Creating content: It's always about your audience and never about you

From the Daily SEO Blog: 

If you're planning to succeed in your content marketing efforts, there is one big thing that you have to understand right from the start: it's not about you. It's never about you. It's not about your company. It's not about your product. It's not about your service. It's not about how great your company/product is. It's not about the amazing charity work your president does. It's not about how fun it is to work at your company. It's NEVER about you. And the minute you try to make it about you, that's when you lose their trust, and that's when you lose another potential customer 

Repeat after me: It's ALWAYS about them, never about you. This is content marketing. It's not sales, and it's not advertising. If you want to do sales and advertising, that's perfectly fine, but just don't do it in your content marketing. Write for the reader, always.

My two cents: Yes, it is always about the reader. Content should always focus on what the audience will want and will need to know. But if you don't think content is about sales, don't ever tell your clients. I guarantee clients believe creating content is about sales -- or they wound't pay you to generate content.

If you can't deal with that, but want to stay in the game, here's a suggestion: Think of what you do as the first stage of diffusing an innovation. It just happens that the innovation is your client's product and the diffusion process leads to sales.