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Pillar content is the foundation, the cornerstone of any content-driven website, including blogs. If your website were a fleet, the pillar content forms the flagship. Creating, publishing and maintaining pillar content is critical for founding an influential, widely-read blog.

But it’s not strictly necessary for getting started.

Website In A Weekend was started without having developed pillar content. The first post (post id 1) on Website In A Weekend was the first version of this article and contained only links to the top 6 results for the search “Pillar Content” on Google.

That was far too short. How much value are you going to find in a short article about pillar content? This article now runs over 2200 words at the current revision. Much more useful.

Between that first version (early 2009) and now, 512 articles have been published on Website In A Weekend, many of which could qualify in length and depth as pillar or flagship content. For example, the article “Choose 3 to 7 Posting Categories to More Effectively Focus Your Writing” provides a great method for generating categories in a bottom-up fashion, by sorting article titles according to like topics. Creating your pillar content can be done in the same way: use your categories to write longer, in-depth articles that cover the entire category as one topic.

Here’s how to do it.

First, put on some excellent music that gets you in a creative mood. My personal choice for the moment is Ben Watt’s Buzzin’ Fly 4. Ben Watt, formerly of “Everything But The Girl,” regularly produces high quality disks chock full of superb, melodic, deep house. Buzzin’ Fly, the whole series, has just the right amount of uptempo and melody to drive my productivity really high.

You might want to fix yourself a cup or tea or whatnot as well. This is going to be intense. My faux Danish designer coffee mug is already full with a 4 shot of Catahoula Sumatra espresso and heavy cream, made stovetop in my Bialetti Moka Express (love that thing!), so I’m a little ahead of you already.

We’re going to break this down step-wise; let’s get on with it…

Creating pillar content from categories

Given that you have finished the the title and category exercise linked to above, here’s how to create pillar content:

1. Make a list of these categories.
2. Add a single topic sentence for each of these categories. This topic sentence should be around 125 – 140 characters long to fit in a Tweet and an SEO meta description.
3. Write an introductory or teaser paragraph for each category.

Here’s mine:

Getting Started

Getting started with self-hosted WordPress is easy: WordPress is free, and most hosting companies have automatic installation.

Building Traffic

Building traffic to your website requires a host of techniques ranging from free search engine optimization to paid advertising, and many techniques in between.

Creating Content

Creating high-quality content to attract and retain loyal readers is an easy-to-learn skill, but requires hard work and dedication.

Extending WordPress

WordPress is easily extended in several ways, from installing pre-programmed plugins, to writing customized code using the easily learned PHP scripting language.

Making Money

WordPress makes an excellent small business website platform for businesses ranging from pure internet marketing to locally-owned brick-and-mortar hair salons.

Maintaining WordPress

Maintaining WordPress is so easy many people immediately several WordPress blogs!

Being Social

New social networking tools integrate well with WordPress to enhance your presence on the web.

Securing WordPress

WordPress is incredibly secure considering the huge number of WordPress installations (over 15 million) and the size of the source code to WordPress.

If you’re reading along as write this article, you will notice that my category names listed in this article don’t match my category names for the Website In A Weekend blog… yet. That’s a future task that’s going to require a bit of web server magic. Expect to see an article on it in the future, once I update the blog categories. As an exercise, tell me the difference between those above and those on the blog, and I’ll give you 30 minutes of free WordPress or writing coaching. Send me a link to the rhetorical device I’m using, get an hour… 2 hours for the Latin name (offer expires Midnight PST Feb 4, 2010).

Driving category content with teasers

Now that you have your categories with one sentence definitions, it’s time for Step 2: digging deeper into each category. Using the technique explained in “Writing For Readers — 5 writing styles for maximum impact,” use each of the list items above as a sectional header for one or more paragraphs. Each of these paragraphs will serve as an “abstract” or “executive summary” teaser, explained in the article “Writing Effective Teasers: Inspiring people to [Read more...]“. Use the topical sentence from above as a basis for your summary (we’re going to use this topical sentence again, so don’t lose it). At the end of each summary, provide a link to a full-length article going in depth for each category. These long articles will form the basis for your pillar content.

Onward!

Getting Started

Getting started with self-hosted WordPress is easy: WordPress is free, and most hosting companies have automatic installation. Probably the highest hurdle for most people is simply deciding to take action… once you have decided to take action, you will be surprised at how easy it really is!

Website In A Weekend has a whole series of articles on getting started with WordPress, you should read them all.

Building Traffic

Building traffic to your website requires a host of techniques ranging from free search engine optimization to paid advertising, and many techniques in between. The easiest way to start building traffic is to create high quality content, get that content indexed by search engines (see related articles here), and let time take it’s course. Longevity is important on the internet, and the longer your content is on the web, the better search engines are going to like your website.

There are many other ways to build traffic, including paid advertisement, organic backlinking by people inspired by your content, backlinking from comments and posts you have made on other forums, and many other ways.

But in the long term, engineers from Google assert that quality content rises to the top. You may be able to get top search results without quality content, but you won’t keep top billing without quality content.

Creating Content

All writers, whether on the internet or off, agree that long term success comes from unceasingly delivering high-quality content. You’re only as good as the last piece people read. Fortunately, creating high quality content isn’t that difficult to learn. However, it is a skill, and it does take practice. On the internet, your primary “readers” are, initially, search engine crawlers. So your content has to satisfy their demands as well (WordPress makes this easy, as noted by Google engineer Matt Cutts).

