April has been a tough month. Aside from falling ill, I’ve also been busy keeping my personal life in order. As a result, my ability to blog regularly has been affected. Just three posts in 20+ days in April is evidence of that… hardly the quantity of work likely to maintain an engaged audience in a hyper crowded market. My struggle got me thinking about the issue of quantity vs quality, and whether it’s ok to publish a few crappy posts when you’re starved for time…?
The question made me think back to earlier this year. Shortly before I began my blogging adventures, I consulted with a number of friends who were already actively blogging. Frequency was one of the issues I addressed with each of them. How often should I blog? Naturally, there’s no right answer to this question; it will differ for everyone. But I was pretty sure that I heard a wrong answer…
“James… you need to post all the time. It doesn’t matter if some of your posts aren’t good. Only 1 in 3 needs to be quality. For every great post you can submit two lower quality posts”.
Hmmm… that didn’t sit too well with me. To me, each post is a product. It is a product we want others to consume, and if we’re lucky… share with their friends & colleagues. We’re not asking people to pay a monetary price for our product. But we are asking them to give us their time. And with millions of blogs competing for readers’ attention, time may indeed be a resource more scarce than money.
How many businesses would be happy with a production line with a 33% hit rate? Not many. In fact, most would be out of business. How many customers would continue to consume a product that sucked 67% of the time…? Why should blogging be any different? Readers are our customers… if we give them crap can we really expect them to be loyal?
It’s not about quantity – It’s about expectations
Ultimately, it’s my suspicion that reader loyalty is driven by expectations:
- Expectations of frequency – Readers don’t hold you accountable to an agreed number of posts each week. But they do form expectations after learning your blogging habits (aka frequency). For instance, my readers wouldn’t think twice if I failed to post for two days (nor would they probably care…). But if Tech Crunch failed to post for two days people would wonder what the story was. It all comes down to the expectations you have set.
- Expectations of quality – Readers don’t subscribe because you publish three articles a week. They subscribe because the content you provide is of a certain quality. They subscribe because you create value for them. What do you think is more likely to cause them unsubscribe – a temporary drop in publishing frequency or a consistent drop in quality of the content you provide?
In the end the proof is in the pudding. Traffic has certainly been down in April. And that’s makes sense… with less posts there is less material to read, and fewer social media visitors. But my subscriber count has remained rock solid. I might not be reaching as many new readers, but I am managing to retain my loyal followers. And I’d take one of them over 25 drive-by visitors in a second…
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