If you’ve gone through the process of choosing your niche and defining your audience, you probably have at least some Idea of what topics you should be blogging about but may not really know exactly how to fit them all together.
Just writing about what you feel like writing about isn’t good enough unfortunately, unless you’re plain lucky. But picking the right content isn’t rocket science either.
The Structure
Depending who you pay attention to, you’ll get different metaphors for how to structure your content. Specifically the content on your blog. They may refer to pillars, foundations, silos, or planets, or one of many others.
For the sake of this post, I’ll use the pillars metaphor. For the rest of this article I will also be using a food blog as my example.
Regardless of your niche, there will be a few broad categories of content. For a food blog you might have recipes, techniques, types of cuisine, equipment, kitchen design, plating, nutrition, garnishes, restricted diets, meal prep, canning, wine pairings, etc, etc.
Obviously that’s overwhelming both to you and your readers. Part of addressing that issue happens during the niche-choosing phase when you’re choosing a narrow slice of the food-loving population at large. That may lead you to meal prep as your niche. Good. That narrows it down.
So within that there are some content “pillars”. Those are the key things that support all the the other content and it’s what some content hangs from. Again, metaphorically speaking.
If you know anything about meal prep, then you know there are still a lot of ways you can go within that niche. The thing is, that you want to support your content like you you’d support a roof over your head. With just 3 or four pillars to start supporting all your other content. It could be even fewer.
Here are a few examples:
Example One – Meal prep for couples
- Weekly meal plans
- Meal Prep Techniques
- Equipment reviews
- Recipes
Example two – Meal prep for big families
- Shopping and pantry management
- Freezer Meals
- Slow Cooker plans
- Family involvement
Example three – meal prep for diabetics
- Food substitutions
- Meal Prep Plans
- Special medical considerations
I don’t know if these are realistic examples, but they help make my point. In the last example, if those are the pillars you decide on then all of your content should fall under those three categories. If you want to write about sticking to your diet when dining out, that doesn’t fit in those categories so you’d want to hold off on that for a while.
Topic breakdown
For each of the three pillars, you should have at least one or two pretty big articles focusing broadly on the topic
So for ‘meal plans’ you may have a biggish article on what meal planning means in the context of weekly meal prep. The benefits and limitations. How to fit meal planning into an already busy week. Methods for adapting meal plan techniques to fit your lifestyle, etc. All of that in one or two big posts.
Here’s a link to the type of article I mean…( https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/healthy-eating/how-to-meal-prep-beginners-guide/ ). I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just using it as a good example of a broad article that would serve as a foundation of that pillar of content.
Then in addition to those foundational posts, have smaller supporting posts going into a little more detail. You can direct readers from one post to the other if they need either more detail or context. There’s no limit to how many posts you can write, but they should still all fall under the main pillars.
In this example you can then have actual meal plans as their own posts. Have a post called ‘grilled food meal prep’, another called ‘Budget-friendly meal prep for diabetics”, another “how to design your own meal prep plan”.
The trick when you’re starting out is to resist the temptation to make too many pillars. Build up just a few before branching out. And it’s okay to work on just one and get to a point that you feel you’ve adequately covered it before attacking the next one. Let them know everything you know about freezing meals before moving on to slow-cooker topics. That’s totally fine.
How it looks to your audience
The point to all of this is that you want to establish yourself as the go-to source for information on those few topics. If you diversify too much, you water down your authority on any given topic. Your blog is not a place you want to present yourself as a jack of all trades. As impressive as that may be, people are looking for a master of one.
If you have in your mind what the pillars of content are for you, why not make it easy for your audience to identify them too?
In the header at the top of your website pages you should have a small menu of choices for them to navigate: one for each of the pillars and maybe one more for stuff like policies and terms, about me page, contact form, and stuff like that.
Keep it as simple and clear as possible. For the first example above good headings would be:
- Plans
- Techniques
- Equipment
- Recipes
- About
They can have their own drop-down menus or dedicated pages. But the main menu at the top of each page should be as short and sweet as possible.
Now that you understand the basic structure of your content choices, let’s take a look at where to find individual topics to write about.
That’s in What to Blog About – Part 2