Kieran Flanagan Administrator

This is really understanding the ratio of time spent on content publication vs promotion. When guest posting you are publishing, but the core reason for that is cross promoting your own blog/site, so I think of that as 100% promotion.

At different points in your growth those ratios will change. It makes a lot of sense to spend more times in the early parts of audience acquisition guest posting or syndicating content across different media to increase your readership. As you grow the radio of time spent between these probably changes. If you have a big readership, it probably makes more sense to have most of the content on your own site and actually allow certain people to syndicate content through your blog.

The one thing with guest blogging or content syndication is I feel it's hard to quantify the return at times. Referral traffic can often be pretty low, although there are some companies like Groovehq who seemed to generate a huge amount of referral traffic from their guest posts, for most companies you need to believe in the law of serendipity, that somewhere your hard work is paying off and good things will happen to your traffic etc.

@stekenwright hey Stephen, the actual ranks are being updated quite frequently, which is why it's fluctuating so much. There are quite a few blogs being ranked each day so the positions are likely to change as those sites push other blogs up or down in the listings.

Let me know if the above answers your questions and if you have any other feedback on it.

wow, there is a LOT of cool stuff in here. that's going to take some reading!

@MaelRoth Yes, I don't disagree with that, but again, that's not because of any link between quantity and quality, it's because that business has made the decision to scale beyond the point where they begin to see diminishing returns for that content.

I don't think our opinions are too far from each other on this :)

thanks for the input

@MaelRoth hey Mael, thanks for the comments. I think you are making the same point as AJ above so it may be worth reading my response to him.

You do not have to make the choice to increase the quantity of your content to a point where the quality really suffers. There is no rule in place that determines, as content quantity increases, the quality suffers. It's simply not the case. It's a choice that companies make.

If you've scaled your content to a point where the quality has decreased and there are now diminishing returns on that content (as judged by the metrics you measure, that are valuable to your business) then you've simply made a bad choice.

If you have scaled the quantity of your content and are still seeing a return on that, then as per my chart above, you are obviously producing content to a level of quality that is still ok for your market as your getting something back on it.

@SEO hey AJ, sure, in some cases when companies scale content their quality suffers. But this is not because some type of intrinsic link between quantity and quality. I'm saying you can certainly have both if you scale correctly or make better choices.

What you're saying is that as a company *has* to scale the quantity of their content, and as they do the quality of that content *has* to decrease. What I'm saying is that's only the case because companies make poor decisions around the amount of content they can produce in relation to what resources they have to produce that content and what the quality bar of "good content" is for their market.

What I hear time and time again is that you can either have quantity or quality. That makes no sense. You can decide on what's best for you. If you can't scale content without a huge reduction in the quality of that content (determined by your content getting a lot less engagement etc) then you either need to hire additional resources or not scale to that point.

Increasing content quantity shouldn't mean a reduction in the quality of that content if you've actually put the right things in place to scale. If it does, then you should consider why are you scaling to a point where the quality of your content is probably resulting in diminishing returns. If it's not resulting in diminishing returns than I would argue that the quality is still high enough that you are actually getting pay back from that content.

@TheLogothete Thanks for the comment. I appreciate the comment on Moz's one metric. I read all the comments when the post was published and I know there was a lot of negative feedback around it.

I am not saying that metric is entirely accurate, I just like examples of people trying to use data to help them make sense of things.

The output of this post (the metric) may not be that useable, but I liked the thought process that went in to trying to solve that problem with different data inputs.

@screamingfrog Thanks for the comment Dan. I agree with you, they shouldn't be linked, but sometimes are. For me this is because people make bad choices. They produce more content than their resources allow for.

I would produce as much content as I could based on my resources, quality bar and the appetite of my audience for frequent content. If I follow that I won't have the first chart that shows as I produce more content, the quality starts to decrease.

@davidiwanow Thanks for the comment David. To me this happens A LOT

"Heck there has been very successful articles that were not of the Pulitzer prize winning level that did very well with comments and social shares, and then very high quality articles that fell flat."

When producing content what actually does well will constantly surprise you. You aim to produce the most amazing piece of content on a topic, and it falls flat, whilst a piece you put together in an hour really takes off.

Usually it's because people have either missed the mark on who is reading their content or they've over estimated the quality bar for their market.

My point is the level of quality you need to adhere to for your market isn't linked to the quantity of content you publish, or else it shouldn't be. 

