Blogging is now one of the hip professions, often being promoted as a work-at-home business/ profession. However, most bloggers fail to taste the success of blogging as a professional. A blog that fails to drive visitors and generates little or no money for the blogger meets a slow death, unnoticed by the world. Thousands of blogs die inglorious death every day on the Internet.
If you want to succeed as a blogger, you need to break from the routine of average blogger and stand out with astounding content and resources that brings readers to your blog/website. How to bring traffic of website visitors to your blog?
THE “SECRET” TO SUCCESS OF A BLOG (OR ANY WEBSITE) IS “AWESOME CONTENT”.
Successful pro-bloggers haven’t become an Internet sensation overnight. All of them have invested time and energy in creating content for their target audience. They take pain in writing highly useful articles, tutorials and guides. Successful bloggers create great videos, post exciting images and jazz-up their blog with graphics.
A while ago the concept of “Pillar Content” was echoing everywhere in the blogosphere. Every successful blogger was recommending their audience to create long-form content based on research and creative inputs, rich with supportive media such as videos, screencasts and images. Such highly authoritative and exhaustive blog articles are still very important for success of any blog.
WHAT IS PILLAR CONTENT?
A long-form article loaded with highly informative details and explanations, images & videos on a certain topic that your potential readers are searching for can be considered as the pillar content if it remains useful for a long span of time. For a blog website, a pillar content (article/blogpost) means an evergreen blog article with the following traits:
- Long-form articles, usually 1,000 words or longer
- Attracts existing readers back to the blog
- Generate organic, free website traffic through search engines
- Persuades other bloggers to provide citations via backlinks
- Emerge as the contender for the “must-read articles” or “resources” section on your blog
HOW TO CREATE PILLAR CONTENT FOR YOUR BLOG?
If you want to make your blog successful, you need to create articles that your visitors find highly useful and often share with their friends as a resource guide. There is no short-cut to creating pillar content. If you have written an article in less than 30 minutes, it is quite likely to be just another article among the vastness of the Internet.
Some examples of typical pillar content article include:
1. HOW-TO ARTICLES
People are always looking for articles and videos on how to do something. Such informative guides can take your blogging to a new success. One of the popular examples of a website gaining all the success via How To articles is WikiHow.com. If you are a real expert in any subject (even non-traditional subjects such as cooking, makeup and fitness), you will find yourself at ease when creating such how-to articles.
2. WHAT IS (DEFINITION) ARTICLES
The Internet is the repository of information where people want to know about things that they are unfamiliar with. What is the best time to grow water lilies? What is this & that? You get the idea, right?
If you are in an industry where you can write explanatory articles about concepts that are important or complicated, you can generate pillar articles around those topics and concepts. Write an article that helps a newbie understand the concept easily through examples, drawing, illustrations and graphics.
One of the great examples for such definition articles is Investopedia.com. It is loaded with articles that explains finance concepts for layman readers.
You can also make a glossary-style definition page around certain topic. Such posts will make a good pillar article. Write an article that lists the important concepts/terms in your industry with short definitions/description for each. Eg: the glossary of important terms in real estate.
3. LIST ARTICLES (LISTICLES)
One of the popular examples of pillar content that drives traffic regularly for bloggers are listicles or an article with a list of something. You must have read hundreds of such articles yourself. (Here are some examples of listicles)
Such posts have titles such as:
- Top 10 Places…
- 101 Ways To…
- 10 Tips To …
- World’s Top 10 …
- World’s 10 Fastest Cars
- Top 11 Fails Images of Trump
- Top 25 Celebrity…
Listicles or top list articles work very well. People are generally curious and hungry for information. These list articles draw attention and make the person curious to scan the whole list. List articles with easy navigation, limited content, graphic relief in form of images/illustrations are easy to consume for readers without much strain on them.
With a compelling title to a list article, you a pull tonnes of traffic via social media platforms. Such articles are also among the most shared on the Internet. So, you have a free source of additional traffic. Such articles can also go viral very easily.
4. FREE COURSE, REPORT OR ARTICLE SERIES
People love free stuff. If you have in-depth knowledge of some subject, you can create a free course (videos, articles, audio podcast, etc) and offer them to your readers. For such free courses, provide the “A to Z” guide of something important and extremely useful to your readers. You can also create an e-book report or email newsletter course.
FREE COURSE, REPORT AND ARTICLE SERIES CAN BE USED TO GAIN SUBSCRIBERS FOR YOUR BLOG.
Create a PDF (using Word or Open Office or any other word-processing application) and offer it as a download. Make sure to create the e-book or download file with your blog branding and website URL. The benefit is that when such e-book or guides are shared by your readers (forwarded through email or posted on social media), you benefit from it.
If you have a subscribers’ list or wish to grow one, write the content as a series of email newsletters (an e-course). Create an email sequence for your newsletter subscribers, so that the email courses are sent to your readers automatically on subscription. You can also add the articles to your blog as a pillar content.
5. COMPILATION ARTICLES
If you find the listicle, or list article, concept useful, you can take it a step further with compilation of resources list and/or embedded multimedia content. You can create compilation of the best tutorials across the web on a topic and make it easy for people to discover the right content. You can create a compilation of YouTube videos, audio and other stuff as well.
TASK: PUBLISH A PILLAR ARTICLE EVERY WEEK
Now, that you have the basic theory of pillar articles as the success strategy for your blog, act on it. You must publish lots of pillar articles as only a few of them will get the success that you desire. Just follow the formats listed here and implement some clever marketing techniques (including paid advertisements and sponsored posts on social media) to promote them. If you stay focussed and create one pillar article a week for a few months, you will surely taste success with blogging.
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