The phrase “content pillar” seems to be a bit of a buzzword these days. What does it even mean? Is it something you need for your blog? Let’s chat about it.

Episode Highlights:

• What are Content Pillars and Why Do They Matter?
• Setting Up Content Pillars on a Website
• Blogging with Content Pillars

Resources Mentioned:

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Stephanie 0:00

The phrase content pillar seems to be a bit of a buzzword these days, but what does that even mean? Is it something you need for your blog? Let's chat about it.

Stephanie 0:10

Hey there, teacher business owner. It's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:21

Welcome back to the podcast. This month, we've been discussing things you can do on the back end of your website to just make it a little bit more successful. Today, we're going to be talking about content pillars. We will focus on why they matter so much for blogging, where they belong on your website, and how you can use them to enhance your blogging workflow. Let's just dive right in.

Stephanie 0:47

Content pillars aren't anything new. I'm sure you've heard that phrase before, and they're a huge part of cohesive marketing, whether you're marketing on TPT, social media, Pinterest, or your blog. But when it comes to blogging, content pillars are essentially the key topics or themes that you're going to cover with your posts. Every blog post that you write should fit within one of your content pillars. So this means that you want them to be broad enough to house your content. Like everything you create can fit in one of those pillars, but they need to be specific enough that you create cohesive content for your audience, so it doesn't feel like it's all over the place. So let's dive into a couple of examples. If you sell only math resources for first grade, your entire product line, your TPT store, that is all you do. Then your blog content pillars might be number sense, measurement and operations like addition and subtraction, or you could break it up as teaching tips, hands on activities and seasonal math ideas. Either of those sets of content pillars would be great for a TPT seller who focuses only on first grade math. Now if you sell upper elementary resources of all types, so third, fourth, fifth grade resources of all subject areas, then you might have a content pillar for each subject area, ELA, math, science and so on. But honestly, there is no right way to set up the content pillars for your blog. The important thing is that you create pillars that can house every post you write. And why is this so important? Well, there are several reasons. First, content pillars can prevent decision fatigue when you're trying to plan out your blog content for the month without having content pillars to think about, you might be overwhelmed by choices, because you could literally blog about anything with content pillars, you can quickly narrow it down to the set topics that you've chosen to cover on the blog. Second, content pillars can help you create content that will consistently resonate with your audience when you choose topics that closely align with the products you create, you know that your blog content is going to be relevant to your potential customers, and that means it's going to be more likely to convert to sales as well. If you decide to write a blog post about your favorite dog sweaters for Christmas because you discovered a keyword opportunity on some sort of SEO tool, you're unlikely to get the results that you expect because it confuses your audience, it confuses Google, and it confuses Pinterest. And that leads me to the third and most important reason why content pillars are so important. If you want to get noticed on Google and Pinterest, it is really important to stick to your topics so the algorithms are able to make better sense of your fresh content. Because when you put a brand new pin on Pinterest or publish a brand new blog post on the internet, you're starting from square one. The algorithm has this brand new piece of content that they have to make sense of. And so they use signals like the person who created the content. What other types of content do they already create? And it gives your content a head start when it's already closely related to the things you already publish. So step away from the Dog Sweater blog post and stick to your content pillars. The other benefit of covering one topic from many different angles with a lot of different blog posts is that it helps you build your authority. We're going to talk more about that in our next episode, but I just wanted to mention that writing random, one off posts on fun topics that you find on a keyword research tool, those are not going to help you become an authority in the eyes of Google or Pinterest.

Stephanie 5:15

So having a plan for your content pillars and carrying out that plan by blogging just only on those set topics - that's a great first step. But you also have to set up your website to support those content pillars. The way you do this is setting up a category on your website for each content pillar that you're planning to blog about. A common mistake that I see on teacher blogs is that they treat categories like tags. They create a category for every smaller topic that they want to cover. So just as an example for the content pillar that I mentioned earlier of seasonal math activities, you would likely cover a variety of holidays, but those holidays don't need to have their own categories. They are all going to fit nicely within that seasonal math activities content pillar. You could create tags or even subcategories for the individual holidays, but that's not essential. Just focus on that one cohesive content pillar. So the way you would set these categories up on WordPress, you can access your categories by logging into the back end of your site, and then over on the left hand side, that black toolbar on the left, just hover your mouse over the posts option in the toolbar, and then you're going to see the options of all posts Add New Post categories and then tags. So just click on categories and you'll go to a page where you can add or edit your categories.

Stephanie 6:56

Once you've decided on your content pillars and you've set up your blog to reflect those topics, it's time to move forward with blogging, and I just have a few quick tips to help you make the most of these content pillars in your blogging workflow. So tip number one, as you choose your blog post topics, be sure to just take a moment to decide if that post truly fits within one of your content pillars. We've all been tempted by the fun topics, I know I have, but decide if your time might be better spent writing a post that truly fits within your established pillars. But I do want to make a side note here that if you continue to be drawn to particular topics that don't fit within your content pillars, but they are closely related, consider creating another content pillar - that's totally fine, just make sure that you are writing plenty of content to support that new pillar. Lifestyle bloggers - it's a very common thing that they talk about a wide range of topics on their blogs, but they still keep them within these tight pillars, and they talk about those topics in depth. And so even though they have a very wide range of what seem to be fairly unrelated topics, because they're keeping them within their pillars, they do just fine. So tip number two is kind of a small thing, but once you have your blog post written, you have it in the editor, right in front of you, on the right hand side, there's a menu, and one of those options that you can select in that menu is just clicking a checkbox for the category that this blog post belongs to. There are differing opinions on whether you should only click on one category per post, or whether it's okay to have multiple categories. I tend to lean towards one, just because I look at it kind of as a newspaper that articles aren't printed in multiple different sections in the hopes of people reading it. They instead pick the best fit section of the paper for that article. And for me, the whole point of assigning categories, yes, it's partially for user experience, so they can find your content, but ultimately it's for SEO. And so anytime I can narrow the focus for the bots and tell them, hey, this is what this post is about, I would much rather have a clear focus than slightly muddy waters. And that actually leads me to tip number three, when you link to other content on your website from that post that you've just written. So we call that internal linking. Try to link within that same category. Again, it's not essential. There's going to be differing opinions on this, but for me, it can help. Point the bots in the right direction as they try to make sense of your content, I would much rather, again, narrow the focus than muddy the waters. And finally, tip number four, take note of the number of blog posts that you've created in each category, and you can actually find that in that same WordPress menu that I mentioned earlier, the category menu over on the right hand side, there's a column where they keep a count of the number of posts you've assigned to that category. But I also like to track this in my master list of blog posts in airtable, because I can also track things like the last time I created a post for a particular category. The reason this is so helpful is when decision fatigue is really strong, you can look and see, well, which category has gone the longest without a fresh blog post. That's the one I'm going to blog about today. And I also just like tracking it on airtable, because I'm able to check on this information without having to log in to the back end of my website.

So I hope that this episode will be helpful for you as you either set up or edit the content pillars that you're using for your blog as you work to keep your posts in individual buckets or content pillars, you're giving your content a better chance to get noticed by Google and Pinterest, and most importantly, you'll be creating cohesive content for your audience and hopefully more sales for your TPT store.

If you're a student of bring your own traffic, I have good news for you. We dive into more detail about content pillars and blog categories in the course, you can find that in lesson 1.3 and specifically in that lesson, I show you how these categories can fit into an effective overarching keyword strategy for your business. If you're not a student of the course, just head over to stephanieroyer.podia.com. That's stephanieroyer dot, P, O, D, I A.com to sign up, and I'll also leave a link for you in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.