Episode 20: Quality vs Quantity: Striking the Balance in Content Creation

Episode Transcript

Ashley Segura: Perfect okay it looks like we are good to go all right so to really just kick things off with a bit of a fun conversation when you’re not working on content and SEO what is your go to dish to cook in the kitchen? 

Jakub Rudnik: I love that question so definitely love cooking just across the board so I love being on the grill

I love being in the kitchen dishes of all sorts and really trying a lot of things I think my go to would definitely be something on the grill or maybe even the smoker so I think the especially when entertaining I really like smoking and smoking ribs I think that would be one of the things that I really like to go to do a couple of times each summer

Ashley Segura: so have you mastered like the perfect ribs? Because whenever I’m smoking ribs they’re either amazing or it just didn’t come out and I don’t ever understand why 

Jakub Rudnik: I feel like I’ve got the timing down and so the perfect ribs I keep evolving on I’ve tried some either rubs or sauces and things so that changes each time I do it a little bit I keep experimenting but the timing I think I’ve got

so yeah I really that I don’t know in the smoker the 225 whether it’s the three two one method or sometimes even doing a little bit shorter but really keeping the liquid high to keep the moisture there I think those have been the two ways that work for me but I feel pretty good that I haven’t had a bad rib personally in a long time

pat myself on the back definitely not going to wood because it’ll happen soon enough 

Ashley Segura: yeah definitely that’s very impressive ribs are hard to cook but so is SEO so let’s hit it with that one so you have a background in journalism I also have a background in journalism and I love how there’s so many journalists that are in content and SEO and just like really dove into this field

can you share how you made that transition and how journalism really influences your approach to content and SEO? 

Jakub Rudnik: Yeah it happened honestly by accident ish so it was I was working in sports TV basically for an online station and so working 4 PM to 1 AM working my days off for Monday and Tuesday I didn’t make very much money

and so really being in my like mid ish twenties it was like looking for a change so like a lot of my social life was gone I wasn’t saving any money all that type of stuff and I thought I’d make a pivot for maybe a couple of years just get a change of pace and then go back to journalism

and I happened to just was applying to content jobs because the skills were very similar as many people do and just happened to fall into G2 crowd just 30 people at the time it’s now g2 com but I got really lucky that I joined I found a company that was Out in the suburbs of Chicago hadn’t hired as many people

so I think that they were more open to people with different backgrounds and then got onto an awesome ride where this company went from 30 to four 50 I upskilled and changed positions on slavery six to 12 months for five years straight and so it was a thing where did I know a little bit about SEO and content before?

Yes but very little and so it was really growing in the job and knowing the company was a big part of that so it got really lucky that the company was right and they helped me to grow in that role while I was there 

Ashley Segura: and so you basically from role to role Got to know a little bit more about the industry and get a little bit more technical with it

or did you stay on a creative level the whole way? 

Jakub Rudnik: Yeah so it was a little bit of both and so again I in the first year or two I’m still thinking I’m going to move to back to journalism full time I’m doing some stuff for the Tribune freelance wise honestly at some points writing three four or five articles a week on top of my full time job

and just doing I’m always doing too many things but that at that point I’m still trying to keep one foot in both camps and so to me content was more on the storytelling the creative I’m certainly doing more business type of stuff as we needed to but I wasn’t thinking about the the I didn’t know necessarily the business metrics and things I didn’t know software and SAS in general like G2 was an awesome headstart for that because you just have to learn that environment

very horizontally but so sometime in that year two let’s call it range it was there’s a gap one is I think I was picking up things and picking up things and get more interested in when you hit some of these goals and you get really excited like I did this and it moved this needle

okay now I’m starting to make some connections and then there was a kind of a vacuum where a director of research left or SEO person left our numbers and flat lined and so there was a vacuum for a couple of us to step into and got Couple of the founders we need somebody to fill this in

are you open to taking on this? And so it was really like a six month just a marathon of long days self learning experimenting and that was like my going from that creative side over to the more technical and really absorbing everything creating and then from there I really focused on the careers and the skills and went from there

but it was very open ended where the the job changes early were more in that creative sphere and then they turned more technical and more data driven and then team driven as the team grew I 

