In this post, you’ll learn what matters more in producing blog content for your coaching website — quality or quantity.
You have limited time to create content in your business. Between coaching clients and keeping up with other business admin tasks, and let’s not even mention scheduling in family time, you want to optimize your blog writing time to get the most bang for your buck.
What’s the most effective way to write blog posts? You can either write a lot of lower-value, shorter posts more often, or you can write high-value, longer posts less often. You aren’t sure which is better, though.
Keep reading to learn how to find the balance between quality and quantity when writing for your blog.
The most important thing is connecting with your audience.
It’s key that whatever you write speaks to your audience. Whether it’s longer-form content or short, punchy posts, it won’t matter how valuable it seems to you if it doesn’t actually speak to your audience.
Ask yourself as you’re writing for your blog: how do these words actually solve a problem for my audience? How can I speak more clearly to them?
One way to connect with your target market in your writing is through the use of storytelling. Neil Patel has an awesome, in-depth article all about leveraging storytelling to increase website conversions that I highly recommend studying, find it right here.
Connect with your audience, then prioritize quality.
Now that you’re leveraging the art of storytelling to connect with your audience and help solve their problems, the next step is to prioritize quality writing.
Because believe it or not, quality trumps quantity.
Sometimes you’ll see research articles like this one on HubSpot that make a convincing case for posting 3+ blog posts a week in order to see a higher amount of website traffic.
Quantity is important, without a doubt. But here’s the thing — these stats don’t show the whole picture.
They didn’t take into account at all the quality of the blog posts. Additional research from Backlinko shows that articles that cover a topic in-depth perform significantly better on Google than less in-depth posts.
That same research found that webpages people spent more time reading (and therefore pages that had a lower bounce rate) were associated with much higher Google rankings.
The point is clear.
Higher quality content that’s longer and covers a topic more in-depth outperforms shorter content on Google.
You might say, “But Jennie, I’m not writing for Google to be able to find my posts. I’m writing to send blog posts to my email list. Does this quality vs quantity thing still apply to me?”
My answer is yes. If you’re like many of my clients, you’re focused on word of mouth marketing or Facebook Ad advertising. You might not need a focused Search Engine Optimization strategy.
But Google gives us a read on what people value when reading on the internet. If someone values more in-depth blog posts over short, surface-level ones, when searching from Google, then that same concept likely applies to a visitor who finds their way to your blog via an email as well.
Focus on quality, then amp up your quantity.
If you’re not sacrificing quality, then more quantity of blog post content is only going to help your website traffic. Especially if you’re sharing that blog content via social media or your email list.
Writing more will boost the value of your blog as long as you don’t sacrifice quality. The quality of content comes first.
That means it’s probably actually better to write a B- blog post once a week than it is to write a D- blog post every other day.
There might be an exception.
The certification program most of my clients are trained by used to have a challenge they gave all their coaches. It was a 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge.
As an assignment, the coaches had to write a blog post every day for 30 days and post it online somewhere.
The purpose of this challenge wasn’t to necessarily produce a lot of valuable content for their audience. The purpose was to help the coach find their writing voice.
If you’re newer to the content writing game, and your goal is to find your voice, then it’s not a bad idea to set a goal for yourself to produce a bulk of short content for a brief period. This can help you get comfortable writing and get in the habit of it as well.
In the end, you need frequency AND length.
What’s probably more realistic for a coach is to use both in-depth, longer articles AND shorter, quippier content to provide variety to your audience and to manage your own content creation schedule.
In the end, you can use both. Strike an appropriate balance between publishing high-quality long-form content and quick-hitting short-form content.
Don’t let perfectionism get in the way.
Sometimes I see coaches (and my own website consultant peers) spend an inordinate amount of time spinning in perfectionism around content creation. What ends up happening is they don’t post the content they create because it doesn’t seem “good enough” yet.
What I tell them is what I learned from my mentor, Daniel Priestley.
Be prolific, not perfect. — Daniel Priestley
I figure if my content is always flawless, then I’ve spent too much time on it.
One thing I learned from another of my mentors, Jody Moore, is to aim for B- work in certain areas. Especially areas that I’m struggling to take action in.
So my advice is don’t wait for A+ work in your content creation. Be prolific, not perfect.
What’s next?
If you’ve got your content schedule down, but you struggle with formatting posts that will be valuable to your audience, check out this article I wrote about how to write blog articles that speak to your target market.
It’s the content framework I teach my clients so they can structure blog posts that are focused and streamlined for their ideal client.
Hope that’s helpful!
Jennie
P.S. When you’re blogging, quality beats quantity. BUT quantity is still important, as long as the quality is still there.
In the end, you can use both to add variety to the mix.
Just be prolific, not perfect.
