Why ask such a question at all? The reason is simple, regularity is one of the surest ways to lead your site out of the Internet underworld and help your articles sail over the proverbial Acheron of untraceability.
A lot of people will tell you that you’ve had enough of content ala Neil Patel (a giant quantity of content). They’ll argue that the internet is overloaded with articles (as many as 4.4 million are published every day) and you should therefore focus purely on quality.
Don’t trust them.
And if you want to find a compromise between quantity and quality, that compromise will be found the closer to quantity you start.
For inspiration, you can see how my blog has fared over the last 28 days when I’ve been publishing articles:
Even if these are small numbers, the trend is visible and SEO takes time. I’m convinced that if I update this image after 6 months, there will be 0 more in all stats.
But you don’t have to trust my assumption, let’s look at some real reasons.
Why focus on quantity (especially in the beginning)
I will present three main reasons:
Quantity as exploration
If you have a new site or blog, you most likely have no idea what your visitors are interested in and what they want to read about.
Unfortunately, you won’t find out except by writing different articles on different topics and carefully monitoring what gets what and what kind of response.
Publishing a post is an iteration. An iteration with your audience that tells you if a given post is working or not. You get feedback.
Satisfying the Algorithmic God
Search algorithms like it when there is constantly something happening on a site. And guess what, constantly publishing new, extremely high quality articles is impossible. Unless you blog for a living and have a team of people on hand to help you create them.
However, writing “moderate” quality articles, with the expectation that you have an hour for each one, and writing one a day, is definitely possible.
Anyway, after a while, you can just go back, expand and update the article, and the algorithmic god is once again delighted by this activity.
This brings us to another crucial point and today’s poor quality may be the basis for tomorrow’s quality.
Seedling Theory
Seth Godin talked about dandelion somewhere. About how he scattered thousands of seeds so that a few of them would grow into new dandelions. And they always do. Nature is wise. It doesn’t scatter three good seeds because it believes that’s enough. It will scatter thousands (quantity) to make the probability of some growing (quality) almost 1.
You can increase your chances of success. For example, by not going straight into writing a book, but by trying: writing a tweet (and if successful) -> an article (and if successful) -> a megapost (and if successful) -> an ebook (and if successful) -> a book.
However, that’s a topic for another article. Today’s top story is that
Allowing yourself to publish mediocre content is the first step to creating great content.
And let’s finally look at how to publish regularly.
Specific tips for regular publishing
If you’re interested in the topic in depth, I highly recommend Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield, or Atomic Habits by James Clear. Below are the tips that have worked best for me.
Head Settings
The key is not to rely on motivation. Create a routine, publicly declare your intention, and in short, create an environment that motivates you to create.
- Choose a specific day and time when you will publish the post (regularly).
- Create a writing ritual and schedule when you will create content (in the morning?, at night?).
- Also be specific about what programs you will use to create.
- Announce your intention to those around you, either publicly (on Facebook) or privately (to friends)
- You can also get a calendar and make a cross every day/week so that you don’t break the chain of regular publishing
- Bet someone that you won’t break your promise
But before you start writing, sit down and explain to your head that it’s really not important that the content is “great” or even good.
What matters is that it is.
But if you constantly strive for perfection internally, it will catch up with you and you will soon stop writing. Trust me.
Ideas database – English sweep file
Lack of inspiration at the right time is a luxury you can’t afford when writing and publishing regularly.
Waiting for inspiration can be a good strategy for artists (some say, I don’t), but we need to be more like craftspeople who work whether or not they are “in the mood” to work.
The Idea Databank is then a great way to make crafting easier.
You can start a Google document (or notebook) to jot down interesting ideas for the future.
Then, if you need to, you just reach for the resource and pick something you feel like writing about.
I personally set up such a database in Notion, as the database option Notion offers is extremely convenient for this.
The database looks like this:
Thanks to the databank, I don’t get the “idea” of what to write about. And if I don’t have time, I pick a really simple topic and either just make a short video or write an article really fast.
Prescribing
It will do your psyche an incredible amount of good to have articles written and scheduled for publication weeks in advance, and to be writing more.Writing an article every week just before the deadline is a nightmare. And it will wear you out over time. So whether you’re writing articles, newsletters, or social media posts, I highly recommend writing them as far in advance as possible and scheduling their publication using a scheduler.Recycling
I count updating an older post as an article release.
This strategy probably won’t be very useful to you at first, but once you have some content on your blog it is a priceless tip.
I have a lot of articles (including the one you’re reading right now) on how to get things done in a given year. If the article is from last year, I just look at what’s changed since then. I update the article. And I’ll release a new updated version of it.
My goal is to make about half of the content on my site “recyclable” in this way.
Not only is the article simple and quick to update. Plus you improve it a little with each update, so after 12 years, the article in question isn’t just 12 updates. It’s also 12 improved and expanded.
And thus there’s a good chance it’s really great.
Those were my tips on how to create new content all the time. Thanks for reading the article and let me know in the comments how you go about creating content!
