It’s a Game of Compounding

There's one thing about our business—the business of building blogs, niche websites, and online media outlets as a whole—we often overlook.

It's a game of compounding.

You won’t see hockey-stick growth on a website by publishing just one article, even if it’s the best article you could possibly produce. You'll see it by publishing many articles, ideally grouped by topic for relevance and interlinked for discoverability.

Similarly, building just one link to your website, even if it's of the highest quality link you could possibly build, won't give it much of an SEO boost. Link building yields outcomes if it’s ongoing and methodical, bringing in backlinks with diverse anchor texts from real sites with authority and traffic to the pages that need them.

A single on-page SEO hack you just learned from your favorite YouTuber probably won't catapult your page to the top of the SERPs. But regularly optimizing your high-traffic content and performing technical SEO audits of your entire website likely will.

But don't forget that compounding can also work in the opposite direction (as it often does).

If you leave a website untouched for too long, it will eventually begin to lose traffic. Competitors with higher domain authority will get "inspired" by your keyword research and produce content to compete with your best pages. The information on those pages will age, and Google will start to favor other sites, even if it’s on an evergreen topic.

Neglect link building for an extended period, and over time, those same low-authority websites you began with will surpass you because they’ve built more (and better) backlinks than you over time. You'll lose momentum, and regaining that momentum takes time and money.

Compound. Build momentum.

This understanding is particularly important if you manage a portfolio of multiple sites.

Building momentum and getting compounding to work for you becomes more challenging when your attention and capital is spread out across more than one property.

Determine the minimum needs for content creation and link building for each of your websites. Once you've done that, decide whether to grow all of your sites at the same time or to focus on growing one while keeping the lights on the others. And ground your decisions in the cyclicality and seasonality of your site’s niches.