Don't Lose Your Content Focus

Good writers are hard to find. Even the good ones will miss occasionally deadlines or disappear when you need them most.

The result is often content for content’s sake.

You end up publishing a post that isn’t the quality you’d like. Or a post that’s only “sort of” related to your brand’s message, products, and offers.

There’s no harm in that, right? Wrong.

One of the least talked about but most critical elements of a strong content marketing plan is focus. Those posts that are almost on-topic or loosely related to your brand message can actually dilute your brand and confuse people about what you do—not to mention negatively impact your SEO.

Like it or not, you must focus your content, and that takes commitment and discipline from everyone involved.

To put it bluntly, great writing isn’t the hallmark of successful content marketing.

Focus is.

It’s time we get back to the basics. A strong blog focus will make the entire content creation process easier—and get you the results you’ve been looking for.

The Impact of a Loose Blog Focus

I get it. Talking about focus is easy. Finding your focus is hard.

That’s why you see high-traffic, industry-recognized blogs that still lack focus. When they started out, they didn’t know what their focus was. They were doing what we’ve all done, trying out different topics until they found what worked.

At some point, they have to focus. As do you. Because not focusing your content does more harm than good.

Lack of Focus Muddies Your Brand

What do you sell? What’s your site about? If your content doesn’t have a tight focus, you’ll hear these questions a lot.

That’s because there’s a disconnect between your content and your offers.

Content marketing is much more than branded publishing. It’s attraction marketing. If it’s doing its job, it should call out your best prospects and weed out everyone else. It should reflect your values, your voice, and your brand promise.

Tea box may be taking a loose-focus approach that, over time, could muddy their brand.

So How Do You Find Your Content Focus?

Sometimes your focus is baked into your brand. Tea box’s focus is tea.

But sometimes it isn’t so obvious. If that’s the case for you, these three steps can give you a head start.

1. Start With Your Products

If your content focus isn’t obvious, you need to reverse engineer it, starting with your top products/services or your core message. If you had to pick one “umbrella topic” that covers everything you do, what would it be?

That’s your core topic.

Next, jot down the supporting ideas and/or topics that you generally talk about when presenting your core message. These should be the topics or ideas that help you stand out from the competition.

If you aren’t sure, try answering these questions as you think about it:

• What do you do that’s unique to your brand?
• Why do you do it?
• How do you do it?
• Who do you do it for?

2. Tighten Even More

Based on your products, the discussions you have with customers, and the answers to the questions above, list two to five topics that are central to your brand.

For instance, Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout talks about traffic and conversion. SEO used to be its core topic, but since search algorithms have changed, it now revolves mostly around content.

The blog doesn’t use categories, but, if it did, they would probably be content, traffic, and conversion.

In most cases, you only want two to five supporting ideas. Your umbrella topic (core message) should be the main topic of all your content. That’s “what you talk about” as a brand.

Your supporting ideas should be the categories of your blog. Any topic or idea that falls outside this list should be considered off limits—your content should attract your best prospects… and no one else.

3. Keyword Research

Once you know the topics you’re going to focus on, you’re ready to pick the keywords you should rank for. My favorite tool for this is Ahrefs—using one tool, you can do keyword, content, and competitor research, making it easy to pick your target keywords.

Keep in mind, if you’re in a competitive industry, you may not be able to rank on Page 1 of Google for the generic topic you cover, but you can rank for long-tail keywords or for related keywords.

Now Do It

The number one complaint I hear from content marketers is, “We’re doing everything we’re supposed to do and it isn’t working.”

If you aren’t getting the results you need, the issue may not be style or format or even writing quality. It may simply be that you aren’t focused enough in the topics you cover.

Onsite and off, you need a tight focus for your content.

It’s tempting to create off-topic content simply to meet your next deadline or entertain your visitors. Don’t do it!

Find your focus and stick with it. A clear focus allows you to create higher quality content with less effort—and finally get the results you’re looking for.

What about you? Have you successfully found your blog focus? What’s your biggest challenge with narrowing the focus of your content?