The power of compounding content

OK, so I didn’t write every day, but I did publish 20 pieces in July, earning $200 on Medium. What I noticed is that, at the beginning, traffic depended on what I had published that day. However, over the course of the month the traffic kept building, like it was accumulating.

Each piece I wrote was good for me as a writer and good for that day, but over time they kept attracting interest, like money in the bank. This power of compounding interest is what makes writing every day so powerful.

To figure this out, I broke down the daily traffic for each post. Before we get into that, here’s the daily traffic that comes from old content vs. content published that day:

At the beginning what I post is what people would read. This is a hand-to-mouth existence — no writing, no reading. You can see that when I stopped for a few days the readers also disappeared. However, over the course of the month the work of each day started accumulating. By the end of the month, the vast majority of readers were reading ‘old’ content.

Here’s a closer look:

This is each post and its traffic over time. As you can see, a lot of posts have a second or third wind. And they all deliver a little bit of daily traffic over the month, forming a nice layer cake by the end of the month. If I keep writing the posts stack up, giving a higher and higher base every day. And of course this doesn’t stop at the month’s end. If you keep writing, that base of residual traffic will keep getting bigger and bigger.

This is the power of writing every day. It’s not just that it makes you a better writer. It makes your writing do work for you. In fact, if you write every day, you no longer have to write every day. The old content will carry you.

Of course I still try to write every day, because if you stop saving your investment will stop growing. But it’s nice to know the power of compounding content, especially connected to a clear monetization platform like Medium. In this business, reader interest is interest, and it compounds over time.