How to write great pillar articles for your blog

In order to build a successful blog content you need Pillar Articles. The concept of the Pillar Article is not new, as it have been mentioned in this guest post on Problogger back in February 2006:

Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

Moreover, the modern bloggers have moved to another step especially Nicolas Tart in his income diary blog post The Most Advanced Blogging Strategy I’ve Never Shared, explains why you should start with pillar articles with each category of your blog.

What Is A Pillar Article?

A pillar article is blog content, which is around 5.000 to 10.000 words, is cover each category or page of your blog and it is the framework to build the other secondary blog posts around. Through its interlinking creates a huge impact on the search engines and drives traffic as it is authority content. The pillar article is evergreen, long term and high quality and it is accompanied by videos.

The pilar post or pillar article is fundamental for SEO and every SEO company should start with it as soon as possible and then go to the link building process.

Pillar Article And The Rule Of Seven

The basic principle of the Pillar Article architecture is to get them to read seven blog posts, or to reread seven post, or to visite your blog without bouncing out for seven times.

The rule of seven is one of the oldest concepts in marketing. The rule of seven simply says that the prospective buyer should hear or see the marketing message at least seven times before they buy it from you.

Why? The main reason: they don’t know, like and trust you. Psychologists say that you need to get exposed to the perspective customer at least seven times before he considers you as a familiar or trusted person.

Build Pillar Articles For Every Category On Your Blog

Basically, take your primary blog topic, usually your blog topic or site topic is the market niche you are in and then split it up into categories or sub niches.

You should have already done this to create categories for your posts. The next step is to make your market research so you would have all the resources to write a compeling and better post than the competition. Take your time.

When you are ready, write a 5,000-10,000 word, ultimate resource blog post for each category.The question here now is: Is there a limit of how much would be the length of the pillar post?

There is no limit on the length of the pillar article as soon as it is easy to read, so use simple language or the topic is very popular and could go viral.

Here are a few ideas of creating pillar articles:

[Category]
Top 101 Tips for [Category]
How to [Category]
[Category] 101
The Ultimate Guide to [Category]
[Category] for [Your Audience]
Basic Principles of [Category]

You have to create some master resources and establish expertise for your nince. As Google says, establish E-A-T, people will start visiting your blog and will start to trust you.

The first cardinal rule of personal branding is to position yourself as an expert to your potential customers.

Then Create Articles For Each Topic Within Your Pillar Articles

After you had created a few ultimate resources on your blog, it’s time to split those ideas into secondary articles that go into extreme detail on each topic.

For instance, let’s say we create a post on ParaMarketing Blog titled, Make Money Online. It would be difficult to get that post ranking well in search because “make money online” is such a competitive keyword.

It is better to find long tail keywords for every tip or write secondary posts that will reply to customer’s questions and would about 1200 words each.

After writing at least 30 posts, you will start to get traffic from the search engines and from other sources that will link back to you because your content will be linkable!

Interlink Your Pillar Articles and Secondary Articles

Internlinking is an on site SEO strategy, quite important when search engines crawl your site.

Orphan pages is not receiving any search traffic due to the fact that are not easy to crawl by the search engines.

Help the spiders to crawl your site fast. Try to interlink every page to other pages you have on your site, especially the page with the pillar article by using relevant keywords.

Be careful with the total internal links not to pass the 100.

Google believe that more than 100 links per page or post looks suspicius and you can be considered as a spammer and you site will start to devaluate.

Point Pillar Article to a Squeeze Page

Squeeze page or landing page is a page that a visitor had reached your website according to Google.

It is wise to start building an email list from day one, when you start building your website.

The email list will starts to capture the first leads. These leads later can be transformed into potential clients.

A visitor need at least seven times of contact, or seven times to visit your website in order to feel that you are familiar to him.

After building this type of rapport, maybe they will come to you to ask for your products or services.

Add to your website some subscription forms and some meta boxes.

Implement This Strategy for Each Pillar Article in Each Category

The benefit of following this pillar article and secondary article funnel strategy is that you can use it for every category. It’s like creating mini-networks of content within your blog. And each time you add a blog post, the mini-network becomes stronger and more valuable.

Not to mention, all of your pillar articles will begin climbing the search engine ladder for those competitive keywords.

Over time you’ll become the trusted authority in your niche and everyone, including big-budget corporations, will come to you with their questions.

How Do You Create A Pillar?

There is no exact formula for producing an article that will become a pillar, however there are definitely some key characteristics you can work on. You may be surprised when articles you write become pillars when you didn’t expect it, or the reverse where you pour your heart into a great article and it doesn’t do much for your traffic at all.

Here are typical pillar article concepts that you can post to your blog:

1. The “How-To” Pillar Article

This is a staple pillar article concept. Think about your industry and write an article that teaches how to do something in it. Be certain to only write how-to articles on topics you genuinely understand how to do and have experience with.

It should be reasonably obvious which how-to topics are popular and relevant to your audience and which you feel capable of explaining well. Remember to tell a story if you can!

For example, if you are in Network Marketing, write about How to succeed in Network Marketing.

2. Make Your Own Definition Article

Many industries have key concepts which new readers won’t know. If a concept is complicated, produce a pillar article that defines the concept, clearly explaining what it means and how it can be implemented.

There is plenty of room in creating a new guide or product or e-learning course in almost every industry.

It’s always smarter to include your own version of a definition if you are capable of explaining a term or concept, rather than link to other sites and drive traffic away from your blog.

3. Create a resource like a free report

This is one of the most plausible pillar concepts in internet marketing. A document such as a whitepaper (a small document, 2-30 pages, which teaches how to do something) or a series of articles combined to create a course, or even a series of free videos is a fantastic pillar.

If you can’t decide what is the best method to distribute your free resource, my suggestion is to offer it in as many ways as possible. Make a PDF available for download, publish the articles individually and make them available from an email list too. ALso produce a video lesson, accompanying the pillar article. This would be the pillar video. That way you maximize your exposure and cater to the widest possible audience.

The important thing with this concept is to create a complete all-in-one solution to a common problem. Similar to the how-to article, a free resource is a powerful pillar concept because it demonstrates your expertise and brings in consistent traffic.

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