Business potential: The most important metric in Content Marketing

For the past decade “Business potential” has been the most important metric (concept?) in Ahrefs’ content marketing strategy.

But have you heard about it?

Probably not.

I’m sure you’ve heard about many other “useful” concepts though: 

• Funnel stages (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu)
• Awareness stages (Problem aware, Solution aware, etc)
• Search intent (informational, transactional, etc) 
• Customer personas
• etc

Well. It's time to throw them all away. 

They are nothing but bogus debatable convoluted moot. They rarely help make good decisions. They often lead to lengthy unproductive debates. And might even mislead you in the end.

Instead, just ask yourself one simple question:

- "Can I persuade the reader of this article to buy my product?"

Nearly a decade ago I came up with this concept of "Business Potential," which we then implemented for Ahrefs' own content marketing team and have been using ever since.

And given that bootstrapped Ahrefs has crossed $100M in revenue (a while ago) and only has about 100 people on our team in total... I have to assume that (among other things) our content marketing strategy has worked out quite well. 🙃

For a bit of third-party validation, check out this 20-second clip of David Fallarme, VP Marketing at Owner.com, saying that this simple concept of mine is "changing lives:" 

So what is 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗣𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹?

It is a simple way to score your content ideas from 0 to 3, where:

(3) - Your product is an IRREPLACEABLE solution to a given problem.

(2) - Your product is very helpful, but not critical for solving the problem.

(1) - Your product can be mentioned, but it's not super helpful in solving the problem.

(0) - There's no way to shoehorn your product, while talking about this problem.

Your content strategy should be laser focused on topics with business potential of 2-3.

Once you rank at the top of Google for your first BP-3 topic I'm sure you'll see a noticeable increase in sales. But the goal is to own as many of BP-2/3 topics as you can.

And only after you've covered them all you can think of going lower, and even consider some "thought leadership" content, which typically has BP-0.

I first talked about the concept of Business potential in my “Blogging for business” course, which was first released back in 2018. Here’s a video lesson from that course, where I explain it:

(I used to call it “Business value” back then, but it’s the exact same thing.)

Tim, what’s your problem with “ToFu” though?

ToFu/MoFu/BoFu concept is incredibly common. And it’s very typical for a content marketer to bring it up in the conversation and even attempt using it in their content strategy.

But…

What is “Top of the funnel” anyway?

The definitions vary depending on who you ask, but essentially it means that the person is looking for some general information and they’re not ready to buy yet.

Well..

Who said they’re not ready to buy?

Let’s take a simple keyword like “teeth whitening.”

Is it ToFu? MoFu? Or BoFu?

The answer is: it depends.

1. I might search for it, because I’m not sure if I actually want to do it. So I want to know what the procedure is like, what are the risks, what are the costs, etc. That’s ToFu.

2. But what if I do want to do it, but I want to know my options: “take home kit” or a dentist. That’s MoFu.

3. But what if I’m in the mood to make decision on the spot? And if the article would recommend me a trusted dental clinic with good reviews - I’ll just go and book this procedure with them. That’s BoFu.

See where I’m going with this?

Nothing actually stops you from pitching your product to someone, who is merely doing their research about “teeth whitening.”

Hell, nothing stops you from pitching them veneers in the article about teeth whitening! Yes, it’s quite a stretch from one to the other. But the end goal is the same - to have a perfect smile. So you can take your shot at persuading them.

So there you have it.

I don’t want to be figuring out if a given topic is MoFu or BoFu. Those things are irrelevant.

All I care about is how likely I am to make a sale from this article.

And if I was selling veneers, the keyword “teeth whitening” would get BV-1 from me.

Hope it makes sense.