A regular discussion between online writers concerns article quality and quantity. If you want to build a brand as an author, the question doesn't arise. Your brand requires that you produce the best possible quality in writing. If you don't, your brand becomes worthless. Any quantity produced won't get you out of that. You have to produce quality in quantity to make an impact, to be precise.
Quantity and quality are frenemies. This is what you have to keep in mind when planning your writing schedule. You need quantity to make writing worthwhile in a monetary sense. You need quality to keep your readers interested in future articles. If you produce too few articles, your brand will play hamster in a wheel; if you produce them in bad quality, your brand dies a horrible but predictable death.
There are no clear rules quantifying quality or qualifying quantity. You will write as fast as you are able to and produce as many quality articles as your allotted time allows. The quality should be good enough to satisfy you. As a check, if an article is good enough you wouldn't mind showing it to your friends, then it is good writing. There are limits to the time you should spend agonizing over your articles. You don't compete for the Nobel Prize for Literature. You just want to produce stuff that readers enjoy coming back to.
So much for quality of style; or should I say felicity of style? There are other quality aspects to consider. Watch the quality of your content. The title of your article should have a bearing on its content. You won't impress readers by promising them one thing in the title and writing about something else in the body of the article. There are very few exceptions to this rule and applying them doesn't mean you make many friends on the way.
Watch the quality of the information you provide. If there are dates or measures included in the article, make sure that they are the correct ones. It can also be names; mistaking one end of a city for the other isn't funny. I once mixed up Manchester United with Manchester City; soccer fans were ready to kill me from either side. The fans of other clubs were having a long laugh, though.
If you use Wikipedia as a source of information, try to get another and more reliable source to confirm your content. Wikipedia is more often wrong than right, and sometimes the German text says something different than the French text and both refute the English version.
The same has to be said about many other online sources. Just do your best in verifying your information and sorting out the mess. If you have conflicting information and no evidence as to who is right and who is wrong, include all the information and the sources and let the reader decide what he thinks or knows to be right.
Last but not least, there is quality of service. As an author, you provide a service to the reader. That service should include some links leading to your sources, or to more material that touches on your chosen subject, or both.
It also means that you shouldn't be a snob. Just because you are used to measure distances in miles or in kilometers doesn't mean your reader shares your bias. North America and Europe are familiar with the continental divide. Include converted measurements for those readers that use other measurements.
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