Watch for an upcoming article on how to develop your own system for rapidly creating high-quality content. In the meantime, a whole series of articles on productivity at There Is NO Box will get you started.

Extending WordPress

WordPress is easily extended in several ways, from installing pre-programmed plugins, to writing customized code using the easily learned PHP scripting language. Plugins are the most common ways to extend WordPress capabilities, and there are thousands of plugins to choose from.

For those wanting to go deeper, writing custom plugins is not difficult, and there’s even a book just published: WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide. The author, Vladimir Prelovac, is an expert WordPress developer and a great theme designer.

For those wanting to get to the bottom of all this WordPress stuff, the source code is Free Software, and you may examine it, change it, learn from it however you will. Fortunately, WordPress is founded on PHP and MySQL, which are relatively easy to learn to program, even for non-programmers.

Check out the articles on recommended plugins here on Website In A Weekend, and watch for upcoming articles on plugin development and WordPress core tweaks.

Making Money

WordPress makes an excellent small business website platform for businesses ranging from pure internet marketing to locally-owned brick-and-mortar hair salons. Using WordPress frees small business owners from paying for trivial changes to their websites, such when they raise the price of a haircut.

Marketers are able to rapidly switch copy, which is useful for introducing new products, and for testing existing sales copy to determine best conversion rates.

The money-making capabilities of WordPress have hardly been exploited, so watch for more articles on this topic in the future.

Maintaining WordPress

I put my first web page up in 1994. There has been a lot of technology developed in the last 15 years, but I firmly believe that WordPress is as much a “game changer” as Google has been, and as Twitter is shaping up to be. It’s not just the ease of use which WordPress excels at. Compared to previous web development platforms, and with current competitors such as Drupal and Joomla, for it’s powerful capabilities WordPress is incredibly easy to operate and maintain:

• Upgrades for the main platform are now automatically delivered.
• WordPress-hosted plugins are automatically updated
• Plugins for backing up files and the database are a few clicks away, and backups can be easily stored via email.

In fact, maintaining WordPress is so easy many people operate several WordPress blogs.

Nevertheless, WordPress does require simple and systematic maintenance, which will be discussed in a future article.

Being Social

New social networking tools integrate well with WordPress to enhance your presence on the web. For example, you can Add a Twitter Widget to Your New Blog and have each post show as a tweet automatically.

Other tools include Facebook and Digg, which allow to reach a much larger audience than you would through simple, organic search. In fact, as explained in How To Make It Easy To Catch People Stealing Your Articles, social media can help make sure your article aren’t totally ripped off without credit.

Watch for more articles on social media in the future.

Securing WordPress

WordPress is incredibly secure considering the huge number of WordPress installations (over 15 million) and the size of the source code to WordPress. Part of this security results from WordPress being open source. While open source allows malicious hackers to examine WordPress for weakness, open source also allows programmers from around the world to learn the code and fix hacking exploits incredibly rapidly. The popularity of WordPress coupled with open source means that no matter hour of the day or night, someone, somewhere, is programming WordPress.

Making security even easier for you are a variety of plugins to check your WordPress installation, keep spammers from pillaging your comments, keep deadbeats from registering, and many more. More articles coming soon.

Small bricks make big buildings

Creating pillar content isn’t really all that difficult. If you can write a title, you can write 100 titles. If you can sort stamps, you can create categories. Then, as I’ve just shown, it’s practically paint-by-numbers.

Here’s what really cool: once you develop a system for content creation, you will find it hard to tear yourself away from your computer! Writer’s block disappears. You will generate more ideas than anyone could possibly execute in a lifetime of work. Finding a way to get it all down “on paper” as fast and as accurately as possible becomes your most difficult challenge. This is what’s known as a “High Quality Problem.”

Check the articles on productivity at There Is NO Box to get some killer ideas for creating your own “brick building” process.

Many ways to create pillar content

In closing, this bottom-up approach is just one process for creating pillar content. There are many other ways, and you will likely work out your own unique method as you get practice. You may already have a fine collection of long articles ready to serve as flagship content. In that case, each article can be summarized to a teaser, and the teasers presented in a page similar to this page for driving content to those articles.

Remember I asked you above to save that topic sentence? Each teaser can be summarized by a single descriptive sentence which helps drive SEO when used as a web page’s description. Think of your title as one half your sales pitch, your description as the other, but not a less important half.

More information from the web

Here are some top article found recently found when searching Google on the terms “pillar content”:

1. David Risley has one of the best articles on launching a blog. It used to be ranked very high for pillar content, and as you can read, pillar content is part of good launch plan.

   [Update 1/8/2010] Note: Risley’s article ranked in the top 8 as recently as August 2009. It’s now down at page 10 on Google. But the article is still superb! What happened is that “pillar content” turned into a “hot search term” and was hijacked by SEO experts… who game Google with -excuse me – BULLSHIT articles containing pathetically useless information to get that coveted front page of Google search results.

   The take home: if you are serious about digging up good, solid information on popular search terms, be prepare to dig very deeply into Google. Because the top 100 results often get eaten up by SEO sharks.

2. Yaro Starak, who probably coined the term “pillar content,” offers an excellent article on writing pillar content. Yaro’s article was published in 2008, but it’s still highly relevant in 2012.
3. Need to take a blogging break? Maya found that the strength of her pillar content kept traffic alive while she was gone.
4. A great article on Daily Blog Tips about pillar content.

First published January 26, 2009
Updated: January 8, 2010
Updated: January 11, 2012