A topic hunt usually looks across your whole business. Sometimes you want something narrower. Maybe you have a launch coming up, or a busy season, and you want every suggestion to be about that one thing. A focus lets you do that. When you start a hunt yourself, you can give it a focus, and all five topics stay on that subject.
This post covers how to start a focused hunt and how the focus works with your website profile and the topics you have declined. It also covers when a plain hunt is the better choice.
What a topic hunt does
A topic hunt reads your website profile and comes back with five suggested topics. Each one has a title and an outline. Hunting is free, so it never spends your credits.
You can start a hunt whenever you like. Each project also runs hunts on its own cadence: off, daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly, at an hour you pick. New projects start on weekly.
You add a focus when you start a hunt yourself. Your scheduled hunts carry on as normal and look across the whole business. So you can leave the regular rhythm alone and still get a batch of topics on one subject when you need it.
When a focus is worth using
A focus helps when one subject matters more than anything else for a while. A few common cases:
- A launch. You are shipping a new product or feature, and you want posts that explain it from different angles.
- A seasonal theme. A holiday, the busy time of year in your trade, or the start of a new term.
- A gap in your posts. You have noticed that one part of what you sell rarely gets written about.
- A question your customers keep asking. You want a few posts that answer it properly.
In each case you already know the subject. What you want from the hunt is five different ways into it.
How to start a focused hunt
The steps are short:
- Pick one subject. One launch, one season, one question.
- Start a hunt with that focus. Write the focus the way you would explain it to a colleague.
- Read the five topics. Check the titles and outlines against what you had in mind.
- Decline what does not fit. Add a reason, so later hunts learn from it.
- Answer questions on the ones you keep. These are the facts the agent could not find on its own.
- Approve the topics you want written. The writer starts on each one.
Writing a good focus
The focus is plain words, so write it plainly. A few tips help.
Keep it to one subject. If you put three subjects in one focus, you get topics that try to cover all of them. Run three hunts instead.
Be specific. "Our new booking feature" gives the hunt more to work with than "product updates". "Getting a garden ready for spring" is better than "spring".
Say who it is for, if that matters. A launch post for existing customers reads differently from one for people who have never heard of you. If you care which, say so in the focus.
Leave room for different angles. A focus that only fits one post will give you five posts that sound alike. If you would struggle to name five posts on the subject yourself, widen it a little.
How the focus works with your website profile
A focused hunt still reads your website profile. The focus picks the subject. The profile still says what your business sells, who it sells to and how it sounds. So a focused topic should still fit your business and your readers.
This matters most for a launch. If the thing you are launching is not in your website profile yet, the hunt has very little to go on. Update the profile first. You can edit it by hand in the Profile tab, which saves itself, or ask for an AI edit and accept or turn down the proposed version. Every version is kept, so you can restore an older one later.
The profile only changes when you change it. A focused hunt does not rewrite it, and nothing else does either.
How the focus works with declined topics
When you decline a topic, you can add a reason. Every later hunt is told what you declined and why, so it stops suggesting the same thing. That includes focused hunts.
This makes reasons worth writing, even short ones. A focused hunt tends to come back to the same corners of a subject. A reason like "too basic for our readers" or "we already covered pricing" steers the next batch away from that.
It works the other way too. Topics you declined in a plain hunt still count when you run a focused one. You do not have to repeat yourself.
Questions, credits and space
A focused topic can arrive with up to four questions, the same as any other. On a launch, these are often the things only you know: a price, a date, whether you support a certain integration. Answer them in the app and the writer treats your answers as facts from the business.
Questions are not a gate. You can approve a topic with them blank. The writer will then write the post so the missing fact is not needed, rather than guess it.
Approving a topic starts the writer, and writing a post uses 10 credits. While RankMill is in early access, each team gets 100 credits a month. If you approve all five topics from one focused hunt, that is 50 credits, half the month. Pick the ones you really want.
Watch your space as well. A project holds at most 20 posts that are not out yet, suggestions included, and no hunt runs while it is full. Before a launch, decline old suggestions you will never use, so the focused hunt has room to run.
If your project has its publish cadence switched on, suggested topics can be placed on the calendar without approving. A topic on a slot gets written once its questions are answered, or 24 hours before its slot if they are still open, unless Human in the loop is on. So decline any focused topic you do not want written.
When a plain hunt is the better choice
A focus is a tool for a specific moment. Most of the time, a plain hunt is what you want.
You have no subject in mind. If nothing is coming up, a focus just narrows things for no reason. Let the hunt look across your whole website profile.
You want to be surprised. A plain hunt can turn up topics you would not have thought of. A focus, by design, stays where you point it.
You want a mix. A blog that only covers one subject for a month can feel lopsided. Plain hunts keep a spread of topics coming.
The subject is already covered. If you have plenty of posts on your launch, more of the same will not help. Go back to plain hunts and let the declined list do its job.
You just updated your website profile. A plain hunt is a good way to see what the hunt now makes of your business as a whole.
A simple rhythm that works
Leave your scheduled hunts running for the steady flow of topics. You can see when each project is next hunting on the calendar. When something specific comes up, start a hunt yourself with a focus, review the five topics, and approve the ones that fit. Then let the regular hunts carry on.
That way your blog keeps its range, and the subject you care about this week still gets the posts it needs.