A Guide To Compounding Blog Posts: Increase Your Blog Traffic Month after Month
What if you could write a post that people loved so much, they kept sharing it month after month?
You could take a vacation; give your blogging fingers a break for a while. Heck, you might even be able to go outside for a minute.
Can you imagine how much traffic a blog like that would create? Unfortunately, some things are just too good to be true, right? Wrong.
It’s entirely possible to produce blog posts like this. There’s even a name for them: compounding blog posts. Designed to produce perennial traffic, compounding blog posts are capable of generating the same amount of interaction and attention as six so-called “decaying” posts.
Fortunately, creating these posts isn’t even as difficult as it seems.
Read on to learn more.
The Difference Between Compounding Posts and Decaying Posts
Compounding posts are like fine wine and decaying posts are like a three-day old cheeseburger: one is a lot more appealing than the other. Additionally, one gets better with time and the other doesn’t. Compounding blog posts command more attention as they age. They produce more visits and generally include authoritative words that reflect common search terms. If you needed more convincing, compounding posts are responsible for producing a whopping 38% of overall blog traffic.
Decaying posts, on the other hand, glean less traffic as they age. They are far more common, however, and make up roughly 9 out of every 10 blog posts. Unlike their more glamorous cousin, decaying posts don’t add value to your site and may even drive readers away based on poor content or sub-par execution. Obviously, the smart content marketer wants to stay away from that three-day old cheeseburger and grab a glass of fine wine instead, right? Right.
How to Create Compounding Blog Posts: The 4 Pillars of Great Posts
Fortunately, writing compounding blog posts is not as difficult as it may seem. Like most things in content marketing, compounding blog posts follow a somewhat predictable outline and, in order to write a compounding blog post, the smart content marketer simply needs to know what that outline looks like. Generally, a compounding blog post needs 4 things:
1) A Great Topic: When it comes to creating compounding blog posts, you want your topic to be broad. This is because narrowly focused posts lose attention over time and decline in value – except for a small category of niche individuals who may display continued interest. Broad topics, on the other hand, are interesting for a wide variety of audiences and are capable of drawing attention for a long period of time. Although narrowly focused blogs have their place in the blogosphere, they generally aren’t the go-to type of content for compounding posts. In addition to boasting a broad topic, compounding blog posts also need to offer tactical advice.
This means that they should help readers make decisions, solve problems or learn new things. Examples of content like this include product reviews, instructions and how-to articles. These posts should be authoritative and welcoming all at once and should be thoroughly researched and fact-checked, so as to avoid disseminating improper information.
2) A Smart Title: When creating compounding blog posts, a great title is essential. Ideally, this title should reflect common search terms and seek to answer customer questions. People are most likely to click on the search engine result that best match their queries, so think about how people ask questions when it comes time to head to Google. When people are looking for answers, their Google searches generally begin with “how do I….” or “what to do when….”. When they’re looking for information, on the other hand, queries generally resemble “the best X, Y, Z” or “Highest-selling __________________.”
That said, the titles of compounding blog posts generally contain the words “How,” “Why,” “What” and “Best.” Considering common search terms while writing your blog titles is an effective way to incorporate common SEO practices into your content. Keep in mind, also, that marketers have found that compounding blog posts often have 6-13 words in their titles.
3) Great Content Structure: It’s unlikely that clunky, difficult-to-read content is ever going to become a compounding post, so keep that in mind as you devise your content structure. The piece should be easy to scan and laid out in a user-friendly fashion, with headers and subheaders to break up content and separate ideas. Additionally, the post should make ample use of visuals, headlines marked out in bold, bullets, lists and high-quality links. These are all ingredients of great content and serve to make the piece more valuable and useful for your customers.
Additionally, great content should be tailored to your target audience’s preferred word count. Most research suggests that the ideal word count for a blog post is roughly 1,600 words. This takes a reader about 7 minutes to complete and is short enough to maintain attention while also being long enough to cover the topic at hand.
4) Unique Information: In order to stand out and become compounding content, your blog post needs to present information in a decidedly useful and helpful way. This means that your post should help customers learn new things and solve problems. Additionally, it should drive awareness and be formatted in such a way that people want to share it.
Learning from the Best: HubSpot’s Compound Post Analysis
HubSpot is a popular inbound marketing and information platform for content marketers around the world. Although it may seem like successful organizations such as this are immune from worrying about compounding or decaying content that simply isn’t true. When HubSpot began to see the term “compounding blog post” popping up around the web, they did a bit of research into their own content.
Over the next several months, they learned that content above 1,000 words receive the most social attention on their site and that posts with 2,000 words or more generated more social shares. According to the results, HubSpot devised a plan to fill in the gaps in their seemingly impervious content marketing strategy. The results are fascinating and, for the interested content marketer, there’s a lot to learn from their pledges. After the results of their internal studies came in, HubSpot vowed to do the following 4 things to improve their content:
1) Write Longer Posts With Tactical Information
After researching their customer base, HubSpot learned that readers wanted content on the topics of content marketing, design and branding. By focusing on those topics and catering to their audience’s preferred word count, HubSpot stands a good chance of getting more bang for each post’s buck.
2) Write Short Posts With Infographics
Did you know how well infographics perform in content? Posts with infographics are liked and shared 3 times more often than other content. HubSpot knows this and, as a result, they’ve pledged to create occasional short content that offers interesting infographics. These posts are easy to write but draw massive engagement from readers.
3) Track Promotions
Like many content marketers, HubSpot uses social media platforms (Twitter and LinkedIn, in this case) to promote the brand. In a move that most marketers could stand to mimic, HubSpot has committed to tracking these promotions in order to ascertain which brings in more quality leads.
4) Keep Reviewing Compounding Posts
To cap it all off, HubSpot has committed to reviewing their compounding posts and updating content that may be irrelevant or outdated. Repurposing content is a great way to get more use out of those hard-won pieces and, when done correctly, can actually boost your blog traffic.
The Case for Compounding Blog Posts
There you have it – compounding blog posts are effective at driving traffic and they aren’t all that difficult to create, either. By simply abiding by the 4 pillars of great content and seeking to learn from the pros when they audit their own compounding post dynamics, content marketers can begin to shy away from decaying posts and begin creating perennial content that will retain value for months to come.
In addition to being a better use of time, energy and resources, compounding posts are also more valuable to clients and consumers. By offering tactical information in easy-to-read packages, compounding posts provide unparalleled quality for your reader, which in turn serves to make your site stand out from the competition.