doing it by breaking all the “rules” of content marketing.

In a recent webinar, Brian reported that Backlinko generates more than 100,000 in monthly traffic with just 31 posts. And he’s in no hurry to increase that number.

What’s going on here?

Obviously, the mandate for daily or weekly blogging is bogus. Both Brian and Jon both rely on quality, not quantity, and their results haven’t suffered in the least.

Clearly, it’s time to start testing

As content marketers and bloggers, we’ve been happily producing mountains of content, mostly because everyone says we should. But we’re working on old assumptions that may be outdated.

From my experience, the number-one reason for unsubscribes is “too much content.” People don’t want to hear from us daily. They’d probably be okay with hearing from us once a month or even less—provided the content was great.

Only a test will tell.

And that’s precisely what I intend to do.

Last month I stepped down as managing editor of the Daily Egg and accepted the position of Director of Content for Firepole Marketing (now Mirasee). It’s a full-time positon that needs my undivided attention. Publishing on a weekly basis on my own blog is going to be difficult, but rather than shutting down my blog altogether, I’m going moving to a low-frequency publishing schedule.

To be clear, that means no schedule.

Like Backlinko, I’d rather focus on quality than quantity.

So I’ll keep sharing smart strategies that are getting results for content marketers—just not once a week. If I see something worth talking about, I’ll share it. But I won’t reduce the quality of my posts just to meet an arbitrary schedule.

Maybe you’re fighting the same battle. Once you commit to content marketing, it’s easy to overextend yourself. Most marketers in my circles are adding content rather than streamlining it—adding YouTube videos, Periscopes, and SlideShares to the mix.

If you have the bandwidth to do it well, that’s great. You’ll probably get great results. But if you ever have to exchange quality for quantity, it’s time to re-evaluate.

After all, 31 posts that get hundreds of shares are worth a lot more than hundreds of posts that never get shared.

My recommendation? Pick quality.

That’s what gets results. And in the long run, it gives you something you can be proud of.

About Kathryn Aragon

Kathryn Aragon is a seasoned content strategist and consultant, helping businesses, not only create better content, but integrate it into their marketing for more traffic and sales. Connect with her on Twitter and Google+.