The sign in master luthier Jeff Elliott’s workroom reads “We are slow and we’re expensive.”
A favorite saying of a friend in marketing is “You can get it fast, good, or cheap. Not all three.” You can get it fast and cheap but not good. You can get it good but it won’t be cheap nor fast. If you want good, it takes time to do it well.
The same applies to your blog and its content. It’s easy to deliver fast content, but is it good? Maybe, maybe not, but it is certainly cheap. If you want good, it takes time.
Developing quality content on your blog takes planning. It takes purpose. It takes a commitment. But most of all, it takes intent.
Writing Content With Intent
When you write with intent, your content has a purpose and goal. You understand your audience and their needs, and you are fully aware of your own needs and ability to convey your message.
A master luthier crafts their guitars. They don’t force them out of molds and bang them out. The wood is carefully chosen, often telling the luthier how to use the wood, whether it be in the neck, front, sides, back, or within the rosette. The luthier tests the strength, flexibility, weight, and durability of the wood to confirm what the wood is telling them.
Building a guitar is a complex mix of art, training, skill, and intuition, as is writing good content. You want your words to artfully convey their message. While your intuition can tell you if you are on track, your training and skill guide your fingers across the keyboard as a master of the written word.
When you understand your writing craft, you understand how the words work to paint a picture of your message. With a goal in mind, and a strong underlying purpose, you write stronger, carefully choosing the words.
Like a luthier who polishes and sands and polishes and sands and repeats this over and over to create a protective luster and finish on their handmade instruments, so you polish and sand your writing, editing lines, words, and even whole paragraphs to hone your message until it shines.
Okay, you should. How many of us do?
You Can Get It Fast, Good, or Cheap
When you produce content with little forethought, you are delivering fast food. Sure, it’s food, but to the discriminating palette, it’s tasteless.
You can produce content cheaply, copying and pasting blockquotes, or even lowering yourself to use a feed scraper, the dollar store version of a blog, and still have content, but with little purpose, and definitely no intent. Like fast content, you leave a bitter taste in the mouths of visitors, who leave your blog faster than they arrived, never to return.
If your goal is to produce good content, content worthy of your visitor’s attention, turning those visitors into readers who come back for more, and brag about it their friends, it takes time.
You cannot built it fast. You cannot build it cheaply. It takes time. Planning. Care. Forethought. Intent.
So how are you blogging? Fast, cheap, or good?
