Yeah, you read that right.
Contrary to what most people believe, quantity matters more than quality.
But let’s get things into perspective.
High quality work is essential. In fact, the phrase content is king fits the quality narrative.
It attracts attention, brings in the links and traffic, builds your authority and makes you an expert in your niche.
But high-quality content only comes from the high volume of work.
Steph Curry, the most valuable NBA player, recently crossed the 2800 career 3-pointer mark, one of only two NBA players to achieve that feat. So how did he do it? By making a thousand times more practise shots to perfect his skill.
Ronaldo, the arguably best footballer globally, is the best because of his daily disciplined and intentional practice.
So the quality of their performance only came after they put in the work.
Before you can create high-quality work, you need reps.
The problem with focusing on quality is that, in most cases, it comes with the wrong mindset.
Quality Standards are created by perfectionists to keep them from posting often; from doing the work that needs to be done.
Quality vs Quantity
When people focus on quality, what they are actually after is virality. They want the content to get attention and hopefully transform their career.
But we forget one thing; virality has no formula.
If content marketers knew the secret to produce viral content, every piece of content that brands and companies produce would go viral. It’s never the case.
It depends on many factors, and in most cases, it comes out of luck.
You picked the right keywords or headline, got noticed by the right person, and your content was shared with a content leader to the right audience.
All of these factors are out of your control.
But you know what’s within your control? Quantity. Quantity is objective. It is based on verifiable facts.
If you post one, you post two articles, three Instagram posts and ten tweets per day, which means you have posted 15 pieces of content in one day.
Quality, on the other hand, is subjective and, in most cases, not easily measurable.
Is it by the number of shares that a tweet gets or the pageviews to a site? What if these events bring in no customers? How will you gauge the quality of your work?
Between a content marketer who publishes 5 articles a day and one who tries to perfect his content to make it go viral and only manages to publish two articles a week, who is likely to go viral?
You could post a perfect Instagram photo that you are so proud of, and it gets two or three likes. Then the next time, post a random 12-second video on Tik Tok, and it gets 100,000 views.
Why does this happen? Because virality is primarily out of your control.
Azziad, a Kenyan influencer, became famous when a video of her dancing to a tune by Femi One went viral on social media.
Most people thought that the song made her famous and even criticized her for not attributing her success to the singer.
What they failed to realize were the hundreds of dancing videos she had posted before that day.
Her success didn’t happen overnight. It happened after consistent repetitions in producing content for over two years.
If you want to improve your chances of success, you must focus more on quantity rather than quality, especially earlier on in your marketing campaign.
But this presents a new challenge.
How can you be consistent?
How can you move from posting a piece of content only when inspiration strikes, to posting daily for the next year?
It’s hard. Building permanent habits is very hard.
For example, you made resolutions earlier this year. For some, it was waking up every day at 6 am. Others, going to the gym three times a week.
How many of you have been consistent for the last six months? I’m pretty sure most have failed. It’s normal.
Our bodies are designed to prevent us from doing things that make us uncomfortable. That’s why building habits is very hard.
Yet, habits are the method for achieving the things that provide meaning and purpose in our life. James Clear.
As a writer, you strive to create work that matters; that answers your audience’s questions.
But you cannot do that well without developing the skill level as a writer that lets you churn through average content and bring out the ideas that matter and, above all, find your voice.
This means more reps. This is why you need to create a habit.
So how do you create a habit?
By setting up a system that makes putting in your reps much easier.
A system starts with a SMART goal: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.
A cliche it is, but this simple concept can help you achieve so much in life.
You are 3X more likely to stick to a habit if you plan when, where, and how to perform the habit.
It is known as implementation intentions.
For instance, mine is
In the next 14 days, I will write an article through voice blogging every day from 7 am to 9 am on my work desk,
If you’re curious, I discovered that dictation blogging is the fastest way to improve your blogging productivity. And also, I want to improve my speech.
So what is your SMART goal? Can you use my example to set a SMART goal?
Whether it’s publishing videos, Instagram photos or writing content every day.
This simple action improves your chances of making the habit stick longer as compared to having vague goals.
But there’s a catch
To succeed you need to have two things in mind.
1. Implementation intentions only work when you focus on one thing.
A habit requires a lot of conscious effort to master and make it stick
If you try improving your entire life all at once, you will fail. If you try creating multiple habits at the same time, you have little chance of succeeding.
It is easier to create a vague goal and follow it through by focusing on it alone than to try changing numerous habits simultaneously by setting an ultra-SMART goal.
2. You need lots of repetitions.
Typically, you need 66 days or two months of daily repetitions to make a habit stick.
But this also depends on very many factors, such as your genes, how difficult the habit is, your environment and much more, which can reduce or increase the time it requires for you to make a habit stick.
With repetition, this pattern of behaviour starts to become much easier within a month and eventually becomes a routine.
You achieve automaticity, the ability to perform a behaviour without thinking about the steps.
That’s when you can call it a habit and perhaps move to the next habit.
Now, putting everything into perspective
As a content marketer who is focusing on quantity, the habit that you need to focus on is content writing.
Focus on this specific habit, especially in the early stages of your blogging or content marketing campaign, work on it until you master it.
Make it an automatic part of your daily life until it becomes effortless to write every day.
What will this lead to? 90 days of content. That’s more articles than 90% of the bloggers publish a year.
Each of these pieces of content is a window for somebody to find you—an opportunity for a sale to happen.
Above all, through repetition, you master writing. You improve your skills by learning from the mistakes you make. You learn how to write better and produce high-quality content without trying so hard.
Meanwhile, a perfectionist trying to write articles that go viral struggles to produce enough content to compete with you.
You are at a massive advantage because you have more content on your website. And you have developed a habit of creating content without struggle.
At this point, you can afford to shift your focus to quality.
So don’t get me wrong. Quality matters very much. A high-quality and engaging article can open doors thousands of mediocre articles can’t.
But before you have the skill and confidence to write such high-quality content, you need to put in the reps, which means quantity.
Wrapping up!
I’ve been guilty of thinking that quality matters more than quantity.
You too probably had the same notion. But this revelation changes everything.
We use quality standards as an excuse for not posting content often. We use it as an escape plan, a means preventing us from doing the actual work, writing content.
But everything needs to change now.
Let’s create a lot of content and make it a daily routine. Quality doesn’t matter as long as there exist no simple grammar and punctuation mistakes.Make it a habit, then shift your energy to quality.
Whenever you put in consistent work and learn from your mistakes, incredible progress is the result.