TUC #003: When is aiming for quantity a smart move content-wise?

Quality over quantity is one of those overly-repeated-likely-to-be-retweeted sorta things people say online. In a general sense, it sounds smart.

But here’s what they never tell you.

If you’re starting from ground zero you can’t create quality content to the best of your potential because you have:

📌 A new business with no customers
📌 Little to no content
📌 No engagement
📌 No audience
📌 No authority
📌 No insight

You can aspire to achieve a high-quality output from day 1 but you can’t really set the bar high when you have zero facts to describe what precisely defines quality in your unique situation.

How Quantity Helped VEED Stop Being a "Nobody"

SEO and getting an audience to warm up to you take time to do its thing. VEED needed to put itself out there, learn, and improve with every brand-new post and content piece we refresh.

For the first year or so of running our content channels from YouTube to blog at VEED we were all about quantity.

Here’s what we did cadence-wise:

Channel	Output
Blog	~2 blogs per week
YouTube	5 videos per week (or more)
Landing Pages	As many as we possibly can

You could say our early iterations “sucked” if you judge them individually rather as a collective effort.

Let me just roast our own early-day content:

Channel	Roast
Blog	Early content didn’t have the best writing flow because I didn’t know how to find strong writers but also didn’t have the budget to attract strong writers I was learning how to research and brief blog content which meant I got back some pieces that didn’t hit the nail on the head in terms of vision for the piece (my fault entirely) We lost a few SEO opportunities in the first iterations of a piece to capture more search volume, optimize for a featured snippet, and better address search intent.  We lacked a strong angle/POV in some pieces where we could’ve better established credibility and originality. Our blog homepage was (and still is for just a little longer) ugly with Canva-esque graphics designed by me 😂
YouTube	Inconsistent thumbnail styling on a cherry pink background We had (sometimes) scrappy/messy video backdrops because we didn’t have the budget to make things look more polished We had good but not absolutely world class video editing because we did not yet have the budget to hire an editor (we had one person on YouTube to start) Side Note: We only had one video creator, Alec Wilcock, who ran the channel. It’s crazy impressive Alec accomplished so much as a mostly one-person show before he could hire more full-time creators and an editor. He’s a truly prime example of how you just have to get on with it now so you can achieve more to help you afford to do more later.
Landing Pages	The copy didn’t clearly speak to a particular audience because we lacked segmented-enough audience research to better tiughten up our messaging (still a work in progress to be clear) We were all learning SEO as we went so early iterations weren’t as strong as the ones we release today

If we had published one “high quality” video per week, 1-2 blogs per month, and a small handful of landing pages we would not have failed (fast) enough to know the things that make our content a winner.

• Our first 20-something blogs helped us learn what sticks and is worth putting more effort into
• Our scrappy YouTube approach helped us learn what gets us ~50K organic site visits and hundreds of paid monthly signups
• Our intensive landing page publishing helped us get those pages to rank early on (we can always perfect them later)
• The more we learned about users, what they do, and what they will pay for the more we could create better new content and tweak existing pieces.

While I can’t change your perspective like the flick of a switch I can offer you a new one to consider.

Quantity now helps you scale quality later

I get that in an ideal world you only ship winners and take your time on every piece of content. I think this is great and is definitely a place you want to strive to get to.

The reality of content when you’re in the ground zero trenches of it as a“nobody” brand is that being slow in the name of quality is foolish and will only hold you back.

Ego and fear of judgment are usually guilty for holding you back as you romanticize your content. You perceive everything you put out to be a direct reflection of who you are in a negative light.

Maybe as someone in a content role you hear ‘quantity’ and your brain assumes it implies making a brainless spammy cookie cutter content type of mess. As content creators—whether a writer, designer, or video creator—you can get so stuck in making things pixel-perfect.

Here’s the thing…

On social media, content about how you should be tripling down on quality sells. It sells because it’s clear and people love a straightforward game plan. Step one, two, three. Love it! Gimme more, please.

Bring some vagueness into the mix to create a little friction and people run. What am I supposed to do? Tell me what to do!

If you’re going to succeed in your content career you have to

• Be okay with what happens before you ever know what quality means for the company you’re working with.
• Run with well-informed guesses coupled with any knowledge you have of your industry.
• Accept that KPIs directly tied to revenue might not be realistic KPIs from day 1 and that you might have to educate a lot of people on why that is and how you can get there
• Challenge other decision-makers to be okay with the gray areas of content and educate them on how content is a journey for both you (learning-wise) and your audience (in terms of decision-making)
• Be willing to fail more than you win
  

By publishing more and making small improvements with each post you’ll be able to validate and reveal truths so you can win more meaningfully in the long term.

When your company grows and the budget does too you can scale both quality and quantity if need be since you'll have a clear idea of what works and what doesn't.

Quantity wins when you have so many unknowns. It’s what’ll help you more quickly surface the insights you need to know what to double down on

If not, you lose in the long term with content powered by invalidated assumptions, zero business value, and unclear goals 🙈 yikes!

⚡️ P.S. Thank you to everyone who supported me last month with the release of my blog topic research templates! It lit up my day more than you know. If you missed it, here’s a link to grab my templates to research and brief smarter content.