Ashley Segura: feel like that’s a really natural progression though because especially going from journalism you have such a creative hat and so you’re drawn to that kind of work

but then as you progress within content marketing you have to learn the tech side of things you have to learn how to optimize things you have to learn how SEO works and with all the updates like you have to eventually evolve into that like I don’t know many content marketers who are just creating content and have no knowledge or depth of experience of SEO

it’s especially these days they have to go hand in hand 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah I think that’s right and I have seen folks coming from journalism or creative writing or something like that that do want to stay more on the I’m telling a story or I’m doing this and I’ve seen that and I do think that for me Letting go of some of that and understanding more of the why it’s the content and how it really applied to this was like one of the lessons I either tell my current students or I tell people on podcasts and things like this is really like the learning what your boss cares about and then their boss cares about

and so on like those are the that’s where the both like me having more of an impact and understanding the why but also then the career progression opens up when you understand those things and how to move the needle on that and for me that was the kind of career shift was not just what makes one piece of content good or one story good how does that apply to the larger department or beyond?

Agreed I think you need to do that I think some people resist that early on you go to you go to J school or creative writing school you just want to tell beautiful stories but that often isn’t that isn’t enough in the space 

Ashley Segura: yeah I can’t just write poems or creative writing stories anymore

like I used to many years ago and I still hope to be a national geographic journalist one day like I still hold on to that but here we are talking about content marketing so you mentioned when we were chatting back and forth before this podcast about your takes on content and whatnot and you mentioned quality versus quantity and

your perspective of it so I really want to dive into that because at the very beginning of the whole web boom it was produced content produced tons of content it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying you just need to have so much content and then it switched to okay now narrow in on what kind of content that you’re creating

and it needs to be really long foreign pieces of content and it’s changed about a thousand times since so where are we at today? And what’s your perspective on quality versus quantity? 

Jakub Rudnik: Yeah it’s a I think this that’s a nice segue from the journalism experience because coming out of J school I think I’m a really strong copy editor

I think I’ve got a good eye for visuals and how they apply and those things do matter no doubt about it but I think one of the unlocks for me career wise was knowing believing I know what things some of the things that can be let go of and what matters like early when I was a I don’t know research editor or maybe like position number two or three at G2 like I’ve gotten a promotion

I’m like leading an intern that type of thing we spent a ton of time creating like this big long 20 page style guide for the research team that ultimately nobody used and ultimately our readers didn’t really care if e commerce was hyphenated or the E was capitalized like as long as it was consistent and honestly even then how often do they notice these are things that I think matter in the very periphery but some of that stuff that we took so much time on didn’t really move a needle like that we couldn’t we spent a whole sprint or two on that to not see any business results

and so I’ve seen that in a couple of different areas for us at G2 we were spending a lot of time getting custom images on these organic driven blog posts that like we weren’t we didn’t see an uptick at all after we spent the money and the time getting all of these design versus just using stock images

like I hate using stock images I don’t think it’s the best experience but we weren’t seeing any meaningful metric change for the budget and the time and so there’s a lot of things like this where it seems like cutting corners or at least like former me would have thought of them as cutting corners

but now I think of it more as like efficiency and focusing where it matters there’s certainly some types of content that need to be over polished and perfect that white paper that you’re going to publish once and is a downloadable the research reports and things like that a lot of content like I found at someone who doesn’t scribe a couple of companies ago we were it’s like a a Chrome extension that Takes your something you’re doing and turns into a step by step guides and grab screenshots

and it was really just like a tool that the second someone heard about it Whoa I wish this existed last time I need to build a SOPs or something so they just go and try it out it doesn’t matter like what content you’re showing them as long as you’re telling them that this awesome thing exists

and we had this TikTok video that someone recorded with their screen like with their camera of the screens terrible quality that I would put like that word quality it was ugly the video editor in me the would have hated it but it was seen 1 6 million times it had it told the right story exactly how it was supposed to do

and it drove tons and tons of signups and revenue for scribe so was that high quality? No in the definition I would have had five years ago but was it optimize for that platform did it get in front of the right people and did it do its job? Yes so that’s where I have a different view of it

