Content territories: how to choose what you publish about

What is a content territory?

A content territory is a recurring area of public work that connects something you know to something your audience needs. "Leadership" is not a territory; it is a category. "Making architecture decisions legible to finance leaders" is a territory: it names the knowledge, the audience and the problem.

Territories sit between positioning and individual posts. Positioning says what you want to be known for. Territories decide what you will actually publish about, week after week, to earn that reputation.

The four tests of a good territory

• Depth: you can publish about it for a year without running out of genuine material.
• Credibility: you have experience or proof that makes your view worth reading.
• Relevance: a specific audience you care about has this problem.
• Direction: it moves you toward the reputation you want, not away from it.

A topic that fails depth becomes repetitive. One that fails credibility reads as commentary. One that fails relevance gets polite engagement from the wrong people. One that fails direction may perform well and still pull your reputation somewhere you did not choose.

How many territories?

Three to five works for most experts. Fewer than three makes it hard to stay interesting; more than five spreads your attention so thin that no audience associates you with anything in particular. If you have many interests, keep the extra ones as experiments with a small share, or as topics you deliberately do not position around.

Give each territory a target share

Assign each territory a percentage of your output so the shares add up to 100. A typical expert model looks like this: a core territory at 40 to 50 percent, one or two supporting territories at 20 to 30 percent, and a small experimental share. The numbers are not precise targets; they are a decision about balance that you can check against what you actually published.

Mark maturity honestly

• Core: deep expertise you can demonstrate. Most of your authority comes from here.
• Emerging: real knowledge with growing proof. Publish, and collect evidence.
• Experimental: a hypothesis. Small share, clearly framed as exploration.
• Incubation: not ready to publish. Keep learning first.
• Avoid: topics you are known for or could write about, but choose not to.

The avoid list is as strategic as the rest. Many experts are pulled back into an old identity because it is the easiest thing to write about. Naming it as a territory you avoid makes the choice explicit.

Common mistakes

• Choosing territories by what performs instead of what you can stand behind.
• Listing disciplines rather than problems your audience has.
• Giving every territory the same weight, which is the same as having no strategy.
• Calling an aspiration core expertise before the proof exists.
• Never revisiting the mix after real evidence comes in.

Revisit on evidence

Review the territory mix every few weeks, not every day. If a territory consistently earns the right kind of response, consider increasing its share. If the response comes from the wrong audience, or your depth turns out to be thinner than the interest, reduce it or invest in learning before publishing more. Record each change as a new version so you can see how your strategy evolved.

A worked example

A principal engineer who modernises legacy systems might choose:

• Incremental replacement of core systems: 60 percent, core. The destination and the strongest experience.
• Reducing coupling between old and new systems: 30 percent, core. The distinctive technical lens behind the first.
• Platform engineering for legacy-heavy teams: 10 percent, experimental. Real but shallower knowledge.
• Avoid: generic Kubernetes tutorials. Easy to write, but they pull the reputation toward tooling.

Each territory answers a different question for the same audience, so the posts do not repeat each other, and every one of them makes the positioning more credible.