Quantity Over Quality When Blogging On Medium

Writing more is superior to writing better.

Pretty much everyone on Medium will tell you to write good-quality posts. They will tell you that one curated blog post published in one prominent publication will outperform seven non-curated blog posts that were self-published.

I preached the idea of quality over quantity too. If you published four blog posts that each made $10 instead of 30 blog posts that each made $1 in one month, you would be $10 more profitable. It makes sense.

I even wrote an article a couple of months ago on why I stopped publishing as many articles.

But things have changed since then for a variety of reasons.

I no longer believe in focusing on writing quality posts over more posts. I would rather write seven average blog posts than one “amazing” blog post in a week.

First, I don’t determine the quality of my writing; my readers do. Second, trying to write better often leads to attempting to write perfectly, which is the equivalent of not writing at all. And lastly, writing better is a byproduct of writing and publishing more.

The three reasons above are the main reasons I’ve stopped focusing on writing my best content and more on getting content published.

You Don’t Control The Quality Of Your Content

You may have spent days or weeks working on one article. You edited it so many times and submitted it to a Medium-run publication. This is the best article you’ve written yet.

A few weeks later, the publication responds, telling you that your article was not a fit for their publication.

You’re confused and frustrated. You’ve spent a week polishing an article only to get it rejected. Oh well, I might as well self-publish it.

The next day you check on your article’s stats and see that it wasn’t all that special. No curation, the views are stagnant, and there are hardly any fans.

This is an experience I often go through. I feel like I’ve produced my all-time best work only to get it rejected and see it do nothing.

I realized that I don’t control the quality of my posts. I can put my best effort in, but ultimately, how well an article performs will depend on the readers.

If you have read many writing advice blog posts, you may have noticed the generic advice saying, “write better” or “write quality posts,” without telling you exactly how. That’s because the quality of an article is subjective. What I consider a well-written article may be regarded as garbage by other people and vice versa.

In other words, any time someone tells you to “write better,” they’re telling you to do your best and pray for success.

So if you don’t control the quality of your content, what does it mean? Your average and your best effort posts have equal chances of success, which means writing more will give you a higher probability of success.

Perfectionism Kills Content Creation

If you’re like me, you would have submitted your “best” article to a publication, got it rejected, and started thinking about why.

When I get an article rejected, I would look over any feedback given, review their submission guidelines, check other published articles in the publication, and think about why I got rejected.

And then I wouldn’t write anything for weeks.

I would be walking around thinking all the time about how I can be better than my best. I would think about new topics that I should write about and how I would support my theses. I needed something new — something that readers have never seen before.

I would come up with article ideas, but they would always be shut down by something I’m missing. For example, I wanted to write an article on search engine optimization (SEO) and low-hanging fruit keywords, but I stopped myself because I’ve only been able to execute that strategy in the badminton niche. I haven’t had the experience of doing SEO on any other topic.

Every article idea I come up with, I would shut down because of some random problem. I needed to be better than my best, and that meant being perfect.

I couldn’t write the perfect article. I don’t think I ever will.

Falling into the trap of perfectionism stems from trying to write “quality” articles and failing. Once you’re in this trap, you end up doing nothing instead of writing an “average” post that could perform better than your “best” post.

Getting something out is always better than getting nothing out.

Getting Data To Build Off Of

The best way to improve and see if you’re improving as a writer is to get feedback. One of the easiest and fastest ways to do so is to publish articles and see how they perform.

If you have published many different articles, you can compare the stats and analyze what factors might lead to better-performing articles. I often look at curation, the publication published in, and the topic of choice. I then dive deeper, looking at headlines, content length, and the content itself, seeing what is working and not working.

As such, the more articles you have published, the more data you have, making your analysis more accurate. Suppose I published 28 articles over four articles in one month. Maybe 17 of those 28 articles were all about writing, and they were performing noticeably better than my other posts. I have better data supporting the argument, “writing about writing is better,” than if I only published four articles where two successful articles were about writing.

The more you write and publish, the more data you’ll gather to help you become a better writer.

Additionally, if you’re writing and publishing a lot, you have an excellent opportunity to run experiments. You can test things such as publications, headlines, and topics that you can’t usually try when you are not publishing as often.

Get Content Out And Learn

Since your readers determine the quality of your posts, don’t waste your time trying to write the perfect blog post. There are only better and worse articles, and people’s opinions will always differ.

You should write and publish as many articles as possible to get a good general sense of what works and doesn’t work. Do your best and post as much content as possible. Over the long run, you will get better at writing without trying to be a good writer.