When it comes to content marketing, there are two schools of thought: people that push you to publish as many pieces of content as you can per day, and people that focus on quality so much that they publish on Instagram twice a week.

And while these two strategies make sense and are totally justifiable, I do tend to prefer quantity over quality. And I think that in the long run, quantity will matter a lot more than quality. And here is why.

Each Pieces of Content is an Entry Point

The point of content marketing is to drive traffic (and therefore, some sort of sales) using content. So that’s self-explanatory: every single piece of content that you publish somewhere on the internet is an entry point to your site, or sales funnel, or whatever other central platforms that you are using to run your business.

So, if you stick to the math, the more pieces of content, the more opportunities you give to your target audience to discover you. The more people discover you, the more sales you can get.

The more content you put out, the more opportunities your potential audience has to discover you.

That also explains why posting on multiple platforms can really be helpful to get more traction, as publishing on different platforms multiplies the entry points to different audiences.

You Can Only Control Quantity

Quantity is an objective metric. If you publish three Instagram stories, two LinkedIn posts, a Medium article, sent two newsletters and wrote thirteen tweets, that’s twenty-one pieces of content. And that cannot be argued. 

How can you qualify the quality of your content? By the number of likes? By trusting your opinion? 

You may have posted your favorite picture on Instagram with the caption you’re the proudest of, it might only get a few likes. You may have posted a random video on TikTok that took you 12 seconds to shoot, and you might get hundreds of thousands of views. Which piece of content was the best? According to whom? 

Quality is just a lot harder to measure. And because of that, focusing on quality makes you a perfectionist. Which doesn’t seem like a bad thing? But in content creation, it really is.

When will you stop perfecting a piece of content and start posting it? The more perfectionist you are, the less you’ll put out content. The more you focus on details that only you can see, the less you’ll put out content. 

Of course, you should make sure the quality of your work is decent. You shouldn’t post a caption on Instagram with a typo in it. You should do a basic edit of a video that you want to post on YouTube. You should proofread the article that you just wrote. You should delete the awkward moments of silence that there is in your podcast.

But what’s the point of spending hours color grading a picture that people will see on a tiny phone screen, for 3 seconds maximum, with nightshift on? What’s the point of filming your video with a fancy 4K camera, in SLog, when an iPhone with its much smaller files would produce the same image quality after the YouTube compression? 

These quality standards that were only created by perfectionism keep you from posting content on a regular basis. And sometimes they keep you from posting at all.

Optimizing Content to Make it Viral

This is the main reason why people overthink content marketing and spend so much time optimizing their content and its quality. 

First, I want to highlight the fact that going viral is not going to have the effect that you think it will. Your life won’t change overnight. You won’t go from unknown to massively famous or wealthy. You’ll just get extra exposure, some more followers, and you’ll maybe get a few more sales. But going viral isn’t going to deeply change your life forever. 

Second, there is no recipe for going viral. And believe me, if there was, it would be known and you would see some brands and content creators go viral at every single piece of content they post. But it just doesn’t work this way.

Going viral relies on so many parameters that it is impossible to predict in advance if a piece of content is going to go viral or not. Part of the reason why some pieces go viral is luck. You used the right keywords, at the right time, it got read by the right person and tweeted by the right thought leader to the right audience and so on. 

And here is the truth: you have NO control over all these shares.

However, you can control the amount of content you put out. Let’s say you publish 3 blog posts a day. You’ll have a lot more chances to go viral than if you post once a week. 

Since going viral relies on luck and reasons that are out of your control, the more you publish content, the more chances you have to get this massive exposure. It’s like the lottery. You’ll have more chances to win if you buy 2,000 tickets than if you buy just one.

Quantity is key in content marketing because it is the only thing that you have control on. You can decide to put out twenty pieces of content per day. Or you can choose to put out two pieces per week. But you can’t control the quality or how your audience will react to it. 

And that’s why you should focus on quantity. Because the more you try and the more you post, the more you learn about your audience, what they want and what they care about.

This article was originally published by Charles Tumiotto Jackson on Charlestumiottojackson.com.