On 25 September I made a rule for everything NexBDM publishes: from October, we market two things only. NexBrand, the communications platform we set up and run for clients. And the Business Operating System, the one source of truth we build around how a business runs. Nothing else. Today is the thirtieth business post written under that rule.
Why I made the rule
I had been publishing a lot of useful posts. Explainers, compliance guides, tool comparisons. Each one was accurate and each one could be defended on its own. Read together, they said nothing about what we actually do.
A reader could finish ten of them and still not know whether NexBDM sells software, consulting or opinions. That is a strange outcome for a business that spends its days telling owners to stop running on scattered information. Our own writing had become scattered information.
So the rule was simple. Every business post had to lead to one of the two products, or it did not get written.
What the rule cut
The first thing it cut was topics I liked. Several ideas on the list were interesting, well searched and completely unconnected to NexBrand or the Business OS. They went.
The second thing it cut was news for its own sake. On news days the test was whether the story connected to a problem one of the two products solves. Most days nothing did, and the slot became a product post instead. That felt like a loss at first. Looking back, almost none of those stories would have mattered to a reader a week later.
The third thing it cut was invented stories here on the journal. Each journal title was planned ahead as a placeholder, and the rule is that it only runs if the week actually holds that event. At least a third of October's planned journal titles were swapped, either because the week did not hold that event or because the story sat too close to one already published. I would rather publish a smaller true story than a tidy made-up one.
What it changed in the writing
The posts got narrower and easier to write. When every piece has to answer "which of the two does this lead to", half the decisions are made before the first sentence. By the end of today the split is even: fifteen posts for NexBrand and fifteen for the Business OS.
It also made me notice how often a business problem is really one of two problems. Either messages and conversations are scattered across phones, inboxes and apps, or information about the work itself is scattered across spreadsheets and people's heads. Most of what owners describe to us lands in one of those two buckets.
What I do not know yet
One month is too short to say whether this brings more of the right conversations. Traffic is not the measure I care about here, and I am not going to pretend a month of data answers that question.
What I can say is that the discipline is the same one we ask of clients. Pick the one place the truth lives. Say no to the extra app. Make everything else point back to it. It turns out that is as true for a content plan as it is for a business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why would a business market only two products?
Because a reader should be able to tell what you do after reading a handful of your posts. Focusing on two products makes every piece point somewhere useful instead of spreading attention across unrelated topics.
Does narrowing your content lose you readers?
It may lose some casual readers who came for general explainers. The aim is to reach the owners who have the problem you actually solve, and give them a clear next step when they find you.
What do the two NexBDM products solve?
NexBrand brings WhatsApp, email, calls and social messages into one managed inbox. The Business Operating System gives a business one source of truth for its work, instead of disconnected apps and spreadsheets.