Kim GeorgeI’ve been blogging for over 2 years now (man does time fly) and believe me when I tell you that it has been a journey.
I’ve had my ups and a lot of downs, but one thing’s for sure is that blogging…mixed with social media marketing and content marketing has been instrumental in getting more traffic to my site and visibility for the Small Business Sense brand.
I decided to write this blog post today to one: stress the importance of blogging and content marketing for business purposes and two: to give beginners, give you a reference point for pillar content that you can create for your business blog.
Sure, there are a million ways to skin this cat…(with creating content that is) however, these are 5 types of blog posts that are known to drive traffic to your website and generate a lot of shares on social media.
What is Pillar Content?
Pillar content is essentially blog posts that as Singlegrain.com states “will solidify your blog’s reputation as a go-to source for good content within your industry”.
These blog posts are in-depth articles that solve a specific problem that customers in your niche are having.
Pillar content is well researched, well written, increases engagement and is the type of information that will attract “repeat” visitors to your site over and over again.
Types of Pillar Posts to Write for Small Business Blog
Pillar Post 1: How To Guides
How to posts or guides serve as mini-tutorials on topics in your niche. These posts go into detail about a specific subject matter much like a mini-instructional guide that will help your readers accomplish a certain task.
As an example, I recently created a definitive guide to creating a small business email newsletter for my readers here that walks readers new to email marketing, the exact steps that they should take to create an email newsletter for their businesses.
For ideas on the types of how to posts that you can create for your blog you can do the following:
- Take look at the most frequently asked questions in your niche and develop how to guides based on these topics.
- Visit sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers to scan for problems that people are having in your niche.
As an example if you’re in the email marketing industry, with Quora, you can simply, head over to the site, type in “Email Newsletter” then start scanning for questions that people have submitted about email newsletters.
Here’s a screenshot of questions that I’ve found from the site surround email newsletters:
As you can see based on the screenshot, you can easily write a how to guide on planning out monthly content for a newsletter.
Some Examples of How To Guides Include:
- How to Start a Small Business Blog in Under 10 Minutes (Small Business Sense)
- A Complete Guide to Writing an Effective Press Release (Marketing Donut)
Pillar Post 2: The List Based Post
These are one of the most popular types of content that you can easily create for your blog. The reason that blog readers love list based posts is because they are easy to digest and scan over.
With these posts, you can create list based posts that help readers in your target market accomplish a specific goal, tools that they can use to work smarter and more.
Some examples of list based posts are:
- 25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List (Hubspot)
- 5 Web Based Tools that Make Social Media Marketing Easier (Small Business Sense)
Pillar Post 3: The Statistical Based Post
These are some of my favorite types of posts to put together. Every year there is statistical information published and also reports generated about trends in different industries.
I usually review these reports to gather data and stats that can be used in my blog posts.
For example, one of my most popular posts “20 Compelling Reasons Small Businesses Should Blog” is an example of a statistical based content that readers raved about.
Other Examples:
- 25 Mind Blowing Email Marketing Stats (Salesforce)
- 25 Direct Marketing Statistics Prove Direct Mail Works (Compu-Mail)
Pillar Post 4: Quick Reference Guides
This post will give your readers a set of tips on how to do something faster, quicker and better.
This post doesn’t have to be as in depth as the how to guide, but rather give the short and sweet on how to accomplish a certain goal for a specific topic.
Some examples of Quick Reference Guides:
- Quick Start Guide to Hiring Freelancers for Your Small Business (Small Business Sense)
- The Quick Start Guide to Writing Your First Blog Post (Blogging Your Passion)
Pillar Post 5: The Resource Roundup and Curated Post
Content curation is a huge deal these days. I always say that there is no sense in reinventing the wheel when it comes to content marketing and even blogging for that matter.
There is an abundance of information out there on the web today from other sites in your industry that you can put to use in your blog posts using tools like Feedly.
The resource roundup and curated content post does just that. Here, you can easily scan through some of the most popular posts from other in your industry and add those posts into a “Curated Post” for your own blog.
Examples of resource roundup and curated posts are:
- 45 Tweetable Quotes About Creativity to Inspire Your Next Big(Impactbnd.com)
- The Monthly Small Business Roundup (Small Business Sense)
3 Tools that Will Help You Write Better Content
There are several tools that I use to blog smarter and they are as follows:
1. Feedly – My favorite trend tracking tool and resource that I use to keep up with what’s going on in my industry.
2. The Best Spinner – a resource that I use to find the right words and phrases to use in my content. What it does is take my original words and changes it to different content that I can use in my blog posts. Here’s a screenshot of how it works:
3. The Tweak Your Biz Blog Post Title Generator – one of my favorite and recommended blog post title generators that I use often.
You simply add the keywords and phrases that you want to use in your blog post and this tool will then generate titles that you can use for your content.
Here’s how it works:
How to Get the Most Out of Your Pillar Content
Here are some ideas for getting the most out of your pillar posts:
- Create attractive images for them. Canva is the resource that I use to create my blog posts images
- Promote them multiple times on your social media networks
- Interlink them with other content that you’ve written on your blog
There you have it..a list of 5 types of pillar content that you can write for your small business blog.
Need help with creating a blogging and content marketing strategy for your small business? I’m here to help!
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