When it comes to running content sites our success is aligned with our content.

So there are a lot of things we have to get right and we spend a lot of time thinking about those things.

• Keyword research
• Content briefs
• Quality control
• On-page SEO

And so much more.

Getting any of those things wrong can really spell disaster for a website's success.

So should you be publishing more content if you don't feel like those things are right?

Absolutely.

There's no reason why you can't go back and edit those things later. I'm actually convinced that's where you'll do most of your learning and refining of the above processes anyway.

So how much content should you be publishing?

This is one area where you can't pay too much attention to competitors, but you still should in some ways.

• Posting more content will always be a competitive advantage if the quality isn't efficiency prohibitive.
• Getting the same quality for less money will always be another competitive advantage.

Those are the two things you should be paying attention to when deciding.

• Find out the average number of posts per week that your top competitors are publishing.
• Look to be above the average from the beginning because this puts you in a good position to scale.
• If you're paying more than $0.045 per word then you need to find ways to reduce that to increase the amount of content you produce.

One year ago I was paying $0.045 per word on one of my sites and now I'm paying $0.015 per word because I moved from content agencies to writers. So it is more than possible to reduce your content costs if you're willing to find a way to make that happen.

One of the oldest tricks in the book is finding different levels of writers for different types of posts. So you might be paying $45 per 1000 words for a review, but do you really need that level of writer for more general list posts?

So my recommendation for most sites...

You should be looking to publish around 8 posts per week and aiming for at least 10,000 words a week.

5 posts per week in a year is 260.

8 posts per week in a year is 416.

10 posts per week in a year is 520.

So you can see where the massive difference is.

More economics

Obviously, 10,000 words per week will be 520,000 words in a year. So your costs will be affected by how much you're paying per word.

0.045 * 520,000 = $23,400.00 USD

0.040 * 520,000 = $20,800.00 USD

0.030 * 520,000 = $15,600.00 USD

0.015 * 520,000 = $7,800.00 USD

Again, you can see what a difference this makes and where you need to honestly be focusing because your revenue is going to correlate massively with two things.

Number of words. Number of posts.

Everything else can come later and I wish someone had taught me this when I got started in SEO because it's too easy to get caught in the theory and focus on the wrong things.