There has been a lot of debate I have been seeing lately about quantity over quality in the amount of blogging and quality of our writing that we bloggers do.
To be fair, I did go over some posts by Darren over at Problogger.net. He is an accomplished problogger who is making a lot of money and does have some very good quality content. (in contrast, John Chow does not have as many quality posts, but he makes a lot of money so go figure)
If you look at Darren’s blog posts way back, he does mention that quantity is still important to be able to survive in the blogging world:
I’ve been blogging for 1053 days so that’s an average of 11.2 11.6 posts per day. When I started out (for the first year) my posting rate was much lower than this - the past 12 months have been something of a posting frenzy.
I will say at this point - that apart from a few reposted articles and duplicate postings (plus of course my guest bloggers work last month) these have all been hand written posts. I don’t use any automated posting system (I’m pretty anti them).
Then take a look at Darren’s post on how the Top 100 Technorati blogs are all posting 20-30 posts per day:
If you look at a lot top blogs going around, they do break many of the reasons that were given for people unsubscribing. This particularly is so for ‘too many posts’. For example - if you look at Technorati’s top 100 list you’ll find that the top 10 post an average of 20+ times per day (I’m taking those averages on what they’ve done so far today - so it’s probably higher). So obviously there’s some disconnect between the reasons that ProBlogger give as a reason to unsubscribe and what’s going on in the blogosphere.
There is clearly advantages to both posting a lot daily or posting less with focus on quality. But do understand quality isn’t everything. Sometimes, people “like” to skim most of your blog posts until one headline catches their eyes.
Here’s another excert from a blog post by a Aseem Kishore that guest blogged at Darren’s blog that caught my eye:
As you’ve probably heard a hundred times “Content is King”! I personally believe that this is true. Yes you have to do marketing, but in the end, if you have really good content, your blog will be read because others will market it for you. Eventually, I settled at two posts a day, which allows me to write a good quantity of posts, but at the same time maintain my standard of quality for each post.
You go look at his blog and look at some of his stats and how quickly he grew his blog, you will know what I mean. Aseem claims he’s making $100 from AdSense these days and it only took him 6 months!
I agree with his guest post that mimicking a fellow blogger (who is doing obviously well), is a very good idea and probably even better to take his advice too.
Here’s Aseem’s advice on to help you get that mimicking going:
- Look at other blogs in your niche and see what is working and why. Mimic those characteristics.
- Find the audience your blog is targeting and focus on that audience.
- Create hard and fast goals that are within your control.
One of my friends, Mike from Bloggin-Ads.com, had a great post comparing quantity over quality comparing it to a gattling gun versus a sniper:
Quality over Quantity - if you’re a niche blogger, prioritizing quality over quantity is a must. It doesn’t matter how frequent you post (of course, must be a acceptable frequency! not once per year!!) if you post ‘em good. Remember, snipers don’t waste too many bullets to get something done. Accuracy of the shot and quality of the post is the key.
It’s true and I completely agree that blogging is the same. If you have lots of money to throw away, you can hire 30 bloggers to post 30+ daily “quality” posts, which is what the Top 100 bloggers in the world are doing.
But if you don’t have that money, you might be better off hiding in the bushes and sniping off your target one by one. The better the sniper you are, the better niche blogger you will be and blogged about.
In all, I think 3 to 5 blog posts per day is necessary in order for your blog to rise in popularity, crawled often by search engines like Google, and also provide enough information for people to browse through.
However, if you are blogging about something completely ‘niche’, some topics like “The Athlete’s Foot Blog”, then you might get away with 1 or 2 posts per day.
Above examples are simply for reference but in my experience, I have tried both gattling gun and the sniper method. The problems exists for both methods since the number of your daily posts increase, readers are less likely to comment and interact within the blog unless that readership is big like Engadget or ValleyWag.
On the other hand, sniping 1 post per day is not such a good idea since it only tells Google that your site is updated once per day. You need to let that Google robot crawler thingee that your blog is updated at least every couple hours, if not every hour.
So, the question is, how many posts per day do you blog and do you focus on quantity or quality?
I used to average 30+ blog posts over at Zedomax.com, which is what my blogger friend Phillip over at Makezine.com was doing. But I have settled down for less for quality, around 3 to5 posts, meaning I only try to post the “really funny or interesting” posts, not all the tech posts.
I hope this helps your blog get on the right track now. (or did I confuse you?)
4 comments ↓
I’m glad you like the post Max
Thanks for the plug!
-Mike
yeah sure! add my beer widget damn it!
I don’t have the technical expertise to add the widget yet.
[...] Remember my last post about Quality vs. Quantity? [...]
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