One of the content marketing strategies we engaged in building our portal is writing at least five pillar articles
Editor’s note: This guest contribution is published as-is, save for some edits for headline and formatting consistency.
Today I would like to share five tips on how to write a strong pillar article and provide recent real-life examples of how our team does content marketing. Hopefully, this post can help entrepreneurs with their online engagement and possibly even personal branding.
Two months ago, our team started building the Krozz content portal (www.krozz.com) and positioned the portal as “Singapore’s definitive guide to dating and relationships”. One of the content marketing strategies to building this portal is to do at least five pillar articles.
What is a “Pillar Article”?
In an article written for entrepreneurs by Yaro Starack, a “pillar article” refers to:
“a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice…This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.”
There is always wisdom in doing pillar articles, because these articles are “evergreen” and have the huge potential to drive a regular stream of views to your portal or blog. One of the first pillar articles we did was written by our guest contributor Yeow An, titled “How to Get a Girlfriend in Singapore“. Here are the statistics for this particular article from 6 June to 26th July 2017:
As you can see, this post gave us a total of 20,170 unique views in June and 8,084 unique views in July, and can be considered a successful pillar post in general. I personally consider it a good example of a pillar article because the article still drove a decent number of unique views (321 views on average per day in July) one month after it was published.
Our Krozz Team had a meeting to analyse what we did right. We have crystalised our learnings into five tips for you to consider, if you want to replicate our successful results.
Also read: Best digital marketing strategies, as shared by 3 CEOs
Tip #1. Have a Catchy Title
“How to Get a Girlfriend in Singapore” is a catchy title. If you were single and long for a girlfriend in Singapore, it is very likely that this article will be of interest to you. Also, the title is just seven words long and very straight to the point.
Tip #2: Have a Relevant and Eye-Catching Photograph
We used a picture of Yeow An, our guest writer. This photograph was professionally taken by a lady named Audrey Tan in a special fashion photoshoot. As a result, the photograph is visually and aesthetically appealing, relevant, tasteful and attracts the interest of our readers quickly.
Tip #3: Have a good length to your content
Remember not to make your article too long! This pillar article is 781 words long and our guest writer strategically reduced her message to five simple points that are easy to remember.
A pillar post need not always include a lot of details–depending on the topic, sometimes it is better to articulate the general idea rather than go into specifics.
Tip #4: Work on your distribution
We shared this article on various Facebook Groups and posted it on reddit as well. Generally, it is ideal to distribute your pillar articles to as wide an audience as possible for two reasons. Firstly, you can test for interest–if your pillar articles are receiving low engagement or likes even after you post it to multiple relevant platforms or avenues, then this might signal a problem with your chosen niche or understanding of it. Next, in the sharing economy, distributing a pillar content increases the chances of your article going viral if multiple groups of people start to share it.
Tip #5: Consider Facebook Paid Advertising
Because the pillar post did well in the first week, we decided to enhance its performance by investing in Facebook Paid Advertising. It worked beautifully–The Cost Per Click was really low and we got great results!
Also read: 3 dead simple rules to get better with content marketing
So if you are considering an effective way of writing a pillar article as well, why not consider the above five tips? If you have any other tips for us as well, do leave a comment–I would love to hear from you! 🙂
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