Quality and Quantity Without Burnout

Here’s a question every creator faces:

Should I focus on quality or quantity?

Most creators end up going one of three directions:

• Quality over everything: Slow to produce and well made.
• Quantity over everything: Fast to produce and often full of flaws.
• Quantity and quality: Somewhat slow to produce and decently made.

There are a trade-offs for any direction you go:

• Focus on quality: risk losing your audience’s attention because of how long they need to wait.
• Focus on quantity: risk your audience associating you with low quality because you can’t take time to polish what you make.
• Focus on both: risk burnout and cutting corners because it’s not sustainable.

I need to acknowledge that every audience has different expectations and creators have been highly successful in all of these areas. That’s why there’s so much conflicting advice out there.

But I assume you’re reading this because you crave quality and quantity without the risk of burnout. Is that even possible?

I believe it is…

The Quality to Quantity Approach: A Fourth Option

Quality content takes time to produce. Then you send it out into the world for it’s 15 minutes of fame before moving on to the next thing.

Do that every day and you’ll be prolific!

You’ll also be stressed out and exhausted.

What you need is quality content that has a longer shelf life. What if that amazing newsletter you spend hours writing could live on for months or years rather than one short moment in time?

Here’s how that can happen with the Quality to Quantity Approach:

1. Write a quality piece of content. Let’s say this takes you 10 hours.
2. Send it out as a newsletter.
3. Take parts of it for social. Find snippets of value to repurpose as social posts or even videos. Maybe you spend 5 minutes reformatting but that’s better than hours coming up with new ideas.
4. Rewrite it and send again later. It took you 10 hours to write the original newsletter. Even if it takes you 2 hours to re-write it, you’re repurposing valuable research and ideas in a fraction of the time.
5. Repeat step 3 and 4.

Do this for multiple pieces of content and not only will you have true quality with the bonus of quantity, you’ll be far less overwhelmed with creating and coming up with new ideas.

“Won’t I be repeating myself a lot?”

When I say “send again later”, I mean at least a month later or more.

This is the internet. Even your most dedicated subscribers don’t remember what you sent 2 weeks ago and even if something feels familiar, the way you’re sharing it the 3rd time might stick better than the first two.

Don’t be a afraid to repeat yourself.

Your next step

Take some time this week to write a well thought out newsletter. Spend some time on it and be intentional. Then:

• Using the Quality to Quantity Approach, pull out at least 3 social posts out of what you’ve written.
• Re-write the newsletter two times.
• Re-write the social posts two times.

Now you have 3 newsletters and 9 social posts. That’s at least 1 newsletter a month for the next 3 months and 3 social posts for the next 3 months.

Keep doing this and your work will compound on itself.

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