I’m also on the side of with some types of content you want just shots on goal a lot of people do programmatic whether it’s templates or certain landing pages and things and this is something I wouldn’t have done in the past but creating a lot of pieces where there’s low competition or you’re really finding like niche audiences looking for specific things

these are opportunities where maybe the every single thing doesn’t need to be created manually and with this high quality standard that I think people think of I’ve moved to a quantity play in many areas of content not in all things but my blog posts I want to create faster landing pages especially this like kind of programmatic I want to create much faster

I think a lot of people have gone because of AI I understand it two more of like quality fewer pieces and I’ll do that in certain pillars but there’s other areas where I don’t think that’s correct I think you actually need to have a quantity play because your competition is doing that with AI

and so you need to find ways to keep quality fairly high while going and spreading as wide as possible 

Ashley Segura: so how do you factor in the risk of choosing when to do something quality risk quantity like the example you gave with scribe which huge fan of scribe we use it at content yeah and totally love the tool but that one video that was so I don’t know

uX generated like it was humanly generated and very clearly not a lot of resources put behind I could easily see a marketing team reimagining that and thinking okay we need this kind of lighting in the background we need full production and doing the same exact concept so how do you manage the risk when you’re choosing?

An idea if you’re going to go with the let’s just get this out versus let’s really dive into this 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah luckily for me I’ve been at a bunch of early stage companies and so when you’re resource strapped and you’re looking for traction anywhere and so generally speaking there’s always somebody that’s

a little bit hesitant to do something that’s not fully baked or inexperienced but I’ve been at places where we’ve had more freedom to do this for Scribe it was like we weren’t growing at the rate we wanted what can we do? What will potentially have the biggest outcome? We didn’t expect 1.4 1.6 million views or whatever it was but we were hoping maybe for 20 000 views because there was nothing else we were doing that was getting 20 000 views

so TikTok you can see on other B2B platforms or videos that looked like they could fit with Scribe you could see something with 20 000 views let’s take a shot before we invest and go get a production company to do all this can we recreate that success for scribe? And so it was really about being scrappy and trying a V1

what does it look like? How do we even get this published? I think it was something like the third or fourth TikTok we’d ever published and so it was really like how can we test this channel this week? Don’t put money behind this just go and get it out the door and see what happens so I think there’s places where you can be experimental like that

tick tock was one of those for us I think with like where I’m at softer right now some of these like long for or long tail landing pages like we have a good one good landing page can I recreate a very similar version with a much smaller keyword where there’s not a ton of risk? I think it’s that risk verse

rewards so I’m looking for a place where something either won’t be very visible or we have no traction at all right now what’s the real downside prescribe if the video is a little low quality the messaging was still right we’re still getting there odds were that the tick tock video was never going to go viral

it did but like the we the worst case is a hundred people see it it’s not that good and we just deleted and move on and so I think it’s really that versus again if you’re going to put it An entire quarter’s marketing campaign behind that like research paper or whatever it is you can’t cut those corners there

so really I’m just weighing that that and but trying to be as experimental as possible in the early stages before we ramp up all those resources 

Ashley Segura: that makes a lot of sense it feels a lot safer especially being like on a platform that maybe you don’t have a ton of reach yet but enough to where you can get enough data to be like yeah this is effective or no this didn’t work

let’s strap it and actually put some proper resources behind it laney peaches are interesting though because you can definitely argue that Hey this is representing the brand and this is more like very conversion focused and going to be a lot more text heavy and it’s just it’s coming at an angle that isn’t as creative as something like a social video

so for your landing pages do you have a specific formula of when you’re mass creating them? Are they do they all have the same design layout and you’re just swapping out copy or? 

