Black Hat or White Hat: Quality or Quantity?

I was just reading the lasted issue of StomperNet’s The Net Effect and reading over the new Q&A section (more like a “Letters to the Editor” section), I was seeing a lot of questions like:

“Is it better to have 10,000 different blogs or a single blog with 10,000 accounts” - something like that.

Then I was thinking about my Twitter account.  About a week ago, I chose to disable my auto-follow and disable my auto-DM.  I admit that the number of followers that I had dropped a fair bit and my new follower additions have dropped dramastically.

I also just paid someone to start social bookmarking my content like crazy.  I would not say it is expensive, but for the amount of bookmarking I am requesting, it isn’t going to be cheap either.

What about the two article writers that I pay to write me quality articles versus the one overseas writer that I pay that produces tons of articles that aren’t even 1/10 the quality?

Quality or Quantity?

I’ve been pondering this for most of my internet marketing career.  And as you would expect, the answer is simply both.

BUT, there are a few rules and a few growing trends.  Plus, quality and quantity may not be an option for everyone, especially when you are first starting out.

Content is King

There is one constant that has always been there since the beginning of the internet and this is “content is king”.  Don’t forget it!  Anything and everything you produce that goes online is good (no matter how much quality or quantity you have).  That is important to understand.

Quality Content is Supreme Ruler

Stating that, Quality is still supreme ruler and it is something that is becoming more powerful every day.  Back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, quality was not that important.  Search engines didn’t decipher between good and bad articles and getting high search engine rankings for, let’s face it: crap, was not difficult.  Ah, the Google Adsense Era.

But now, search engines are smarter and social media is starting to take center stage.  Quality matters in the social arena of the internet.  If you don’t produce good, quality content, no one will follow you, no one will listen to you.  You will never establish yourself as an authority in your niche (which is where a LOT of money can be made!).

What about SEO?  First, SEO is starting to respect and rank popular social media channels more and more.  (I will talk about this more in my final posting of the SEO Exciter Series Part 10, SEO and Social Marketing.)

Secondly, search engines are smarter.  They KNOW how much time visitors are spending on sites.  If your content is of poor quality, people will not stay and Google knows this, too.  Poor quality can result in quick search engine listings, but not very long-lived listings.

But More is Always Better

Quantity is still good.  And if you mix quality and quantity together, you create the ultimate internet marketing weapon.  Of course, this is easier said than done.

Writing 10 quality articles per day and submitting them to article sites and bookmarking them all over the place would be ideal, but either expensive to do alone or extremely time consuming.

And this goes with Twitter followers.  When I proactively recruited about 1000 followers in a week, the quantity was flowing, but the quality was poor.  Now I just get a bunch of people trying to sell me garbage (especially Twitter products, MLM’s or the next social media break-through tool).

(And this is ironic since I sell my own Social Media product, yet I know better, as a social marketer, not to Twitter-spam it all over the place. )

Too Much Garbage Can Hurt You

Twitter is an excellent example of where too much garbage can hurt you.  I was losing track of the quality twitter followers that I had and actively communicated with.

Too many backlinks and too much duplicate content can also hurt you.  Quantity is a great way of getting indexed quickly by the search engines (since it is easy for the spiders to find), but the search engines recognize these unnatural backlinking practices and you may lose your Google rankings rather quickly (worse, you can get put into Google supplemental index, which is sometimes called the Google Sandbox).

What to do

If you are just starting, I would always focus on Quality first.  This includes the articles you write, the people you follow and communicate with on Twitter and the other social media sites, and the development of your own website (not trying to create multiple websites at once).

This won’t send you blazing into the search engines or the create the viral social media upheaval we all dream about, but it creates a great foundation to build from.  Google will respect it. Your followers will respect it.  And it is easier to manage.

When time and money become more abundant OR you have created a solid foundation for your online business, then I would venture into more quantity (like more social bookmarking sites, more articles sites, more video syndication, more aggressively seek out social friends and perhaps start creating hybrid sites similar to your own).

Grow it slowly and naturally.  You will find that ultimately, a mix of both quality and quantity CAN be achievable.  And once you figure out the this quantity versus quality process flow, the traffic, sales, social following and more will start to snow-ball!

cheers…matt