Daily blogging misses the point

Daily blogging supporters say quantity trumps quality. Specifically, that quantity trumps quality because quantity leads to greater quality.

Enter mandatory quote from some book:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

OK, this science exists.

But from an SEO perspective, the articles that rank at the top of Google are the only ones worth writing. And, from a virality perspective, if your daily post doesn’t have great article-reader fit, then your reader’s not going to text your content to her friends. And from an engagement perspective, when she reads an article of yours that happens to be good, but stumbles on one of your many trash articles next, she’s gonna ditch your site.

Thus, my thinking:

100%, if a piece of work doesn’t reach a minimum quality bar, it’s not worth publishing. For example, I was crunched on time one day, and wrote a post that was a jumble of bullet points. Certainly not going to be a runaway hit. So, it’s useless to publish until it meets some minimum threshold of quality.

If daily blogging doesn’t afford you enough time to publish some amount of quality, then you need to publish less often.

How much time do you need for a post? Depends on the type of content—Seth Godin type idea posts, a day is plenty. But a huge how to article meant to rank first on Google among tons of competing articles? That needs hours of research and thousands of words? More than a day.

My thought is that, yes, a volume of work makes you improve fast. A volume of work also might produce a higher number of quality works. But, you need to put effort into your work and not publish obvious trash.

Publish as often as you can, as long as you feel you’ve put your best effort into each piece. Specific pace varies per person and per post.

I think I don’t find short idea posts as fun to write. So in the long run, I’ll move to a slower posting schedule.

Another note: I either need to delete my trash posts, or provide an easy way to get to my best, e.g. with a “Greatest Hits” tab.

Further reading:

• https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-1-mental-model-for-writers-who-want-to-write-high-quality-viral-content-43ecf0d4ec05
• https://www.nateliason.com/blog/wiki-strategy
• https://seths.blog/2008/09/how-often-shoul/
• https://medium.com/@herbertlui/why-quantity-should-be-your-priority-3bc2b16fe3f5