The Most Advanced Blogging Strategy I’ve Never Shared
I think about blogging, a lot.
I’ve had plenty of good ideas and even more bad ones. But I think I’ve found something that’ll be very interesting to you.
It works insanely well for getting traffic, keeping people on your site, building trust, collecting leads, and I’ve never seen anyone else do it exactly like this.
Here’s the most advanced blogging strategy I’ve ever thought up.
Blogging and the Old School Advertising Rule of 7
Before we get into the strategy, you need to understand the thought process behind it. There’s an old school advertising concept that states:
“Consumers need to see an ad seven times before they’ll purchase.”
How does it apply to blogging?
I see blog posts as advertisements
If I stumbled upon your site seven times and read seven of your blog posts, then I’ll read your about page, opt-in, sales page, and probably send you an email thanking you for your blog.
With that in mind, your goal as a blogger is to get people to read seven blog posts.
Now let’s talk about how to do that.
Start with Pillar Articles for Each Category on Your Blog
Pillar articles have been around for awhile.
Basically, take your primary blog topic and split it up into categories. (You should’ve already done this to create categories for your posts.) Then write a 3,000-5,000 word, ultimate resource blog post for each category.
Here are a few ideas:
- Top 101 Tips for [Category]
- How to [Category]
- [Category] 101
- The Ultimate Guide to [Category]
- [Category] for [Your Audience]
If you create a few master resources like this, people will start to trust you.
This is how you become a trusted authority in your niche.
Create Specialty Articles for Each Tip within Your Pillar Articles
Once you have a few ultimate resources on your blog, it’s time to split those ideas into specialty articles that go into extreme detail on each tip.
For instance, let’s say we create a post on IncomeDiary titled, 101 Ways to Make Money Online. It’d be difficult to get that post ranking well in search because “make money online” is such a competitive keyword.
For the specialty articles, we’d take each method of making money online and dedicate an entire post to it. These posts would rank better because they’re more niche, the keywords are long-tail, so there’s less competition.
This is how you start to get traffic.
Strategically Interlink Your Pillar Articles and Specialty Articles
In the SEO Blog Post Publishing article, I wrote about the importance of interlinking, but this strategy takes interlinking to the next level.
What we have here is a cluster of similar articles on specialty topics that naturally reel in search traffic. If a search visitor is interested in, “Make Money Online Strategy #1,” then they’re also interested in #2, #3, and #4. And they’re definitely interested in the 101 Ways to Make Money Online.
Remember, our goal is to get them to read seven blog posts. So the best way to keep them on your site is to tactically link to the other MMO strategies as the call to action, and make it obvious.
Think of interlinking as a sales funnel to get people to your pillar article.
Then, on the pillar article, link back out to each of them under their corresponding tip with:
More info: [title of specialty blog post]
They’ll get drawn into your site through the specialty article, work their way through the funnel, land on the pillar article, and find a whole bunch of other articles that they’re interested in reading.
It’s like leaving a trail of M&M’s into a candy store.
This is how you keep people on your site.
Point Pillar Article to a Squeeze Page
The beauty of the funnel is three-fold:
- The pillar will get a ton of traffic.
With the funnel, people will always be working their way back to the pillar article. - The pillar will constantly get re-shared.
Since it’s one of your best articles, that’ll be the one they want to share, especially since they’ve already spent a bit of time reading your site and beginning to trust you. - The pillar will rise up in search engines.
More traffic means more opportunities for people to link to it, not to mention all of the internal linking. Plus, social shares.
But the biggest benefit to this is that your pillar article becomes a perfect opportunity to collect opt-ins.
The problem with putting an email opt-in at the bottom of every post (not that I’m against it) is that I don’t trust you enough after reading just one post.
If I read two or three, then maybe.
If I read six or seven, then definitely.
People who read your pillars have probably read multiple posts and they’re looking for an opportunity to learn more from you.
You can collect emails one of two ways:
- Put an opt-in box at the end of the pillar.
- Make the call to action a link to a relevant squeeze page.
This is how you collect leads for people who are interested in a particular topic.
Implement This Strategy for Each Pillar Article in Each Category
The benefit of following this pillar article ? specialty article funnel strategy is that you can use it for every category. It’s like creating mini-networks of content within your blog. And each time you add a blog post, the mini-network becomes stronger and more valuable.
Not to mention, all of your pillar articles will begin climbing the search engine ladder for those competitive keywords.
Over time you’ll become the trusted authority in your niche and everyone, including big-budget corporations, will come to you with their questions.
The Final Word
The reason bloggers don’t do this is because it takes a super-human level of forethought, an incredible amount of planning, and a tremendous amount of work.
It’s a lot easier to come up with blog posts day-by-day or week-by-week.
But if you spend a little time strategically creating an editorial calendar with deliberate blog post ideas, you’ll be on your way towards creating a well-rounded, lead-generating machine, instead of just another measly blog.
I know this concept is a bit idealistic, but I think it’s something we can all strive towards.
Let me know if you’ve thought about or implemented this concept on your blog.
Image by: Rammy Storm
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This is awesome Nick, I must confess this is the first time I’m coming across some of these tips. I didn’t know they worked so well. Thanks for the post.
Emmanuel
Sure thing, Emmanuel. Start with your pillar articles then work your way into specialty articles.
Nicholas
I think that’s a very cool strategy with a lot of mileage in it. Thanks for sharing it here today.
paul
You’re welcome, Paul. If I was going to start a new blog, I would plan this out before I ever started creating it.
