We\u2019ve borrowed the term \u201cBarbell Strategy\u201d from Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>, a writer and quantitative financier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A concept commonly applied in financial investing, the Barbell Strategy allocates investments into two bins at the extreme ends of a volatility spectrum. Resembling a bimodal distribution<\/a>, you have one bucket of investments in safe assets (such as cash or bonds) and another bucket of investments in highly volatile, speculative assets (cryptocurrencies, stocks, options, angel investing). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Typically you\u2019ll index more heavily, say 90% of your investment, in low-volatility assets and about 10% in high-volatility assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By balancing your portfolio like this, you cap your risk of financial ruin while still participating in potential positive black swan events and unpredictable upside from the risky side of your portfolio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 90% of low-risk investments allow you to survive; the 10% allows you to capture optionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is in contrast to a \u201cbullet strategy,\u201d in which you\u2019re entirely invested in mid-risk investments, which Nassim Taleb argues actually hide much more risk than they appear because by taking the middle, or the bullet strategy, you\u2019re missing out on both safety and the potential of massive upside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This middle-brow strategy is the one that most content programs follow. You\u2019re squeezed to the middle of the pack, where competition is thickest and big wins are unlikely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First, before diving into what the Barbell Content Strategy<\/a> can look like in motion, let\u2019s establish the reasons for using it and our beliefs that make this an effective path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The barbell strategy, when applied to content marketing, indexes heavily on low-risk, keyword-driven content while keeping a flexible basket of speculative, experimental content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ll name these two types of content Product-Led Content and Buzzworthy Content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Product Led Content<\/a> is analogous to your safe assets, created with the intent of driving product signups or purchases. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each piece of content you plan and create<\/a> in the name of this strategy is done so with your product in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask yourself: \u201cDoes this content relate back to our product?\u201d If the answer is \u201cno,\u201d it\u2019s not product led content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean the content is all about getting people to buy your product, what you might consider \u201cbottom of funnel content.\u201d Product led content can span all stages of the buyer\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We think about the buyer\u2019s journey in three stages: awareness, action, and decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the aware stage, the buyer is still becoming aware of the problem they have or the topic they want to learn about. Examples of content that addresses the aware stage include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can see that most of the content answers \u201cwhat\u201d questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the action stage, the buyer is hoping to take action and seeks a deeper understanding of the next steps, or even how to do something. Examples of content that addresses the action stage include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more obvious action-oriented queries will show up in the form of how-to questions, but that isn\u2019t always the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the decision stage, the buyer has made a decision that they will do something and is trying to make the right decision. Examples of content<\/a> that addresses the decision stage include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you look back at the examples of content that address each stage of the buyer\u2019s journey, you\u2019ll notice that the queries aren\u2019t about any particular product, but they can be tied indirectly to a product the reader may be interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buzzworthy Content is speculative content that\u2019s created to attract backlinks, attention, social shares, partnerships, or connections. These goals might indirectly feed into business growth, but you should not try to directly attribute these activities to revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More now than ever, link building is a slog. Journalists, marketers, and writers get dozens of templated email pitches from people hoping to snag a backlink everyday (we get them too).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best way to get the job done is through content-led link building. You research what type of content is likely to generate buzz among influential publishers in your sphere and develop an outreach strategy to build links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To clarify, Buzzworthy Content can<\/em> end up driving leads or product sign-ups and Product Led Content can<\/em> drive links or heck, even go viral, but these are exceptional cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s helpful to have two discrete buckets to help you decide the singular goal of each piece of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea is to index heavily on predictable, known channels while keeping an experimental bucket open for unknown channels that represent nonlinear potential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes keyword-driven Product Led Content \u201csafer\u201d than speculative Buzzworthy Content? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The probability distribution of outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether a keyword\u2019s estimated monthly search volume (MSV) or purchase intent (usually measured via cost per click) is truly accurate or not<\/a>, the outcome of the post will roughly fall on a normal distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, if a keyword is estimated at 500 MSV, you can predict that it will probably fall within 300-800, and at least 100-1000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At a given keyword difficulty, you can get a rough estimate of how likely you are to rank for the keyword<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also build content growth models<\/a> to try to try to predict your traffic growth and calibrate your prediction accuracy over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where Product Led Content follows a normal distribution, Buzzworthy Content follows a power law. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This means most posts you produce won\u2019t demonstrate large tangible results, but every once in a while, a large success pays for the rest of the failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is similar to the approach in venture capital portfolio theory: what you\u2019re after isn\u2019t consistency of wins, but rather the effect size of a given win. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re trying to capture the upside of serendipity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For many years, website traffic distribution has followed a sharp power law<\/a>, and it seems articles that generate organic backlinks follow a similar law. Very few articles get the majority of backlinks and the rest of the articles get very few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just look at the results of any Buzzsumo content search:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Setting aside whether or not you want to write clickbaity content to get results, it isn\u2019t probable that you can repeatedly reverse engineer articles that achieve 100K+ social shares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why not simply produce only SEO-driven, predictable content, then?<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it could work for some websites, it\u2019s simply unlikely to work for you. Given the headstart your competitors might have had, you\u2019ll need to generate spikes of attention with Buzzworthy Content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You need something different enough worth sharing or linking to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unless you\u2019re already working at a company with a domain rating of 80+, you\u2019ll have to put in effort to build backlinks, capture attention, and get people to read your content. Once you amass some backlinks and authority, your Product Led Content can consistently generate returns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ve gotta build that content flywheel<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with an investment portfolio, your content portfolio will become more conservative with time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s because you won\u2019t need the leverage produced by Buzzworthy Content to build up your domain rating. That will allow you to improve your content economics by scaling up content production<\/a>, lowering the cost per article, and getting the flywheel to work to your advantage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n After enough time and effort, you\u2019ll be able to rank for pretty much any piece of content you publish, increasing the expected value of each article as the probability of ranking on page one of the search results increases and the cost of producing content decreases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mk0omniscientdiqrnx8.kinstacdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/barbell-content-strategy-1-1024x576.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Barbell Strategy for Content Marketing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Product-Led Content<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Buzzworthy Content<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Risk\/Benefit of the Two Content Barbells<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mk0omniscientdiqrnx8.kinstacdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/barbell-content-strategy-normal-distribution-fat-tailed-power-distribution-1024x576.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/WtjKKG8Eh02gADi3Hs5cj9e6Zg2hK_wOa2D_8iTeMTi5xubj0_0sqfu6SbAyoMQYo_AhD_ARAiH3pehn0fxO7J6V1JnIKm92X_OiSYkkudyVK5PWU-4kdt8LWY2lQfrUfavGELTe\")
Your Content Portfolio Will Change Over Time<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How will you adjust your content portfolio?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Content](\"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Content-Strategy-framework-1024x535.png\")
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