4 Content Pillars To Build An Audience
Generate Endless Ideas For Your Content
Have you found yourself not posting or posting completely randomly because you just don't know what to post? You aren’t alone.
You’re lacking organization and order, a ‘proper’ framework if you will. The single best way to tackle this problem is to build ideas around 4 content pillars. We’ll delve into these here, but something to note — it’s completely okay if you want to swap one of these pillars to something you feels suit you, your brand, your business better.
Why use content pillars?
Content pillars allow you to plan your content and generate endless ideas. How? Well segmenting content into pillars allows your brain to concentrate on one section at a time.
Idea’s are easier to generate when you give your brain more direction
It allows the space to showcase different areas of yourself, your brand or your business. This will also allow you to reach more people with a variety of similar interests. All these different people who are interacting with your content is what’s going to help you build your community, your fans and eventually customers.
What are the 4 content pillars?
The four I have listed below will work well for pretty much anyone but keep in mind it’s completely okay to switch these around to better suit you.
Education
Share educational content that will allow your audience to learn something for nothing! Normally this area of content is where you share your knowledge, become the go-to expert, the authority.
TIP: Answer questions your audience is asking. If you aren’t there yet and need questions to answer look at:
- Google search (suggested results & related results)
- Answerthepublic.com
- Quora
- Forums
- Youtube
Inspiration
Inspire your audience. Think mindset for this one. This is a good area to try and think ‘ what would my audience love to share’, you’re looking to produce content people will want to engage with.
If you aren’t sure what will inspire and engage your audience try looking at your competitors. What are they doing well? Experient with different types of content and see what works well for your audience.
Promotional
This is the juicy part where you get to promote your business, products, or services. Please don’t go overboard on this one and don’t forget people hate being sold to. Your challenge is to find ways to promote without it looking like an advertisement. People respond to this better.
Entertain
Bring your personality to the content game. Show who you are and what you’re about. This works from a business perspective too. This is how people connect with you, it makes you relatable.
How do I generate ideas using content pillars?
Okay, fair enough you know what they are but really not sure how to apply them. What you need to do first is sign up to something like trello, create a new board with 4 different lists. Alternatively something like Google Sheets will work well too.
Each board is going to be one of your content pillars, for our above example we are aiming for something like this:
Then we need to fill each section with a ton of ideas. I do this using power word to guide my sentence and just fill in the blanks.
Power Word Examples:
- How to ____
- Top 5 ways to _____
- Top ___ to find _____
- The ____ ways to get ____ without _____
- You’re running out of _____! Here’s how to fix it!
- Try _____ and get ______
Treat these are your headlines (technically that's what they are) and something I found works well for me is to make sure everything I come across something that caught my interest I write down the headline and stick it into the appropriate pillar.
Good luck and feel free to ask questions in the comments!
