A lot has been written about quality and quantity in online writing. Most often the writers agree on the importance of quality over quantity. But I always found different observations in reality. Articles like "how to build a high-traffic blog" by renowned successful online entrepreneur Steve Pavlina make me even more confused as to the relation between quantity and quality.
There are lot of online bloggers out there who are taking advantage of the traffic benefit of low quality content tweaked to suit search engine algorithms by writing such content. For some writers it is easy to produce those. For some who are struggling to shift to write high quality content like the one Steve recommends, would find themselves missing out on opportunities that some others are easily exploiting. These writers get confused as they try to venture into new arena which they know is very tough, either having tried writing such content earlier or not, and lose lot of time deciding to venture or not. Here I have realized something that the pro-quality writers don't mention about quantity in relation to so-called quality writing.
I began to see that any writer's work gets expected results or recognition when it fills some gap in existing system. There are some bloggers who had built nice blogs which don't give much information than even more credible blogs but still rank higher in search engines and nevertheless provide required information. As I thought more about such blogs and the other category of "quality" blogs I began to see that the two terms quality and quantity are not really opposites as most writers try to show them to be. It is not so simple as I explain further.
All writing starts with a concept from the mind of the writer. Including my own. Based on my own experiences, I can tell that it is not necessary that a writer's content be very conceptual. Only part of it can be conceptual or something associated with it. Especially in the context of online writing where this Web provides opportunities for many bloggers. For example, facts are not copyright protected but the way they are expressed (and so how another author has collected and put together) is copyrighted. A writer can come up with the concept of collecting facts or separating facts from expression from existing literature and have his/her own way of compiling and presenting them to his/her audience. Some other concept can be to find emerging keyword search trends and look for unanswered questions on information related to those keywords and produce content to answer them (whichever s/he can). If you see, these examples do not show concept in the writing itself but in the act of producing the content.
Conceptual writing manifesting the concepts in writing itself is usually not an easy process or not very motivating to some writers who aren't confident of doing it by themselves. Apparently it may involve extensive research. But in reality, by definition, conceptual writing flows freely. So a writer conceives ideas through research or thought by continuous exploration and sometimes with deeper level thinking to finally present it in a physical reality.
Now what about quantity difference in relation to the above two types of writers? I realized that the conceptual writing too requires lot of quantity. Given that, in online writing, there is lot of competition, the increased content increases the chances of getting visitors from random sources. As this content might not have been promoted by the author whose priority might be to produce quality, unique and highly useful content. Hence quantity is needed here too just to ensure the random chance of the content becoming visible. With time, the readers taking care of promoting the content, the traffic for such writing will continue to scale with time. So don't just write here and there. Be committed to write more and more of it and often. It will all be worth it if you keep writing without waiting for the results.
For the other category of conceptual bloggers, quantity is not exactly same as what was perceived. These bloggers would be promoting their content one way or other (social, seo etc.). But the scalability of the resulting traffic could be limited. Randomly some of the content might become extremely useful and some of such content could draw unexpectedly huge traffic and continue to scale up. But overall it might not have much impact nor might it be possible for the blogger to reproduce lots of such content without getting into new paradigm shifts and interim confusions. So this means that the quantity required for such content to make the effort worthwhile is much more than the quantity needed for the conceptual content. For example, if one looks at Steve's blog he has more than 500 articles, all of those are original, thoughtful, conceptual and useful articles for personal development, some of them controversial too. Now calculate what quantity means for so-called "low quality" content. It can run into tens of thousands.
This is how a writer who is confused by the "quantity vs. quality" debate should understand the relative meaning of these terms in relation to online writing and its scalability. This way, one can decide which path one should take without the worries of regrets post-results.
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There are lot of online bloggers out there who are taking advantage of the traffic benefit of low quality content tweaked to suit search engine algorithms by writing such content. For some writers it is easy to produce those. For some who are struggling to shift to write high quality content like the one Steve recommends, would find themselves missing out on opportunities that some others are easily exploiting. These writers get confused as they try to venture into new arena which they know is very tough, either having tried writing such content earlier or not, and lose lot of time deciding to venture or not. Here I have realized something that the pro-quality writers don't mention about quantity in relation to so-called quality writing.
I began to see that any writer's work gets expected results or recognition when it fills some gap in existing system. There are some bloggers who had built nice blogs which don't give much information than even more credible blogs but still rank higher in search engines and nevertheless provide required information. As I thought more about such blogs and the other category of "quality" blogs I began to see that the two terms quality and quantity are not really opposites as most writers try to show them to be. It is not so simple as I explain further.
All writing starts with a concept from the mind of the writer. Including my own. Based on my own experiences, I can tell that it is not necessary that a writer's content be very conceptual. Only part of it can be conceptual or something associated with it. Especially in the context of online writing where this Web provides opportunities for many bloggers. For example, facts are not copyright protected but the way they are expressed (and so how another author has collected and put together) is copyrighted. A writer can come up with the concept of collecting facts or separating facts from expression from existing literature and have his/her own way of compiling and presenting them to his/her audience. Some other concept can be to find emerging keyword search trends and look for unanswered questions on information related to those keywords and produce content to answer them (whichever s/he can). If you see, these examples do not show concept in the writing itself but in the act of producing the content.
Conceptual writing manifesting the concepts in writing itself is usually not an easy process or not very motivating to some writers who aren't confident of doing it by themselves. Apparently it may involve extensive research. But in reality, by definition, conceptual writing flows freely. So a writer conceives ideas through research or thought by continuous exploration and sometimes with deeper level thinking to finally present it in a physical reality.
Now what about quantity difference in relation to the above two types of writers? I realized that the conceptual writing too requires lot of quantity. Given that, in online writing, there is lot of competition, the increased content increases the chances of getting visitors from random sources. As this content might not have been promoted by the author whose priority might be to produce quality, unique and highly useful content. Hence quantity is needed here too just to ensure the random chance of the content becoming visible. With time, the readers taking care of promoting the content, the traffic for such writing will continue to scale with time. So don't just write here and there. Be committed to write more and more of it and often. It will all be worth it if you keep writing without waiting for the results.
For the other category of conceptual bloggers, quantity is not exactly same as what was perceived. These bloggers would be promoting their content one way or other (social, seo etc.). But the scalability of the resulting traffic could be limited. Randomly some of the content might become extremely useful and some of such content could draw unexpectedly huge traffic and continue to scale up. But overall it might not have much impact nor might it be possible for the blogger to reproduce lots of such content without getting into new paradigm shifts and interim confusions. So this means that the quantity required for such content to make the effort worthwhile is much more than the quantity needed for the conceptual content. For example, if one looks at Steve's blog he has more than 500 articles, all of those are original, thoughtful, conceptual and useful articles for personal development, some of them controversial too. Now calculate what quantity means for so-called "low quality" content. It can run into tens of thousands.
This is how a writer who is confused by the "quantity vs. quality" debate should understand the relative meaning of these terms in relation to online writing and its scalability. This way, one can decide which path one should take without the worries of regrets post-results.
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