Content that compounds: choosing topics worth the effort

Most content is spent rather than invested. It is read once, in the week it is published, and then it is a page nobody visits. A smaller amount keeps being found months later, because it answers a question people keep asking.

The property that makes content compound

Three conditions have to hold at once, and content that misses any of them is spent.

1. There is a durable question. Someone will still be asking it in two years. “Which of these two approaches should I use?” is durable. “What changed in our product this month?” is not.
2. It remains findable. It answers something people search for, or it is linked from somewhere that keeps being visited. Content nobody can reach is published, not distributed.
3. It stays true. It does not depend on a price, a version or a person who will leave. Where it does, it needs maintaining, which is a cost most content plans do not budget for.

Topics that usually compound

• How to do a specific task, completely. The piece a practitioner sends to a colleague. Depth is the moat, because a shallow version is easy to replace.
• Comparisons and decisions. “Which of these should I choose” stays useful as long as both options exist, and it attracts people at the moment they are deciding.
• Definitions of a confusing term. People search for the term they have just heard, and the explanation does not go stale.
• Reference material. A checklist, a template, a table of options. Objects get bookmarked and shared; essays get read and forgotten.

Topics that look productive and are not

Commentary on news. It has a short half-life, it competes with everyone, and it dates the moment it is published.

Opinion pieces about the industry. They are read by peers rather than buyers, which is fine if peers are the audience and a poor use of time if they are not.

Anything requiring a number you will have to update. Pricing guides and statistics roundups are the highest-maintenance content there is, and the maintenance is invisible until the page has been wrong for a year.

Content written for a keyword rather than a question. A page built around a search term with nothing to say answers the query badly, and its performance decays as search engines improve at judging that.

Why a small number of good pieces beats a schedule

Publishing on a schedule produces consistent output and consistent mediocrity, because the constraint becomes the calendar rather than the question. The alternative is to publish when there is something worth saying, which produces fewer pieces and a higher proportion that keep working.

The exception is where the audience expects a rhythm: a newsletter, a series, a column. There the consistency is the product, and the pieces are spent deliberately.

Maintaining what you have

Compounding content needs an owner and a review date. The practical version: list every page that makes a factual claim or includes a number, and check them on a schedule. A page that used to be right and is now wrong is worse than no page, because it is being found by exactly the people you want to persuade.

Where a page has decayed and cannot be maintained, consolidating it into a better page and redirecting is usually better than leaving it. The redirect preserves whatever value it accumulated.

Measuring whether it compounded

The measure is not total sessions on the blog. It is whether a specific page is still being found a year after publication, and whether people who arrive at it do something. The general approach is in measuring marketing honestly, and how pages get found at all is in SEO basics.

How to choose a topic you can own

Owning a topic means being the best answer for it rather than the only answer. The test is whether you can say something on it that a competitor cannot easily copy: a method you actually use, data you collected, a constraint you understand from experience.

Where you cannot own the topic outright, own an angle inside it. The practitioner angle, the small-team angle, the version for people who have already tried and failed. An angle is cheaper to establish than a whole subject and it converts better, because it selects the reader who has that problem.

The other half of ownership is internal linking: each new piece should point back to the set it belongs to, so that a reader who arrives at one finds the rest. A site of unlinked pages competes with itself.

Editing, which is where compounding content is usually lost

The difference between a piece that keeps working and one that is read once is almost always visible in the editing. The compounding version answers the question in the first paragraph, uses the reader terms rather than internal ones, and states its scope so that the reader knows whether it applies to them.

The practical edit: read the first paragraph and ask whether someone who only read that much would have been served. If the answer is no, the rest of the piece is decorating an introduction.