Content Creators UNITE! Stop the Quantity Madness. Embrace Quality!

I just read, (cough) a”success story” written by a fairly new writer who has been blogging for around a month or so. They blog every single day, between one and four articles a day, which is pretty good going. Admittedly not as many posts as some people but the person has actually been writing rather than using AI or a copy-paste system.

I won’t name them but they wrote about their success on Medium with a grand total of $5 for December.

Curious about why they only made $5 with so many posts I read through some of the content.

I admit the subjects were good and many were interesting, but that’s where it ended. Everything else was pretty bad.

The first thing I noticed was the titles were too simple. Very little thought had gone into the titles and most were a touch on the boring side and run-of-the-mill. To get reads your titles need to stand out, not out-and-out clickbait, but enough of a hook to get people reading.

The writing itself was quite obviously unedited. There were too many grammar errors and simple mistakes.

Confusions of your, you’re, their, there and they’re, for example.

A lot of spelling mistakes or missed letters.

A dog was in house. A house? His house? The House? The dog house?

Or silly mistakes like reveiwed

These and other tiny niggles made the reading experience unpleasant.

All of these small problems can be easily fixed by running the story through the free version of Grammarly.

And finally, the formatting was poor, as in, big block paragraphs which in places made most of the posts hard to read.

So my question is, why?

Why was this so bad? Then I noticed their publish rate. The next story was around an hour later, and another two hours after that.

It’s obvious what is going on. Quantity is outweighing quality!

The mind of the writer or more often the advice from some YouTube star, is to get as many posts out there as possible and get followers quickly to make some fast money!

And as a writer, trader, poker player, investor, and creator, I understand this more than most! However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about making money as a writer.

The wrong is and always will be, mass amounts of bad posts, hoping that some of them might get traction and make a few dollars.

Not only is it sloppy, but it isn’t sustainable because most likely readers are going to start blocking you, simply because your posts are of low quality.

There is another way!

It’s a bit of a compromise but it’s a better approach. That is to cut down on the number of posts per day, to one or two. Concentrate on writing good quality stories that are giving some kind of information, fun, insights, or are just pleasurable to read.

Put in some effort with the editing and fix the small things such as paragraph structure. Put your post through Grammarly which is free to use and finally, add some images.

If you are a writer on Medium there’s a simpler way than writing tons of posts to get more readers, and that’s through publications.

Although some of the big publications are strict and have very high standards, a lot of the medium and smaller ones are a little more understanding and support the smaller, or newer writer. Yes, some of the big publications also support new writers but these guys get a lot of submissions so they have to filter a bit more.

This does not mean that the small and medium sized pubs do not have standards, because they do! If you write absolute trash they will not publish it! They are trying to grow so they don’t want junk on their pages!

There are a lot of publications out there and you can easily search for them.

Don’t be put off by the bigger pubs. Before submitting, read their rules and requirements, which are usually linked somewhere on their page. The smaller and mid-sized pubs often will get back to you the same day.

For the larger publications, you may have to wait a week or two before finding out if your submission was accepted.

That’s it for this post.

Thanks for reading and in a short conclusion.

Do…

Write something of use or interest.

Use correct grammar and spelling.

Think about adding your work to publications.

Don’t…

Spam with below-par stories.

Be impatient and upload a post before checking it for simple errors.

Use massive blocks of unreadable text.

Give a clap, a follow, and a comment if you wish (feedback is always appreciated and valued.)

Paul.