TNR Blogging Series 1 – quality vs. quantity

Being new to professional blogging, I’ve faced my first share of decision-making.  And while I’m sure there are many more decisions to be made, this series is dedicated to exploring the myriad of decisions that I either have already made or am thinking of making.  How many parts will this series contain?  I have no idea, but I promise to document as many decisions and the details behind them.

For the first part of the TNR blogging series, I would like to address the age-old question of quality vs. quantity.  More specifically, do readers of (insert your blog’s name here) want to see a lot of stories throughout the day, or do they want less stories that go more in-depth (and are perhaps longer than than an average tech-blog post)?  This is the first question I had to face when starting TechNest Report, and one I am constantly thinking about.  In my experience, four major factors have an influence on answering this question.

1. Your audience
   Your market, your readership, your fanboys and girls – whatever you want to call the people who visit your site and read the blog posts – that should be the first thing that determines whether you should focus on quality or quantity.  Do your readers want fewer posts that are more detailed or do they want a greater amount of posts that are shorter and to the point.  In the case of TechNest Report, I didn’t have a clue: it was a brand new website that nobody knew about.  How was I supposed to know what people wanted to see?  Sometimes, you just have to trust your gut feeling on this, but at the same time – be smart.  Before launching TNR, I noticed that the majority of technology-related blogs in the blogosphere focused on the quantity factor – they had many posts throughout the day that tended to be short in nature, often not exceeding two paragraphs.  Seeing an opportunity in this, I decided that it was a great idea to do the complete opposite – to write in depth posts that go into greater detail and explain as much as possible.  This proved to be a little problematic, because of
2. Your resources
   When I began to blog at TNR, I was a full-time college student with a double major.  Today, I am still that student (although with many more credits and a year reaming in school).  But making the decision to focus on writing quality stories with greater levels of detail proved to be problematic.  I sometimes couldn’t finish one story for an entire week – just because one post became very long and changing one part threw something else off in the post.  Letting a blog sit out there without being updated for an entire week is not good.  A huge factor that plays a role in this is your budget.  Do you have enough money to hire bloggers of your own?  The theory here is that if you hire bloggers who write quality content, the readers will come, and the money will follow.  So it’s kind of like a chicken-and-the-egg thing: if you don’t pay bloggers to write, you won’t have (as much) original content, and you won’t get as many visitors.  So which do you do first and what happens if you don’t have any money?  In my case, I am planning on having a few bloggers join TNR in the near future, even though I’m a 21-year-old university student.
3. The tech world… it’s… fast…
   I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the speed of innovation, heck – the speed of technology – is extremely fast.  That’s where the phrase “fast-paced tech world” comes from.  But why does that matter?  It matters because it should be one of the things you will need to make a decision about being a tech blogger.  Since the tech world changes to quickly, people expect to be updated about these changes.  Whether it’s by reading blogs, newspapers, or magazines, listening to or watching podcasts, or picking up the info elsewhere – people want to be in know.  One thing I learned is that no matter how much I tried, in-depth posts are great on Saturdays or Sundays.  During the week, people want to know what’s the latest coming down the grapevine.  They tend to care a lot less about how factors x, y, and z will affect elements a, b, and c – they want to know more fact, less opinions.  And this is where my strategy of writing the ultimate in-depth analytics/opinion/review column broke down.  People were tired of coming to the site and seeing the same post be the most recent entry as it was one week ago.  They needed something in between.  So if you’re planning on doing the quality thing in your blog and going into a ton of detail, quantity also matters.
4. Attention spans or snaps? (they’re completely oppossite of each other)
   Another important aspect of the quantity vs. quality dilemma is the attention span of your audience.  This is a very personal topic and differs from blog to blog.  Many factors play a role in determining whether the people on your blog read the entire post or just the first paragraph, before moving on to the next post or leaving the site entirely.  What are some of these factors?
   • Credibility: If you are Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com and write a post anywhere on the internet, people will take your words in a different light than if you are Joe Blogger and nobody has ever heard of you.  But even if you are Joe Blogger and nobody has heard of you, don’t lose hope – you have one thing on your side: the ability to be insteresting and exciting.
   • Interest: are your posts “juicy” or “stale”?  One site that constantly delivers juicy technology posts is TechCrunch.com – always having the right mix of quantity and quality.  In fact, the entire TechCrunch network does a superb job of having the right balance between the two “Q’s”.  As you can see, this is also a chicken-and-the-egg dilemma: if you have interesting posts, people will eventually come and read them, like them, and keep coming back.  If you keep this up, you are well on your way of being the Mike Arrington of the tech blogging world.  But when do you know that your posts are interesting and exciting?  Look to your audience for this.

Coming back to the original topic of quanity vs. quality, it’s difficult to choose exactly where to point the finger and say “I’ve made my decision.”  One trend I noticed is that – under the pressure of time – people will eventually come to the site that they feel is most beneficial to them in that amount of time.  For example, if they feel that site x provides more in-depth (but fewer) posts while site y publishes more (shorter) posts than site x, they will go to site x if they are looking to be kept up-to-date on the latest developments and headlines.

It’s difficult to know exactly what people are looking for if you have a brand new blog, so I recommend picking a strategy and sticking to it for two months.  See what kind of results you get.  Then re-evaluate and decide whether it’s best to keep that strategy or formulate a new one.  This is where site-wide surveys (polls) help: just place a multiple-choice questionnnaire in your site’s sidebar and ask visitors to vote on whether or not they like what they see on the site in general.  Just be careful not to make the poll that steers the audience in answering in a particular way.  A poll that  asks “do you like this site” will most likely lead a person to answer “yes” but won’t really give you any insight into whether or not they want some things changed as it relates to content.  You can even use Twitter to do a quick “Twitter poll.”  Just before writing this post, I threw a question out to my Twitter stream about the quality vs. quantity dilemma and received a reply from Corey, saying that he prefers “quality” and subscribes to over “20 blogs in my reader and generally unsubscribe to the ones that clog my stream(.)”  Remember, the right balance always wins; the trick is finding that right balance.

In the next installment of the TNR blogging series, we will discuss what to do with the results you receive from the aforementioned polls and how to make decisions based on this information.  Let me know what you think, what your experience has been, and what you’d like me to address in future installments in the comments!  Happy blogging!

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