One of HubSpot Academy’s core tenets is to always be learning—the idea that learning should never truly stop. That’s why the Academy continues to offer such high quality educational opportunities like how to build a better blogging strategy or how to master high-impact writing, in addition to continued HubSpot platform training.
At the Chicago HubSpot User Group, we also believe in this tenet which is why our latest HUG was a content pillar workshop featuring Liz Murphy, director of web and interactive content at IMPACT. Liz has extensive experience building out content pillar pages and has led multiple workshops on this very topic. We were incredibly lucky to have her lead a workshop!
A content pillar is an all encompassing and informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme. Each content pillar is broken down into subtopics that cover many related sections, pieces, and materials. The idea is that all sub topics relate to the overall topic establishing your business as an authoritative source.
Liz started our HUG workshop by talking about the relationships that we have with our personal assistant devices, like Google Home. Typically, we ask devices for restaurant recommendations, directions and answers to basic questions. She stressed the idea that we should build out content pillars in the same way—using the common language of our audience, instead of building out content pillars for machines.
Multiple breaks throughout our workshop allowed for attendees to brainstorm, build out pillar keyword research and get started! Liz set up our attendees up for success by including a project milestone timeline and a table of contents planner in her workbook.
Towards the end of the evening, Liz shared one important thing to remember when building out content pillars. Links should be bidirectional. In that, everything that links away from your pillar page should also link back to your pillar page for maximum results.
Starting to build a content pillar can seem like a large and daunting task, but thanks to Liz's content workshop, our attendees were given the tools for success. She ended the evening answering questions from our members and sharing her own personal experiences. With easy access to an expert in content pillars, I'm confident that our HUG members will have solid knowledge to build out effective content pillars that keep driving high-quality traffic.
Save the Date: Our next HUG is Wednesday, March 27, 2019. Stephanie and I have awesome plans and we can't wait to reveal them soon!