I love this strategy, it does sound like a lot of work, but it would be great to have a plan to stick to. Plus you could also write one post a week that is relevant to customers / readers at that time, and still have your planned schedule.
So do you go into each post and add hyperlinks to all other related posts everytime you post a new post??
That’s a good point, Julie-Ann. Thanks for adding it here. I use the Similar Posts plugin by Rob Marsh at the bottom of the articles. But for this strategy, I make it more obvious. Here’s an example of a pillar article from one of my older sites: http://juniorbiz.com/top-25-young-entrepreneurs
Nice post. This is exactly what I’m doing on my blog – although it happened by accident that I wrote a flippant post that got lots of attention (for my small blog) and made me start to write the funnel articles around it.
Good, Neil. Funny how that works, huh?!
Awesome Great Strategy
This is one of those articles that you save to your “favorites” for sure! Thanks Nicholas! I always look forward to the emails from the Income Diary.
Stay Amazing,
K.L. Horne
Wow, thanks K.L. Do you have any post ideas for us? Anything you haven’t seen here that you’d like to see?
Nick,
Great article, and so simple (if a little time consuming) to implement.
I could see this strategy really working wonders if you have a good writer that could do the work for you on the pillar articles.
I think the issue for most bloggers is time., so if somebody is available to write then I’d say get it done now!
Thanks again.
I think you’re right, Barry. There are only a handful of sites that I’ve seen effectively implement something similar to this strategy, and they all have a team of writers who are experts on their topics.
Another solid post Nicholas, I really need to get to work on some pillar posts, I have too many subjects on my personal blog, but I can definitely do this on most my other blogs.
Me too, Jamie. Since I’ve been writing here, I’ve been rethinking the topic of my blog. I’m going to niche it down a bit before I put too much more work into it.
Nice post Nicholas, great idea.
One thing I’ve tried that has worked well is rather than saying your pillar content is a PDF or HTML page make it even more value add.
We use tools like SlideRocket.com to create courses based on pretty much the same content you would put into a PDF. It just adds that extra mile in the eyes of the visitor.
Hmm… Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about videos lately and how we can incorporate them here. Thanks for the tip about SlideRocket.com.
Hi Nick, great article and congrats with your continued success at such a young age and thanks for sharing how you’re doing it!
Carpe Dream!
Sean
Thanks, Sean and you’re welcome. Thank Michael as well. None of us would be here if he didn’t start this site when he was 20 years old.
This is a brilliant idea. For someone just starting out or for someone with experience, this approach ties everything together to do the one thing we all want: generate traffic. Well done!
Do you recommend going back to posts and updating them/creating links for this strategy?
Thanks!
Hey Laurence, absolutely. When I publish a new post on my blog, I always go back and find 2-3 opportunities to link to it from older posts.
The strategy is work but it pays off when your site becomes an authority. Very thoughtful tactic thanks for sharing. It will take time but worth the effort. GENIUS is what you’re on the brink of !!!
Haha… Thanks, Abigail. I mentioned in another reply that there are only a handful of sites that do this and all of them are widely considered the authorities in their niche.
Nice tips! Definitely going to try some of this out.
Which parts are you going to try out, Adam?
Brilliant strategy, Nicholas. I gotta try that. And as always, thanks to Josh for this site.
Thanks, LSC1. Thank Josh and Michael.
Nice post! Intuitively I knew that this type of strategy should work for the blog, I just didn’t know that somebody else can have a proof that it does work, like obviously your examples here!
I guess, I need to go back into strategically planning the content around the pilar pieces and constantly linking back.
It should be really great pilar posts for the whole thing to work!
Yeah, Hanna. It’s difficult to describe how well this works with words. I created the image, but even that doesn’t do it justice. I’m glad you can start to see the benefits, but you’ll truly understand once you start doing it.
Greate article, I will need to look in to squeeze pages soon. Interlinking pillar articles has always been a good idea as many of the top blogs do that.
Thanks
Hey Morne… A squeeze page can be as simple as a short post describing the offer with an opt-in box at the bottom. Glad I could help.
Nick,
Thanks for lighting the way to progress.
Sure thing, Faisal. Now we just have to work towards it :).
Hi Nick,
This is a great article. I absolutely love the idea and it is in line with in bound marketing strategies of content sharing.
Thanks.
Thanks, David. Yep, that’s the neat thing about it. It’s like the most advanced of the most advanced online marketing strategies.
Very interesting, Nick!
I’ve been trying to help a friend to get started on his blog. I am forwarding this to him right away.
Thanks, King! Good to hear from ya. This is essentially what we did with the 25 YE Post and Interviews. Those posts get more traffic than the rest of the site combined.
Nic, here is yet another great post. About the inter-linking strategy, I’ve seen it on quiet few blogs and I was forced to check other articles as instructed in the blog post just to get more information about what I was reading.
Sheyi
Hey nick great idea bro, I have started doing this pillar thing and am working on making most of my posts become clusters on related info linked to each other. I am new to blogging so I am still building up traffic and I am glad I came across this post because now I know Im going in the right direction.
Genius! Great post. Anyone getting started with a blog should definitely read this. It gives a great strategy for getting a blog started. I just started mine, am only 11 articles in at this time, will be using this to increase my post count and get some great content!
Like all of the above, I am glad I found this post, gives a great roadmap in the right direction!
Nice blog post very informative and helpful tips that you have shared on creating a valuable contents. Great concept.