What the Heck is Pillar Content and Why Do I Need It?

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Contrary to popular belief, so-called pillar content on a blog isn’t just a few random How-to articles on, say, sex or whatever. Ok, it might be How-to articles on sex if you’re writing in the DIY sex niche.*

But most people write on other topics, not sex.

So, what is pillar content then?

The simple answer:

Here on Website In A Weekend, I’m writing about building a website in a weekend (surprise!) using WordPress. Most of the 250 published posts can be linked back to this concept. Certainly the 24 articles in the eCourse count as pillar content. But there’s another 77 articles. In fact, Website In A Weekend has 101 pillar content articles, all of which support the Website In A Weekend thesis.

How much pillar content is enough?

The short answer is: “It depends.”

If you’re in a very tightly defined niche, perhaps 5-10 articles would be enough.

If you’re in a broader niche, you might need considerably more material. 101 articles is probably a bit excessive, and a pretty good argument could be made that it indicates too broad of a scope. On the other hand, I’m comfortable with it and I’m doing fairly well, so it’s no big deal for me.

Here’s another way to think about pillar content: if you had to delete 75% of your articles from your blog, what you had remaining would be your pillar content.

It’s ok to pretend to delete 75% of your articles; you don’t have to actually delete them.

Here’s another technique: pick the 12 best articles on your blog. Those are your pillar content articles.

Here’s a couple more ways to choose:

• Interested in organic traffic? Pick the top 10 articles according to popularity with search engine traffic. That’s your pillar content. Now write more articles like those. Warning: search engines are fickle. Love them all you want, but don’t expect to get any lovin’ back.
• Maybe community is more your style. Find the 15 most commented upon articles on your blog. There’s your pillar content. Audiences can be fickle too. They require care and feeding. Careful what you wish for.

In the end, only you will be able to determine your pillar content, and how it supports your blog.

Create your pillar content

There’s two situations for creating pillar content:

1. you have started writing, or
2. you haven’t started writing.

If you have your collection of articles, how did you decide which were pillar content? Did you use any of the methods above? Or did you roll your own method?

If you don’t have a collection of articles already written for your blog, what’s your plan? Are you going to write your pillar content first? Or are you going to just write and write and write and see what pops out?

One way to get started on pillar content is to create your categories first, then leverage your categories into pillar content blog posts.

There’s no single correct method. What works best for you is the right way to proceed.

Your turn, tell us what you think.

*I ’spect most of us are reading in the DIY sex niche, but that’s off topic. I mean, off topic for Website In A Weekend. Go back now, before it’s too late.

Tagged as: Pillar content