I would love to hear other peoples views on this. I spoke at 3 conferences in the last month and this question was asked at each one and also asked a bunch of times outside of my sessions. People seem to be obsessed with thinking content quality or quantity. 

It's an event I've always wanted to go to. I was debating about going this year. The problem is I am introvertish so do find big events like that pretty exhausting, plus I am an awful, awful, awful flyer. Both of those things usually turn me off making the commitment to attend. Making the trip from Ireland is a pretty big commitment. 

I do attend a lot of events across the year, including our own Inbound event in Boston, but I would say 90% or more of those are events are ones I'm speaking at, which gives me that extra push to make it happen.

Still, I do think I should just bite the bullet and attend SxSW at some point.

I think focusing on your personal brand causes a lot of marketers to make poor decisions for their own career. At times you are better served learning new things, professional development, gathering experience vs regurgitating content in blogs or spending all your time on social.

I would like to think your personal brand works the way Dharmesh describes it, that it's obtained by adding value to people and also demonstrating you're actually good at what you say you are.

Some of the marketers I've been most impressed with throughout my career don't focus on their personal brand at all, they are just really good at their jobs.

Your initial argument is really badly worded. It's actually just hyperbole because it's not what your actually saying. Your comments make a lot more sense. Maybe you should rewrite it?

What your saying in the comments is right. Don't obsess over a couple of head keyword. Have a keyword plan that is realistic for your company based on your resources/budget. Having a keyword plan made up of long tail and head keywords is common sense.

What you've written is ranking for head keywords is pointless because they are too hard. That's a silly argument. The reason they are so hard is because you will end up getting so much traffic from them.

If you can rank for head keywords there is obviously a big positive for your brand. How difficult they are is not relevant to the results you get from being at the top.

@MaelRoth the quantity vs quality thing is a total non argument in my opinion. I hear marketers discussing this all the time.

The two of them are not necessarily related. What I hear most is, focus on quality over quantity. Why not do both? It seems most marketers feel when quantity increases, by default quality will automatically decrease. This won't happen unless you allow it to happen. You should only produce as much content as you have the capabilities to do so at a standard that's better than the majority of content that is currently being created for those topics. If this means you can produce a lot of content and there is big demand for it, then I say go ahead and do that.

I also agree on your points on it being industry dependent. In some markets "good" is way better than what anyone else is doing. In other markets "great" is just the norm. It's way more difficult to create something "amazing" because the bar has been raised so high.

This is another example of Google talking in circles. What John seems to say is don't try to actively "build" links, but do make it easy for your content to "earn" links. This is no different than what Google usually say, manufacturing links is bad, but creating something that earns links is good.

You still need a bunch of work to "link earn", outreach, PR, skyscraper technique etc are all ways to help your content earn links, and are legitimate marketing tactics.

The problem as always is Google doesn't do a good job of helping people distinguish between what they see as bad examples of link building/earning and what are good examples.

This is something we get asked for constantly, a quick and easy way for marketers to create a one page persona to send around to other teams within their company.

This is a great little tool for marketers to get started with their buyer personas. It will hopefully give them something to go to other people within their company and get them excited about creating proper buyer personas for their products/services

@highonseo 

100% agree with this

"I just think it's important to get the "most correct" thing done as early in the process as possible where it doesn't cost you extra time & resources."

This is basically the exact thing I used to tell people when I was lecturing on digital marketing, stop waiting for people (like me at the time) to teach you things so you can get a cert, instead just do things to show you have the skills. That's why digital attracts people who work hard, hustle, and are tenacious, because you don't have to wait for a qualification or opportunity to start learning some real skills.

@highonseo That kind of simplifies the issue down to those companies that can just as easily create example.com/blog as they could blog.example.com. From experience of working with companies who are trying to do this, there are usually a lot of additional complexities of creating a blog within the sub-folder that actually stops them from even getting started with content. They get so hung up on trying to start with a blog within a sub-folder (because of threads like this), that they waste time in just getting started.

There are a LOT of successful blogs that are on sub-domains. HubSpot's blog is on blog.hubspot.com and gets millions of visits per month. You can still be extremely successful with a blog on a sub-domain.

I feel what Dharmesh is saying is, the location of your blog is one factor that may influence your success, actually creating content and making it good is going to play a much bigger role in weather you are successful or not. Sure, if you can just create it within the sub-folder from the get go, then why not, but the decision is usually not as simple as that.