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More content or higher quality content?
by
Yehuda Brickman
What do you think the best way to grow your following is?
Start with quantity until you find patterns of what works -- what kind of content resonates with people and gets shared, and what kind of content you can rank in Google.
Then double down and focus on it.
At some point, if something works, the more you do of it, the more successful you will be.
But if you invest all your time into content you THINK is "quality", but no one CARES about it and won't rank in Google, it doesn't help.
Not sure if your question is about Twitter specifically, "following" is extremely vague.
Hey, thanks so much for the input.
I actually didn't post this in a specific group as I was referring to "following" in a vague sense, haha. I believe the most valuable type of following are people who will literally follow you from platform to platform so it doesn't matter where you post.
It doesn't matter to them if you're posting short form content on Twitter or writing a long blog post on dev.to, indie hackers, or your personal blog because they see you have experience and value what you say, not where you say it.
This can especially seen in the entertainment field. People can go from Snapchat or Vine to YouTube and then to Twitter, maybe even start their own podcast after. Everyone generally loses some amount of users between platforms but the people who are really great at what they do are usually followed between platforms.
I know that each platform has its own unique paradigms that need to be followed to succeed and by nature some of them are shorter or longer. My question wasn't necessarily about exact length but relative quantity. For Twitter for example would 1 or 2 tweets a day that were very high quality be better than 10 - 15 of medium quality. And then blog-wise, would 3 - 4 weekly blog posts of middling quality be better or worse than 1 a week which was clearly very well done and researched.
I guess, after writing this all out I kind of see that the question probably is platform specific. Maybe for blogs 1 post a week of higher quality is more important but for Twitter you do need to flood the network to be heard.
Either way, I really appreciate your suggestion cause it's a good strategy regardless of platform. Getting a bunch of stuff out there, seeing what gets traction and sticks and then doing more of that seems like it can be applied anywhere and is a great idea.
Thank you so much!
For The Side Hustler, I'm relying on quality way more than quantity. I made a conscious decision to only release once a week and I keep playing around with the number of Side Hustles I review every week because I need to have the time to get good depth for my reviews.
Interestingly, I actually asked my subscribers what I could do better and these were the results:
[Q]: Do you find value in the way we analyze/describe side-projects?
[A]: - Yes, I think it's useful to see what others are building [37.5%]
- Yes, I think I might try some of these products [35%]
- No, you are not going into enough depth analyzing the products [25%]
- Other [2%]
Wherever you're reaching people directly such as twitter, newsletters focus more on quality.
Wherever people reach you, such as blogs, you can go with quantity in the beginning. Trying out different things is the only way to find out what works for you.
I read this great story in the book "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
That there are two groups assigned to the task of creating pots.
Group A is the quality group, they only need to create only one best quality pot. Group B, on the other hand, have to create as many pots as they can.
After sometime when the judgment day arrived, The quality group never created a pot because they were focused so much on how to get higher quality and kept circling around it. They never get to the part where they make a pot. The quantity group tried a lot of approaches and learning from their experience, arrived with high-quality.
This solves the case of quality vs quantity for me.
Having attempted higher quality in my primary business in the past before, I found that the effort needed to find people to appreciate that quality and link to it was so arduous that, overall, going for a long tail approach that performs to Google's algorithm and mustn't fight for human attention was the easiest approach. Esp if you are a programmer and can automate.
I have detailed videos about growing my SEO to 200k sessions a month here if you want detailed reasoning
https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/seo-strategies-for-web-apps-part-i
Higher quality for sure.
However, there is a major twist: The more content you create, the better your content will eventually get. So actually, flood the web.
If you're talking website content, you can delete the worst 50% of content after it turned out bad (cause it's up to your audience to actually decide if your content is good or bad). That will likely improve your SEO, as weird as it sounds.
If it's Twitter, nobody cares, your tweets won't survive longer than a day anyway.
Etc.
Interesting tip about the SEO, it makes sense to me cause then more of your links will retain users for longer time periods but I’m curious if you’ve tested this in production before?
I haven't tested it, but I have seen it happening on sites of other people. They switched from basically spam to quality content, and in the process got rid of a lot of useless content. The changes got picked up by Google in terms of bounce rate and click-through rate and improved overall SEO.
Note, that the deleted content wasn't mediocre though. It was usually really bad. Like Fiverr copywriter bad. Written without intention and any useful info.