Yes, You Can Create TOO MUCH Content

“Content is King”, “3 Ways to Create More Content”, “Crank Your Content Machines”…these are just a few of the titles of recent blog posts I found advocating the production of more content to support marketing and sales enablement programs.

I have a contrarian viewpoint that you reach a tipping point in content volume and after that sweet spot, more content will actually have a deleterious effect.

Our Blog Blitz Experiment

Back in November 2016, we conducted an experiment and increased our blog post count on the Clarity Quest Blog to 16 posts from our normal 6 posts per month. While it was just one month and seasonal factors may have influenced the results, we actually saw a decrease in engagement and pipeline conversion from the blog.  

We’re certainly going to try the blitz again in 2017 during a different month, but here are a few of my personal theories as to why the unexpected result occurred.

Increased Quantity, Decreased Quality

“Quality Outperforms Quantity” is an age old adage, but one that rings true with content consumers. Because we had to triple the amount of content produced with the same resources, the quality of the posts was not as high as usual. The length of the posts also skewed toward the shorter side.  

Not Enough Graphics to Attract Skimmers

Words are faster to produce than graphics, so some of our posts were more wordy, and less graphic-intensive than usual.  

Hubspot recently shared results showing 43% of people skim blog posts while only 29% consume them thoroughly. This leads one to believe that graphics should be included in ALL posts and sections should be brief and clearly delineated, especially in long-form posts.

We Broke the Expected Cadence

People like consistency and when you shake up what they expect to see and read, they tune out. Our blog readers were used to seeing 1-2 posts per week from us and didn’t like the interruption of 4 posts per week.  

Plans for Our 2017 Blog Blitz Experiment

Based on lessons learned, here are our plans for the next round.

1. Aim for a significant post increase, but not a drastic one. We’ll try doubling our posts from 6 per month to 12 per month.
2. Write the posts ahead of time so the quality for each post is at the higher end of our internal scale.
3. Use engaging graphics in each post, not just in the banner headline.
4. Delineate sections into short bites of no more than 3-4 lines so skimmers can digest the highlights.

Subscribe to our blog as we’ll continue to publish results from our blogging experiments.