| By :
Steve Shaw
Just the other day I heard about a really surprising experiment about quality versus quantity in the book "Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking". That experiment happened in a ceramics class that was separated into two distinct groups. Group A's grade was assessed on the quantity of material they created. For example, 50 pounds of pots for an "A", 45 pounds for a "B", and so on. Group B's grade was assessed on the quality of their work. At the end of the exercise they only needed to produce a single pot, but it absolutely had to be superb. OK, quickly - answer these questions: => Which of these groups do you think produced the highest quality pots? => Which of the groups do you think you would rather be in? It might really surprise you to know that in this experiment it was the group who focused on the quantity that had more quality pieces. Why could that be? It could have been that the team that focused on quantity had any pressure of performance removed from their grade - they simply need to role up their sleeves and start producing pots. With all fear of failure gone, they were free to act on instinct, even if that action ultimately led to a poor product. But, most times the actual outcome of the quantity focused team was not a poor product ' how could that be? By creating more pots, that team had more opportunity to learn from errors. With each subsequent pot that the group produced, they improved a little bit more. How might we apply the findings from this experiment to an article marketing exercise? I'm certainly a quality oriented worker. If I were given the choice of being put in one of these two groups and not knowing the conclusion of the trial, I would have chosen the quality targeted group. I don't conclude that the experiment is downgrading the final quest for quality, but I do think it is enlightening us as to how we can improve as writers. There is a value to creating a constant stream of articles in our evolution as writers. Here are some tips on how to apply the lessons of this experiment: 1 You must start thinking of your articles as a group, rather than as individual articles. This will help you to get the momentum going, and you will resist the pull to concentrate too heavily on a single article. 2 If you are a perfectionist author who can spend days getting your article just so, try to give yourself a time limit - let's say one day - to finalise that initial draft. Wait just one day, and then proofread your article; using a time limit again. The time limit will help you target and be even more productive. Your article quality will not suffer. This approach should help you get over the desire to obsess over just a single piece of work. Always remember, with article marketing you need to learn to put together top quality articles on a steady basis. You must learn to balance quantity and quality. 3 It's also really helpful to give yourself a maximum word limit. Why not pick a target of 400 to 800 words. 4 - If you are already a more quantity focused individual, and you are submitting significantly more than 8 articles each and every month per site using automatic article submission software, then scale down your quantity and focus more energy on quality. Create an initial draft, then let it be for the next 24 hours before you review it a second time. Take some extra time on each article, and really pay much more attention to the little nuances of your articles. It's important to always balance quality and quantity when doing article marketing. Some of you may need to set aims to write top quality articles faster and more consistently. Others could need to set targets of writing higher quality and more insightful articles. Questions for you to answer: Are you more quantity or quality targeted as a writer? How can you apply the lessons learned from this experiment to really improve your own writing?
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