My philosophy for creating good content on my blog and e-mail newsletter is simple: If I don’t have anything to say, don’t force it. It’s okay to miss a day or a few days or a week. While consistency helps get your audience into a habit of hearing from you and coming back for more, if you’re serving them cold, dead fish, they won’t come back for the good stuff. So, when in doubt, don’t.
However, that philosophy is much different than not posting something because I don’t think it’s good. There’s a difference in forcing yourself to say something, even when you have nothing to say, and posting something you want to say but don’t think meets some sort of editorial standard.
As someone who has been creating good content (if I do say so) for the online world for almost 20 years now, I promise you the pieces you spend more time on, caring for every detail and polishing until they’re perfect will be the ones that get crickets. The ones you spit out in a hurry you never think are very good? They go viral.
Of course, that doesn’t happen every time, but you’ll be surprised how frequently it does.
I was reminded of the notion of Just Hit Send when I caught a video for David Mamet’s masterclass on dramatic writing. Here’s the Facebook post with the video:
I love that quote: “You’ve got to stand being bad if you’re going to be a writer. Because if you don’t, you’re never going to be good.”
The same is true creating good content, regardless of channel or style. Your Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram pictures, Snapchat snaps, YouTube videos … will mostly suck. But getting into the habit of producing them will eventually make the gems emerge and show you that content success is like writing success. You have to do it bad a long time to do it good just once.