Web Content – Can you Have Too Much of a Good Thing?
Posted by Beth Hrusch on Tue, Jul 27, 2010
If you’re creating web content for your business, you may sometimes wonder about how much content you should be putting out there. Are you overdoing it? Saturating the Internet and turning off your customer base? Deciding when and how much to post is part of your content marketing strategy. And, the resources (both human and financial) needed to develop web content are determined by how much of it you want/need. So, the question also affects your bottom line.
A content marketing strategy requires you to do some research into your target market, define the buyer, etc. It also relies heavily on the regular posting of fresh content. The question is, just how much content? And, how often?
There are a lot of opinions on this out there. Unfortunately, there is precious little definitive information. You don’t want to appear spammy, and you don’t want to produce so little and so infrequently that people forget about you.
While there is no final word on the subject, and each company is different in their approach, I think a good way to determine frequency of posting web content is to determine the quality of the content. Good, authoritative content can be posted constantly—the more the better. There is almost no limit to how often good content can be introduced, because it won’t be considered spam.
Weed out anything that doesn’t add value, help your brand or add to the conversation. For example, good directory articles are valuable, and can be submitted almost constantly—even more than once a day. Bad, fluffy articles can only hurt you with readers and search engines. Likewise, the company blog (usually considered a prime piece of content that establishes authority) can be posted daily without danger of overdoing it, as long as the posts are useful to readers.
To help you keep on track with the quantity (and quality) of your web content, put yourself on a schedule. Have your articles automatically submitted. Make sure your blog writers submit fresh content regularly and post on the same days each week. Remember that certain content types are considered premium pieces, so they can be submitted less frequently because more time goes into them. Examples would be ebooks and white papers. Take your time and submit these regularly, but only as often as you have time to create pieces of exceptional quality.
In my opinion, press releases should not be posted until you have real news to share. The advent of news release services such as PRWeb has made it so easy to distribute press releases that some companies are treating them like vehicles to announce every little thing that happens. Some news just isn’t news, so be judicious in their use and they’ll be more effective for you.
I’ve heard it said that when you generate a schedule for yourself, it’s harder to walk away from it or set it to the side in order to do other things. This can apply to your content marketing strategy. Try this:
1. Determine how much web content you can generate given your resources.
2. Make sure you can produce high quality content. Hire an SEO firm, if necessary.
3. Set up a realistic schedule. You can always increase the number of posts later—focus on the quality first. This means that if you can only create quality content twice a week, then only post twice a week.
So, with content marketing, can you ever have too much of a good thing? Not if it’s a good thing. In fact, good web content will almost always have your readers looking for more, not less.