Do you invest loads of time and energy into internet marketing with nothing to show for it? Do you feel like the mice that run round’ and round’ in their wheels without ever leaving their cages?
If your profits…or lack thereof…do not equal your time investments, something may be wrong…
Quality vs. Quantity
It’s easy to fall into the “power in numbers” trap when you are marketing online. After all, doesn’t it seem like it’s a numbers game sometimes? Get more links; more Twitter followers; use more keywords…and on and on and on.
It may be a numbers game, but your customers/clients are not interested. They could care less if you are the article marketer of the year, slinging articles faster than you can say, “I need to make money.”
Your audience only cares about what you can give them. Now, if the 500 articles you distributed each addressed a need and offered valuable information, then by all means sling away. But, most of the time, when quantity is a focus, quality suffers.
Would you rather buy five $5 shirts that tore apart in two weeks, or one $25 shirt that lasted you five years?
Would you rather eat an inexpensive, mediocre meal and risk getting sick, or spend a few dollars more to eat at a clean restaurant?
Let’s put this into internet marketing terms…
Would you rather have 250 people visit your site with no intention to buy, or 5 people visit your site with every intention to buy what you are offering?
Would you rather have one promising lead, or 50 who never get back to you?
The point is…it’s not always the best for your business to think in terms of quantity. Most of the time quality will trump quantity.
Below are the most common quantity traps…
Articles – Article marketing, while a sound marketing strategy, has taken on a life of its own. I have seen marketers literally publish hundreds of articles a week and never see a return on time investment. Why? The articles are fluff, offering no value. They are either re-hashed content or a bunch of keywords and some sentences that don’t even make sense.
One great article can do more for a marketer than one hundred poor ones. It only takes one great article for a webmaster to grab and publish on his website or someone to see and desire more information.
Google’s mission is to eliminate poor content from its index. I’m not a psychic, but I predict that Google will eventually find a way to separate the good from the bad even more than it already does with social signals and spam content. You can’t win the SEO game and rely on long-term business growth with shoddy content, plain and simple.
Blogging – Your blog audience will never grow if you are focusing on the number of posts as a priority. If you must make a decision between publishing one amazing post a week or three mediocre ones, publish one.
Social Media – This principle also applies to Facebook posts and tweets. Don’t tweet just for the sake of tweeting so your audience can see that you opened a Twitter account. Share great content and spread some value.
By focusing on quality, you will have more time for marketing because you won’t be spinning your wheels. Focusing on quantity is not necessarily a poor marketing strategy; it only becomes a hindrance when it takes precedence over quality.
How do I know this? I fell into the quantity trap many year ago and I not only failed to make money, but I also lost some in the process. When I changed my mindset and I started focusing on less work and adding more value, my business took on a life of its own.
Jenna Scaglione is a content writer, internet marketer, and a lover of family, friends and life. Jenna enjoys learning, growing and discovering the newest and latest trends on the internet. Known as "Lady Content", she lives in sunny Socal where she helps her clients around the world increase brand awareness on the internet through content writing and social media.
