What are content pillars?
Content pillars are the three to five recurring subjects a person or company posts about, chosen in advance so that individual posts accumulate into a recognisable position instead of reading as unrelated updates.
Also called: content themes, content buckets, posting themes.
The problem pillars solve is memory. Nobody remembers a single post, but people do remember that you are the person who keeps writing about pricing, or hiring, or why a particular practice is broken. That association only forms through repetition on a narrow set of subjects.
Three to five is the usual range for a reason. Fewer and you exhaust the material and start repeating yourself literally. More and no single subject appears often enough for anyone to connect it to you.
Good pillars sit where three things overlap: what you genuinely know, what your audience needs, and what supports the outcome you want. A pillar that fails the first test runs dry fast, and one that fails the third produces an engaged audience that never becomes anything.
They are also a planning device, not a cage. The point is that a reader can describe what you write about after following you for a month, not that every post must be filed under a heading.
Common questions.
How do I choose my content pillars?
Look backwards before you plan forwards. Read the posts that produced real conversations, the questions you get asked repeatedly, and the objections that come up in sales calls. The pillars are usually already visible in that record.
How often should I change them?
Rarely. Pillars work through repetition, so changing them every quarter defeats the purpose. Revisit when your business changes, not when you get bored of them, which will happen long before your audience does.
In the product
See also