No, your content does not need to talk about everything in the world. Remain relevant!

Call this experience. Call this a rant. But really, you need to stop thinking that content marketing means you need to talk about everything in the world and post it on your blog to drive traffic.

I usually break a content marketing strategy into two types of content – authority and a traffic puller.

The authority piece usually talks about what the product/ service is solving – preferably directly. And in some cases, indirectly.

The traffic puller is a content piece that is around something that the product/ service’s target audience is talking about. Yes, I’m talking about what’s trending but that does not mean jump onboard the celebrity news track!

For example, you have a product that enables freelancers to send invoices. (Reminds me to send mine. I’m probably running late again)

So you start writing blogs on payments, billing cycles, best practices, payment policies and more. You’re trying to equip the freelancer you want as a user with all the important information!

But at the same time, you also want traffic and not every freelancer is financially inclined. Look at me – I would send invoices only after my clients finally start sending me reminders. I am trying to fix this habit, but I just find the whole process so boring.

Now if you write an article around how I can boost my productivity on Friday with some concrete tips, you’ll have my attention. That’s a traffic puller for you!

But now if suddenly, you start to move from ‘x things as a freelancer’ or ‘x things to do as a freelancer’ to ‘how to reduce thigh fat’, you’re going off-track.

I mean, just because reducing thigh fat is big on search, it doesn’t mean it needs to find a place in your content marketing calendar.

Apply the same to a B2B software. You have a niche that has so much to share in and provide value to in different ways. But you choose to go the opposite way to write about something that your product or service isn’t remotely related to.

You’re going to fail at this in two ways.

One, you’ll end up driving absolutely irrelevant traffic on your site. Traffic that will probably bounce off your site the moment they realise your business has no ‘expertise’ on what you’ve written about.

Two, you’ll end up confusing your audience. They’ll never really understand what your business is about!

No, don’t you dare give me HubSpot’s example again.

I’ve heard a lot of ‘Look at HubSpot! They write on everything!’.

My answer to that is this. ‘Look at HubSpot closely! They write on everything that is tied to their massive suite of a product in one way or another.’

I mean, there’s a limit to selective understanding. Right?

You can’t be looking up to industry-leading examples, but looking into them properly.

If you’re worried about how you’d run out of things to write on if you stuck to what’s relevant, here’s a little hack that I use.

I create a mind map, putting the product/ service at the center of it and the questions that its audience searches for using simple prefixes – why, where, when, how, who and what.