{"id":3620,"date":"2023-12-12T15:25:25","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T20:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/?p=3620"},"modified":"2024-11-08T14:24:19","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T19:24:19","slug":"applying-financial-concepts-to-content-portfolio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/blog\/applying-financial-concepts-to-content-portfolio\/","title":{"rendered":"Field Notes #066:\u00a0 Applying Financial Concepts to Your Content Portfolio"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Content should be treated like a portfolio of bets. Similar to how a financial portfolio of stocks involves asset allocation, monitoring, and rebalancing, so should a content portfolio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We take this approach with our barbell content strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some content is meant to satisfy search intent and align with search engine queries. Someone searching for a given query wants to accomplish a goal. That might be to evaluate products (BOFU), learn how to accomplish a task (MOFU), or educate themselves on a topic at a high level (TOFU). That content tends to be optimized to be distributed through search engines (SEO). These feel like safer investments for growth, like index funds, because there’s a straightforward distribution channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other content may be written based on questions from or discussions with your customers or original research. This content might be more \u201cbuzzworthy\u201d and may not directly align with a search query, so it’s less likely to be distributed through search engines. That means they require active distribution, say through social media channels, paid ads, email, or even one-to-one conversations. Because they require active distribution, they’re less likely to get compounding passive returns in traffic and leads. But if a handful of them get traction, you\u2019ll be rewarded with traffic and backlinks. Because of that, you can consider these to be \u201criskier\u201d bets. You have to make a bet that what you have to say about the industry will resonate. Think of these like picking stocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your content portfolio is likely diversified<\/strong> and has a mix of these two types of content and a little bit of other stuff mixed in (company and product announcements, customer spotlights, employee spotlights, interviews, etc.). Whether intentionally or not, someone made these asset allocation<\/strong> decisions at some point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diversification is good<\/a> because it allows you to place bets on multiple types of content and topics (like stocks) to understand what will perform best. From this point of view, asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s the expected ROI on a piece of content?\u201d is like asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s the expected ROI from this one stock in this investment portfolio?\u201d You can\u2019t predict it, and it just doesn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, unlike a financial portfolio, the ends of the content barbell are synergistic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every website needs a strong domain rating, topical authority, clean website architecture, and backlinks to rank. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, people rarely reference or link to educational content, the ones that are often written to satisfy a search query. These tend to be more dry, informative, and even highly technical. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s where the \u201criskier,\u201d buzzworthy content does the work. This content tends to be opinion-and research-driven and often gets referenced and shared, resulting in backlinks, social sharing, and increased topical authority. This enables the website pages to rank higher in the search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as with financial portfolios, you should monitor the performance<\/strong> of your content portfolio on a regular cadence to identify opportunities to optimize or rebalance<\/strong> the portfolio (unfortunately, we don\u2019t have a content index fund to invest in passively \ud83d\ude43)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebalancing a content portfolio might involve updating or removing outdated or non-performant content, increasing focus on high-performing content types, or exploring new content strategies to align with current market or industry trends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example: <\/p>\n\n\n\n