How much content is too much?
How much content is too much?
The forever spin of the content machine or when we became promoters more than writers
For the last two months I’ve felt more exhausted than ever. I couldn't exactly pinpoint where it came from. Especially because it started around the time when I decided to dedicate my time to writing - something I love and care about. After five years of everyday work for clients, I was finally able to focus on only creating the pieces I like.
Which meant doing interviews with people who excite and inspire me for this project, Vivid Minds, writing for large business magazines in the US (my dream since I came to New York seven years ago as a journalist), and starting to work on my book…. I was also invited to become a contributor to Forbes.com. On the surface, things couldn’t be better. But it wasn't long before I started feeling incessantly tired.
As I found purpose in my writing (and it was by no means called “Content” in my dreams), I also needed people to discover and read it somehow.
Which means that, along with writing itself, I had to spend most of my time on promotion. If I wanted to write something big (a story with a few interviews, which would take me a month to accomplish), especially for Vivid Minds (let’s assume large publications such as Forbes can sustain their own promotion efforts. Although their editors love freelance contributors to have a social media following and learn “SEO tricks”), I had to dedicate even more time to promote them. Yet, by the time I finished a feature story, which included a few rounds of edits and a proofread, I was too tired to even think about promotion.
In the beginning, I could justify myself for not doing promo thinking that I should first focus on the quality of my pieces. After leading Vivid Minds for 6 months, I realized that it makes no sense to put so much effort without growing my readership. It was hard to find my writing on Google since my domain rating was new and, therefore, resulted in low search visibility. I hired an SEO consultant to come up with a plan on how to make them pop. In two days, he gave me a complete list of the headlines, captions and bits of words to use inside the copy.
That felt humiliating and disrespectful to my stories (similar to how I feel when someone calls them 'content'). I had spent much more time working on that grid and those headlines, checking every word to make sure it sounded right to me. Would I sacrifice my captions for SEO? Am I going down the path of creating another website to compete for traffic? No, and I did not use his suggestions.
The other day I sent a piece to a magazine. The article had nothing to do with ChatGPT, but it did with technology. The editor replied back saying that the title wouldn’t perform well on their website. “Can you use something that includes ChatGPT?” I got it, and I did it.
But I digress. The point is no matter how much I like my writing (and there are days when I get stuck and really hate it), I still need to use every possible platform to promote it. I have around 8K people on Facebook, a bit over 1K on Twitter and around that on Instagram, plus 3K on LinkedIn. I just started using Substack and watched a 5-hour series on how to promote it here. They just started Notes that nudge us to write even more often and think less about it. Add to it TikTok, Threads and all the Twitter rivals that don’t get me particularly excited about promoting more bits of content!
That overwhelming, suffocating feeling of never doing enough for my writing—or worse, sacrificing time to improve it—is what drives me into that tiring and anxious trap. Instead of spending five hours on a promo course, I could have watched another video on becoming a better writer or finished the overdue book by Sally Rooney on my nightstand.
Yet, there is always a feeling, that if you are not a Donna Tart, you have to write more and post more. While others write more and post more, so there is no exit. “You have to be consistent”, - any writing course will tell you.
I need to mention that I make almost no money from this writing and posting, so that also diminishes my motivation.
Today, I googled this question “‘How much content is too much’?
“There is no such thing as too much content. Whatever industry your business or startup operates in, you will need to develop content” - it said.
Whatever life stage you operate in, too much content is only defined by how much of it you can handle.