The quality vs. quantity debate really boils down to what you’re actually talking about. It’s very situational. If you have seven children to feed and ten dollars in your pocket, the dollar menu at Taco Bell starts to look pretty good, but would you take the girl that you’ve been courting for a year to Taco Bell on your first date?
Probably not, you’d probably go somewhere with a nice table, a linen table cloth, waiters and waitresses, basically that same ten dollars wouldn’t even cover the tip.
So let me first define what I’m talking about. For the remainder of this article I’m going to be referring to content. Content for your business, whether through blog posts, email marketing, article marketing, offers you make to your customers, meetings and seminars that you hold with valued employees and customers, basically anything associated with your business.
Since we’ve focusing on the business, let me first stress that anything memorialized as written or spoken words are a reflection of your business and in the case of the small business entrepreneur, it’s a reflection on you!
So when it comes down to my personal business, I’ll always strive for quality rather than quantity. I’d rather have three meaningful articles a week on my website, giving information that people can actually use or that makes people think than striving to hit a certain number of posts per week. You probably will start off ok but once you start to fall behind, quality usually takes a hit.
The same holds true when I’m working on a product to sell or preparing to talk at a meeting or seminar. The quality of the information is what I’m referring to.
I’m not necessarily saying that you need to go absolutely crazy with the production of your product. Remember it’s the quality of information that’s important here. Let’s say you putting together a series of videos that teach someone how to accomplish a certain goal. I’d rather create a no BS series of videos shot with an amateur video camera that explain and demonstrate exactly how to accomplish the goal you set out to accomplish in the least amount of time than spend a tremendous amount of time editing and playing around with the production of the videos.
This accomplishes 2 things:
First, you are giving people exactly what they want. If you can accomplish your goal in 4 hour-long videos then people will appreciate not having to watch 6 hours of video (where 2 hours are pretty much all fluff.) I’m not saying you shouldn’t have your personally shine through and tell stories that relate to the work at hand. I’m just saying don’t get caught up with the quantity, stick to providing quality information in the least amount of time necessary.
Second, by quality I mean quality information, don’t get caught up with making your videos (or whatever type of products you’re creating) look like a Hollywood production. Either you know how to do this or you don’t. If you’re doing the editing work yourself then you’ll probably end up spending a lot of time adding no real value to your project. This usually raises the costs because you need the software necessary to edit video plus you need to factor in your time. This is time you could have spent planning your next project.
If you don’t know how to professionally edit videos then you’ll have to hire someone. Again, this will run costs up and you’re not really adding too much value.
At the end of the day you’ll have to pass the costs down your customers which may prevent someone from buying. (Everyone has that price point in their heads where it’s just too expensive for their brains to make the purchase.) So keeping costs down on the production side with either help keep the costs to your customers down or it can raise your margins dramatically. (You’ll have to test various price points)
My point is quality content is king. Quality that doesn’t really add value will end up costing you in the end.
Well, that’s my take on the quality vs. quantity debate. For anything related to me, where my name or my business is associated with the product, I’m going to err on the side of quality. I just think of what I’d rather have; 10 pieces of content a day that offers very little value or that one piece of content that really makes you think or that really teaches you something valuable.
Personally I don’t have the time for fluff, I prefer quality.
Please let me know your opinions, everyone has one, what’s yours?
