The Truth About “Quantity vs. Quality.” One is actually better.
Let’s end the debate once and for all.
My best friend and I were sitting this morning at our favorite coffee shop in Barcelona. It’s an old and dusty place hidden in the oldest neighborhood in the city — but the espressos are amazingly strong.
Pablo, my friend, is the CEO of an international company based out of Los Angeles. He’s from Barcelona, and he is visiting his mother for a few days.
After a few minutes of talking about his company, he said:
We are focusing on content marketing, but we are struggling to deal with quality versus quantity. Do we create a lot of content or do we make less but of higher quality? It’s like the chicken and the egg.
That’s a fair question, but I refuse to believe that there’s no right answer.
When I tell people what I do — ghostwrite thought leadership articles for CEO’s, Entrepreneurs, and Investors — , marketers like to call me a content writer.
I always laugh and tell them that there’s much more to it. But they are right about one thing: I create content. Between my own personal brand and my client’s, I write over 5k words every day. And I have one thing clear:
In the Internet era, quantity is 100% more important than quality.*
Conditions apply.
Let me explain.
Imagine you are in charge of creating content for your company. You’ll have to deal with a complicated decision:
How much time/money/effort do you spend per content piece?
Say you want to create a 1000-word blog post. You can either allocate 2 hours of your time or the whole workday. What do you do?
If you focus on quantity, you’ll write for a couple of hours, click publish, and move on. You can write four blog posts in one work day if you so want, or just do something else.
“But Marti, if I work on one single post for 8 hours instead of 2, it will be so much better and people will love it. Quality should be the focus, Marti!”
Now, I hear you. I really do. But there’s a problem to that reasoning:
Quality is subjective.
Like beauty, it’s in the eyes of the beholder. You have no guarantee that, just because you spend more time on a piece, it will be significantly better. The only guarantee is that it will take more time to create.
What you think is better might not align with what your audience wants.
You might spend hours researching statistics and creating graphs just to find that all your readers want to know is your opinion.
You might invest hours on creating the best animations for your video blog just to find that your viewers don’t even like them.
You might record your podcast dozens of times to get it “perfect” just to find that your audience doesn’t care when you stutter.
Meanwhile, the ones that chose quantity over quantity have already created four pieces of content by now. They are executing, learning what the market enjoys and hates, and moving forward. While you are thinking, they are doing.
You get the point.
“Ok that makes sense, but what if I have to decide between writing five articles of 1000 words or 1 article of 5000 words. It’s 5k to 5k. What now, huh?”
That’s a great point. But here’s the thing:
Speed matters. A lot.
I am not against detailed, dense pieces of content. I am actually about to finish a 140k words book about Though Leadership — talk about long-form writing, huh?
But what I am against is wasting my time. Look, there are three types of content:
There are losers. There are winners. And there are neutrals.
So, what should we do? Create winners, am I right? The problem is that you never know what type of content it is until you published. You’ll often fall in love with one piece you are creating only for the market to throw it right to the trash.
It happened to me with this article below. I loved it. Medium did not. That’s fine.
Since I am going to flunk content anyway— I’d rather flunk a 1000-word article than a 5000-word one.
That is why it’s best to create many shorter pieces than one longer and more detailed. You give yourself more chances to get a Winner, and you have more information to learn what the market loves.
When you find that articles about, let’s say, being productive are consistent winners, now you can take the time to do longer formats.
Shorter pieces also hit the market quicker — and speed matters. You stay on your audience’s mind by creating relevant content more often.
*Conditions apply
The one point that I am making in this article is that quantity matters more than quality, yes. But I do have to add a clause to it:
Quality is subjective — to an extent.
Certain quality standards need to be met for this approach to work. You cannot just throw incoherent words into a paper every day and expect to get a book deal.
Like lean startups, your content has to be an MVP — a Minimum Viable Product. It doesn't have to be perfect or worthy of international recognition — but it does have to be good enough.
And remember, Quantity and Speed > Quality.
Learn more about how perfection trumps success with this article:
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