Jakub Rudnik: Yeah it’s more like that so that’s the same thing where I think getting the first one really in place getting like a really Great landing page that you believe in that you’ve tested and things

and then basically like dragging the spreadsheet with the copy and changing certainly the text and certainly visuals as well and that’s where you need that view like not it’s not a view one but you need like that great example that is tested and then you’ve done the keyword research on these other ones to go drag that

and I think the other piece like with this play and some others too is can’t I didn’t mention is can that piece of content be changed later? So this is where we’re like with blog posts I think I’m more free with cutting some corners and going faster than some other heads of content because like those

when I hit publish like nobody sees it this is like the journalist in me was like you publish it and it’s on the internet anyone can see and I think a lot of non marketers feel that way like a CEO going to your blog and asking why some things like it is no one’s read that this just got published but no one’s going to read it for months potentially or not many

so there’s very little risk there in those cases or the landing pages like we can wait for Google or our users to send us signals and when we’re getting more traffic or more impressions or something we can optimize make sure that something is really polished and so for me if for instance we published 200 landing pages in 1 day which I would never have done 5 years ago but now is like something I’m doing or thinking about doing

not all 200 of those at work but because I’m shooting a lot of shots on goal I can go find the 20 that are really working well make sure that those are tested and optimized while the other ones fall flat and if I’m only publishing 20 really polished I still won’t hit all 20 of those I’ll probably still only hit five or eight of those

I just want my shots on goal and I think I can optimize later for something like a landing page or a blog but again can’t do that with your white paper 

Ashley Segura: yeah the fear of publishing something and being like a thousand people are going to see this immediately then you look at your analytics and it’s four page views over a week

it’s oh okay people aren’t really so focused on it like we are but when it comes to metrics and really analyzing the success from blog posts to landing pages to social it’s going to be totally different and you’re collecting data to really identify if this quantity play was the way to go or not but is there one metric kind of like across the board regardless of content type that you first want to look at when you’re producing new pieces of content?

Jakub Rudnik: Yeah so for me on mostly written mostly own like on your own website so content blogs landing pages et cetera that’s where I focus and for me it’s like a funnel of metrics almost like on day one and two did this even get indexed? I’m just checking that and making sure that’s happening and forcing that through a search console if it’s not but that’s my very basics especially coming into a new company insight

is that healthy? And then I’m watching are we it’s like impressions and keywords an Ahrefs or SEMrush but those two are is Google Exploring putting us into a search and so that’s a good signal for me just like we said nothing’s going to happen on day one but in week one are we getting new keywords in month?

When are we getting new and are those the right keywords? And ultimately over the following months are those growing for like we’re doing this right now it’s after I’ve only been there six or seven months so those first like quarters worth of content went from indexed yes to keywords yes

and then the keywords kept expanding or jumping and now we’re seeing traffic and that’s like our next stage is someone actually coming to the page? Certainly there’s some stuff you can look at there are they on the page? What are they doing on those pages? How are they interacting? But then from there when we have traffic is it for us?

Someone signing up for a pre plan and then down the road Are they trialing the product? Are they signing up for a paid? So there’s like metrics to all of those really? I want those like first pieces are they are we finding ourselves in search in queries at all? That’s our impression right?

