More Than This
Between my home and office, I listen to Sirius satellite radio… and usually if I don’t have dance music or 70’s rock, I’ll have on Fox News or CNN. One of my pet peeves with both news corporations is that right before a commercial break, they will tease me with a reason not to flip the channel…and then the story they promised won’t be available until after the commercial, then more news, then commercial and then they will finally give me the promised story. Liars I call them because it’s implied that the story will be available right after the commercial but it almost NEVER happens that way.
This morning, they teased me with a story about how going to the gym may be worse for your health than not going to the gym. Of course, I wasn’t going to buy the story but I arrived at work, it’s 7 degrees outside F. and I sat here waiting in my warm truck for the story they promised 2 commercial breaks ago before I head into the office.
The guest expert goes on to spew fluff after fluff after fluff and as I got angry that I waited the extra minutes to hear the fluff, …it occured to me…ohh no, it reminded me of some of the poor quality articles that make it into our site every day. There must be MORE THAN THIS?
Seems so subjective but after you review tens of thousands of articles, I think one can become a very split second judge of article quality… ie: When the content is FLUFF vs. real value.
The point of this blog entry: After you finish each article that you write, give it the “fluff acid test”: Does my article deliver real value or am I just filling word count minimums?
Musical Factoid: Special thanks to Bryan Ferry + Roxy Music for their 1995 song, “More Than This” (Catalogue number CDV2791) that inspired this blog entry title.
How do you personally know when your article is delivering real value vs. fluff?
Chris.
This is an interesting point, because the quality of our work can be totally subjective and in my haste to fulfil my quotas – i.e. my submission targets, I do think it is possible to sacrifice quality for quantity.
Equally, I feel one can be too self-critical and I often find that something I have written in haste and not been totally happy with has attracted positive feedback.
In addition of course, the number of times an article is downloaded may provide evidence that a piece of work is good? Having said that, I have no idea what an acceptable ratio is – 1%, 5% – do you have any stats on this?
Finally, requests to re-publish an article is also an indicator and a morale boost of course.
At the end of the day, quality has to come first, as it is the only way one is going to develop a regular “following” – I do find that visitors here are pretty discerning.
Jonathan
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