Business Owners: Easily Create Topic Clusters With Your Next Series of Blog Posts

"A rising tide lifts all boats." - Unknown

Internal links and related content are two powerful ways to get ranked on Google and drive organic search traffic to your website.

If you're a service-based business, particularly in the B2B world, here's a simple way to create content that gets ranked, drives traffic, and collects leads.

Pick one of your service offerings. Make a list of the problems that your service solves.

Write one blog post listing and summarizing the problems. This will be your pillar page, a summary-type table of contents that briefly surveys the topic and the problems.

Let's say you identified five problems. Write a series of blog posts where you conduct a deep dive post into each of the five problems. You'll now have six blog posts, one summary, and five deep dives. If it makes sense, you could also do a concluding post to close it out in a sharp and focused way.

Now, once you publish, you'll want to do the following tasks to maximize your search engine reach. You can do a deep dive into my article about everything you should do in your blog post here, but I'll share a handful of relevant tidbits in the writing portion below.

• Length: Aim for 1,200 words. This is a sweet spot for readability and SEO.
• Headline: Create an emotionally compelling headline that quickly conveys the relevance
• CTA: Include a call to action, ideally one that connects the problem of the article to the exact solution you provide, that solves it.
• Linked: Most importantly, make sure all six blog posts link to each other. If you can link through a phrase or sentence in the post, organically, that is ideal. If there is not a great spot to do that, create a summary list section at the end of the blog post with links to the related pages.
• Frequency: At a minimum, you should blog quarterly.  Posting once per week will foster powerful effects. Ideally, if you post multiple times per week, you'll see the most growth and lead generation.

The one thing I wish I had started a decade earlier, in 2014 when I shut down my marketing company, was blogging. I'm now 10 years into the journey and glad that I've kept it going because of how fruitful it is. The library created from blogging has a positive compound effect. Tipping points seem to be found at 75, 150, 215, and 400 blog posts.

Making the blogging process easier, as I've described above, will create energy once leads and opportunities start flowing. To truly make the habit stick, you'll need to embrace the value, of the writing process, in developing our expertise and practicing our messaging.