A pillar article is basically a really long, informative and content packed article that is chock full of keywords, is useful to your audience and helps drive traffic to your site.
My first attempt at a pillar article came in the form of my ‘How To Register Online with SSM‘ post which was an informative how-to on registering your business online using the ssm.com.my site.
To date, it brings in the most traffic, and ranks the best amongst the search engine keywords, along side ‘online business malaysia’.
I first read about pillar articles from Yaro Starak’s blog post, ‘How To Write Great Blog Content – Pillar Articles‘
In his words:
Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually 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.
Ideally you don’t want to fill it with affiliate links, as you’re meant to be providing good content with no ulterior motive right? But since it’s going to bring it a good amount of traffic, ‘useful’ affiliate links are allowed.
What are useful affiliate links? Maybe a link to a good web host your readers can use? Or even a useful product that might enhance your subject matter? Use your common sense, don’t go overboard and you’ll probably make a little from it as well.
But the main aim is to drive traffic.
I’m working on my pillar article as we speak and you’ll be able to spot it when I’m done. I’ll make it at least 1000 words, probably broken up into multiple parts with as much useful information as I can put in it.
My idea is to put it in public view as a sticky post or perhaps a page on this site, as I think I’ll gain more from SEO and indexing that compiling it as a free product and asking people to sign up for my newsletter.
After all, I’ve already got one of those anyway.
Well better get started, lots of work to do.
-William Lee