Or our keyword and then the next one is that traffic and from there I know I don’t know you’ll see this on LinkedIn all the time that like traffic for traffic’s sake whatever but as long as I’ve identified the right keyword it’s something that people would potentially use softer or scriber whoever for whatever your company is

if it’s the right keyword as long as I have traffic I can go optimize I can take what people are doing on the page and adjust my content so I just want to get to page one and then up those rankings and I do as well as I can ahead of time but I will never know how someone’s going to interact until they’re on the page

so I just want those pages out get that traffic and then we always are optimizing from there 

Ashley Segura: yeah you really can only do so much competitive research on what’s happening as of that day when you publish and what’s on page one but that can change drastically in three months when the post finally really takes off and you’re getting a lot of traffic you mentioned something that’s hugely important and I think a lot of people

miss the step or they hope the SEO team or they put on the SEO hat and maybe aren’t so much of an SEO but checking to make sure that it’s even indexed in the first place and make sure that it’s being found can you walk through like the very basic step of how you even do that? Cause that’s huge right there

Jakub Rudnik: yeah in our Notion database it’s one of my first columns is just a simple yes or no is this indexed? And when your website’s healthy this should happen pretty naturally but even now I still have one piece I cannot get to index and I I don’t know why so I’m still like working through this but the my typical playbook is just I hit publish and I’ll even grab the URL and go to search console and manually submit that to to search console for indexing

okay typically you don’t have to do that I’m sure somebody some people will frown upon doing that unless it’s actually like an existing page and you’re changing it but I’ve never had a penalty against that or anything so you could just wait as long as your URLs are being submitted to your site indexes

naturally like that will happen on its own probably just a couple of days late but again I’m going to search console I’m pasting the new URL in that top search bar and then there’s a I forget what it’s called but index request I believe is the button right on that page like the page will come up it’ll say it’s not indexed

all the texts will be gray you just submit that and then especially when I’m in my early stages when I’m not sure or stuff isn’t indexing very quickly I’ll just check those pages every couple of days like the things that have been submitted and see if they’re indexed they’re submitting to Google and indexing appropriately

once you’ve done this a couple of times like literally just a couple of pages Google tends to do this either again on its own or very quickly you’ll see things indexed within 24 to 48 hours so really straightforward but it’s something that I did wasn’t doing a G2 early and we were finding pages that hadn’t indexed for a week sometimes

and it was just something that obviously you want to get things indexing and ranking as quickly as possible and you just never know so that’s one of my first checks even if it seems pretty basic 

Ashley Segura: yeah that’s it’s basic but it’s so foundational going back into the quantity versus quality

so now we’re in AI and people are just like We’re back to mass producing tons of content then we have helpful content update then we have March core update and now we’re at this weird space of yes produce a ton of content but make sure it’s the best content you’ve ever done and it’s super helpful and make sure there’s five other pillar pieces to support it at some point in the user journey

where does AI fit into your workflow with all of this? Or are you not using AI for any of your workflows? 

Jakub Rudnik: No AI is definitely fitting in I think like it’s if I’m looking at these landing pages we’re putting FAQs on there and so luckily my boss is automation and AI heavy and no like very useful and collaborative

and she’s developed a a GPT that’s been very trained to be in software’s voice and be very helpful and like less repetitive and so an example that we’re testing is can we create these FAQs that are going to be repetitive and are just fairly straightforward a couple of short sentences there should just be really definition based so that I feel like it’s a good use case for AI

can we set up an automation that every landing page we’re creating has FAQs automatically generated through this custom GPT so one that’s one version where the average part of the landing page is either done like programmatically or there are manual parts of each landing page that we’re creating so we have distinct copy for that use case but there’s some sections of that landing page that are less important but we still want that content on there both for the user and how they’ll use software but also I think for some SEO value right?

