I like that. It’s been awhile since somebody (kind of) called me an athlete. You are my new BFF.

Mark, you are more similar to Hubspot than you realize. You both create marketing content people love, and you both drink your own champagne … leading the right prospects deeper and deeper until they discover the solution being offered. Social shares play a role in your discoverability, as theirs. It’s like watching two great athletes with very different styles … both ending up in the same place. You’re not competing with them, you’re playing your own game.

I always enjoy a good debate about quantity and quality. There’s no right answer to this dichotomy, since so much depends on what you define as “winning.” Without understanding the objectives, and whether the goals are short- or long-term goals, the argument is relatively moot. You can impress people with frequent content, just like you can impress people with learned manners and politeness. However, just like it can be easy to spot a facade on a mean-spirited person, the low-quality content will be exposed with time. Which is why the quality vs quantity arguments also depends on the time-frame of the running comparison.

My take on the whole SEO and “content marketing” game of cat and mouse is that the high-quality bloggers will continue to thrive even more as Google improves their algorithms. I believe that many company and personal blogs that have an SEO objective take the “easy” way out with content and write content for what they think Google wants. The guidelines for writing for Google provide a relatively simple process: find some keywords, write a blog post with some strategic linking, use the keyword naturally, etc.

When writing for SEO, it becomes easy to forget you’re writing for people. Writing for Google is easier than writing for your audience because connecting with your audience takes time and effort. For Google, there are plenty of guides you can find online to write SEO-optimized blog articles. Ultimately, the SEO game will separate the good from the great. The great will keep pushing the limit, unafraid that it may be “bad for SEO,” with their content, constantly trying to connect with engaging articles. As Google gets better, these “pricing wars” of content will decrease as the path to blogging success will be less and less defined by where you rank on SERP.

Thanks for the response Mark… much appreciated.

I see your point more clear now, and I feel your pain. I am in the middle of rebooting my personal and business efforts, trying to plan my content, and it is a bit daunting to say the least. Maybe it is especially painful for us as we are in the same industry, trying to talk to many of the same people as someone reading Hubspot content.

I agree with the budget sentiment, but I think it is a matter of allocation. Depending on the business, moving budgets around to hire the right people to create the content, and getting the whole company involved would help. Shifting yellow page or radio spot budget to hiring content producers. I think you mentioned accepting guest posts as well? That is a great way to generate content, along with new eyeballs. I dunno, there are ways to make it happen if a company really wanted to.

I think that a good majority of businesses have the ability to compete right now on their very own payroll, but just do not know how to do it, or where to start. Will they be able to compete at a 4+ post a day stride like Hubspot does? Probably not. But devoting the time, resources and effort into it now, rather than after everyone else does, is going to get any business ahead of their competition.

Thanks again for the reply. Looking forward to chatting more.

Doc

First of all, thank you for this amazing comment and welcome to the blog and podcast.

I probably was not clear enough about the “Hubspot Problem.” I actually like and admire Hubspot. The problem is not with them, it is with me. I can’t keep up with that stream of content. Unless you want to get into an expensive content arms race, who can? And if you did, then HubSpot would double down.

And that’s the problem. The people with the biggest budget will win. Not necessarily the best product or the best content. The sheer volume will trump everything … and I believe it more than just a short term issue.

So actually, I am nearly in complete agreement with you, but I don’t thin the problem is diminished. Many thanks Doc. Well done.

The Hubspot problem you mention is interesting. Yes, they are a content machine, and they wholeheartedly eat their own dog food when it comes to practicing what they preach… but they know their target market. (Maybe you are not it, and that is why it seems annoying?)

Why do they do it? Because it works! The data says it works. The amount of leads they get is astonishing. The staff they have to write their incredible content and the employees on hand to respond to the massive leads they receive daily is huge in comparison to the majority of the sites and businesses out there.

The “Hubspot problem” is not really a problem. They are a model of what works on a huge scale. Sure, they may not have author recognition like yourself, or a Chris Brogan. They have so many authors it can be a bit hard to build that relationship on such scale. So I do agree with you there.

But, how is what Hubspot does any different than many other content machine sites like SearchEngineLand, Mashable, The Huffington Post etc? Do you follow and know every author on those sites? The blatant difference however is what they are selling. Hubspot sells an awesome Saas software, while the others sell advertising. Hubspot knows that for every post published they will average x visitors (some new, some returning, some in whatever stage of the sales funnel they track) and that will gain x amount of leads and x amount of sales. The others look at the traffic data and have stats they can sell future advertisers on how many eyeballs will see their banner ad.

I agree to a certain extent that every post has to be of high quality. But what defines quality? Is it the length? Is it the subject? Sometimes you just have to ship it. I would say for people or businesses just getting started, quantity is very important from a search engine (seo) perspective. But it has to be targeted. And, who cares how many visits a particular piece of content gets you if you do not have a well optimized website ready to give your reader an ability to take another action that you want them to take?

I do not see content becoming less important any time soon. Sure, Google will eventually knock off content farms, or people ripping you off. But Google, Bing and the others are throwing their eggs into the quality, original content game… and tying all that to author rank, social signals etc.

As one grows their brand (personal or business), grow their following, and become more of an authoritative writer, they may be able to get away with less content because they have so many people willing to comment, share their content or engage with them. But I would say that this is tricky as well. If you have a schedule that readers are used to, and you drop off the face of the earth and reduce your posts to a minimum, your readers may stop caring and sharing. And there goes your autor rank.

Quality is in the eyes of the reader or consumer of ones content. One must focus on making content (as much as it takes) targeted to the end user that they are trying to reach. This is just the hand we are dealt now, and the game we must play. If organic traffic is what you are after, what other choice is there? Do the work and play the game.

Anyway… sorry for the long response here. I am cutting myself off now.

Just subscribed to your podcast. Looking forward to hearing more.

Doc

and great to hear Tom’s voice too! both of you are steller speachers 😉

I’m glad SOMEBODY was happy to hear my voice. Take that Mr Velvet. Thanks Jessica!