Content pillars are a catchy way of dividing your content into thematic segments, the idea behind having them is educating your visitors with different content that are relevant to their needs.
Content pillars are the topics that you think/know are popular and important in your industry. All your posts in each pillar should somehow be connected to it your niche. It takes a little time to build but once you get it figured out, it’s not a hard thing to keep going. Don’t worry about coming up with the perfect pillars first time – just start with 3-5
These pillars of content are important in order to remain ahead of the competition or gain your edge against them. You need to provide useful information with unique perspectives. Doing so will make sure your readers or viewers will come back for more information in the future – and that is how you can expand your reach among the people
I would strongly suggest you keep to between 3 and 5. Anymore than 5 and a.) your page becomes too messy to be useful, if it’s a spreadsheet, you’re scrolling left and right to much, if it’s paper you’re running out of space to write too often! B.) It can feel overwhelming and you won’t get anything done c.) you’ll come up with TOO many ideas, and again won’t execute.
So, we split the difference and say 4? Let’s do that!
There are a few general content pillars that are almost always useful, and you can turn them on their head as well to give a little more leeway on your ideas. SO for example; Education is a content pillar that is always good to have. You can either put it at the top, the pillar is called Education and then below it you come up with hundreds of educational content ideas.
The other way is to come up with a pillar, lets say ‘Vegan Cooking’ and in that pillar, you fill it with all sorts of ideas; educational, as well as inspirational, controversial, meme, graphics, video. So you’re using education as more a particular ‘row’s purpose than the column’s purpose. Hop that makes sense?
A fashion TikToker’s content pillars could be Beauty, Fashion Trends, Self-Love & Audience Empowerment. Two obvious pillars, and then one or two that thinks a bit more about the audience. Mental Health creeps into everything, and within the fashion industry it can be quite paralysing or preventative to a person’s life.
A Fashion influencer that has overcome those struggles and now is living the life online is very inspirational and aspirational. Hit up some psychographic inspired content pillars!
An independent coffee shop might obviously focus on Coffee picks of the week, Coffee Recipes… But also think about what people in the cafe might also be into or do alongside a coffee. They might be working from home, reading/studying, so why not add Book Recommendations, or Study Tips?
You might have an amazing taste in music. Can you make playlists for certain moods? Share those, add a content pillar around that!
A Gaming streamer; 1. Game Reviews 2. Lets plays 3. UI design 4. Top ten roundups…. What about some audience deep thinking thought ones? Confidence, might be one. Gamers can get stuck in their rooms traditionally, someone that shows other gamers how to get out in the world and complete their ‘social rings’ is a gamer I would 100% have followed back in the day!
Can this streamer Gamify other parts of life?
I think it’s helpful when starting out to make them a bit narrow so that they make you think of ideas easier. You could make one of your content pillars ‘TikTok’ for example. Under this column you list out TikTok ideas, videos, thoughts, analysis etc. If you just put social media you might be tempted to go quite broad, and then you’re inner-critic is going to start giving you reasons to not take action. Feck that, take action! So, give them maybe just a cheeky bit of specificity, column: Video can become TikTok Video / YouTube Video / Educational Video / Reaction Video > Give it a bit of guiding light!
They don’t even need to fit the pillar, just have a space to get all the stuff out, and then you can take them one by one and see how a pillar can morph them slightly. People often call this a brain dump, and if you’re just spilling ideas and the pillars are being a bit restricting, just pull open a text document and get the ideas out that way, adapt later. We’re all about action over here at Crystalpulse Inc!
You can use tools like AnswerThePublic, AlsoAsked & QuestionDB.io to find questions people are already asking and looking for answers to, but the better you know your audience the better you know their pain points and struggles. This will massively fuel your content pillar ideation exercises.
As you create ideas from your content pillars, check their progress. Is there a particular pillar that’s performing well? Can that inspire ideas in other pillars? Give each one a good go, at least ten ideas out there in the wild so we can see what is and isn’t working. Sometime’s I make a video and the thumbnail and title work well, but the content didn’t. I can focus in on why it didn’t work, but also build more content around titles that did work, or a thumbnail style that did work.
Limit your time on these exercises, coming up with your pillars may take a bit of time, and then running your brain on ideas to go under will be another chunk of time. Give yourself maybe an hour max to just get stuff out. Then pick one and do it!
Social Media evolves super fast, the angle of your idea will be malleable. If lets say one idea was ‘5 best camera lenses for the Panasonic GH5’, some of those lenses are going to remain the best for years, but sometimes a new lens comes in that kicks ass. Do the idea again with an updated list. With this in mind, do it annually. Best lenses 2020, best cameras 2022, best digital painting program 2023, best EV stocks etc etc.
This is a do and a don’t basically saying the same thing, but don’t forget that you’re doing this for your audience to help your audience and consequently build your audience. Ask “Is this idea interesting? Does it help my audience? Does it teach them something new? Does it benefit them? Will it make them laugh?” If you can answer yes to a few of these, then you’re on to a winner.
Depending on where you are in your journey, quantity over quality can help more. Once you’re established you want to push more towards quality over quantity, but on your way up it’s about taking swings. The more you put out the more you learn. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t sooner and you can course correct. A post a week is a good start, that’s 52 swings, but can we get to 2 a week consistently. There’s plenty of argument for once a day as well. Once a day for 2 months is going to massively benefit you, but only do what’s possible. If once a day is just not practical, is once every other day? Get on that train then, learn, adjust, course-correct, and then find your cadence and improve the quality from there.
Content pillars serve as an additional layer to a customer’s journey. The goal of content pillars is to get people who visit your page or website to spend more time on it and move farther along on their customer journey. The best content pillars are the ones that answer questions users have at each of the stages in a customers journey to success/you. By addressing common problems and giving valuable information you build ‘Know, Like and Trust’. People buy – Whatever that means to you (Might be monetarily or in some other way) – from people they know, like and trust.
Content Pillars help you make content quicker, they give organisation, context, build authority within your niche and on a topic, they give you SEO benefits – Most platforms have some way of indexing you elsewhere on the web. If you’re caption or description hits the right marks, you can rank in Google Search as well. IG/TikTok/Twitter posts can all become YouTube videos and vice versa. Content Pillars don’t have to stop at the idea, they can stretch to implementation as well. More often than not the idea can be adapted for each platform to benefit from native context.
If you have any other questions, hit me up in the comments below or, if you want to get me involved in your content creation, contact me here.