The what is or examples or whatever that type of stuff that people fill in that don’t love but I think you have to put it in there or it can be an advantage on the margin so we’re creating it there other things are like definitely using it in outlining or especially in just ideation in general

sometimes I’m asking it like for examples of who would use something or features or problem and so we’ll get a lot of that research from users and we have big like databases of those things but sometimes you just don’t have like you need something else or it’s a new use case so I’ll use it just to get some tracks and get some ideas and hear that out

so I don’t know there’s others as well but I’m really using it to start using it in like some drafting can you just write me a subject line? Can you write me an intro here two sentences and then I’ll take that and reshape that so it’s really like first versions of things for me or using it in content that is repetitive

that doesn’t need a human writer that like exists already it’s very definition and factual and as long as the AI is correct we can tweak to make the language a little bit more natural 

Ashley Segura: yeah you just have the copy editing aspect of it which really is just making sure that this is brand correct and also factually correct but you have the GPT to really understand the brand tone and style

so it skips a lot of those initial steps of retraining it and retraining it so it sounds like you’re mainly using it for processes and then initial content every once in a while for FAQs 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah I think he’s in some other sections again the lower stake if you take a 1500 word article I think that there’s three to 600 words that are way more important than the rest

there’s like the setting the stage there’s some of the examples or the extra questions we want to answer that stuff does matter but it’s really we need one version of that the stuff that’s really about positioning your product that really the depth there that’s what we I want to be on or I want our product marketer on

and then I’m overseeing like that optimization but that’s the stuff that I would never have a touch but the other stuff that’s a little bit more generic that most blogs have I still want to reduce that but I think there’s some necessity to it and I can support you on the be one there 

Ashley Segura: yeah I think that alone is a huge takeaway is how much AI can support you

it’s still your journey it’s still your task load and it’s still your content creation but AI has been such a great support system to help you get to that finish line 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah definitely I like that 

Ashley Segura: yeah as we wrap up I would love to know what your current secret sauce is that one strategy tool or maybe even a recent book that you read that’s really been a game changer when you’re balancing quantity versus quality

Jakub Rudnik: yeah that’s a great question yeah I haven’t I was big into like content books and podcasts honestly I’ve taken a lot of this year off I had a kid this year I’ve been like trying to read more like novels and things and get out of content in some ways and just I think that’s been helpful is I did so much for four or five years

like it was all content all SEO and so now stepping away is let me have some space and prioritize so that’s not that doesn’t help answer your question but I think it has helped me in some ways is like freeing it up this is and so I don’t have a resource that I would recommend necessarily right now but me we talked offline I always spent two weeks in Europe and it was with the software team at an offsite and then working together

and that was really helpful just having some time but then over the last couple of weeks I’ve had time in airports I’ve had time walking around on my own and taking out my headphones and letting my brain wander rather than just listening to an audio book or a podcast I’ve had some of my best ideas and most impactful things there is like finding carving out real time to digest to think through

I think I’d been missing that for a few months so there’s probably other people like that like me who are content junkies you feel like if you don’t have your headphones in or you’re not reading something you’re wasting your time in your life and honestly taking just 30 minutes here and there twice a day or whatever

that maybe that isn’t even possible but even just a little bit of time it’s like really opened up and freed my brain a little bit over the last month so I would say that’s my like current secret sauce and hopefully that’s not a cop out answer 

Ashley Segura: no I think that’s a really good answer because it brings you back to reality

we’re Like just so infested with do this do that how to do this how to become this and how to get to the top of this and it’s constantly being thrown at our face that we’re like yeah okay we should listen to this podcast or we should listen to this new audio book and then start another book on top of that and subscribe to all these email newsletters

and it’s really in reality we don’t actually have time to digest all the information that we’re trying to like load into our brain so to be able to have those quiet times I’m sure you’re some of those thoughts that have been circulating or things that you may have learned three six or even 12 months ago that are coming through now and you can actually like digest that info and be like Oh light bulb moment

here we go 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah 100% I think the shower thoughts idea is very real and make sure you’ve carved out that time for that it just I feel like I somehow missed that or missed a lot of that didn’t have it like I used to so if you’re like me just take that minute like pause each day and I think it will open up some doors for you

Ashley Segura: I love it awesome thank you so much for everything that you shared today I really appreciate having you on the show 

Jakub Rudnik: yeah of course thanks Ashley thanks for having me 

Ashley Segura: awesome okay I am going to go ahead and press stop and we’ll just want to stay