Tutorial: Creating Pillar Blog Posts Using AI
If you are creating content for your blog to get organic traffic from search engines, you need to have pillar blog posts. Getting your blog ranked well takes time and effort. You need these longer blog posts that provide in-depth information about your chosen topic to get noticed.
In just about any niche, there are too many competitors vying for the same keyword phrases for you to achieve that goal by doing the bare minimum. According to Google and other search engines, the kind of content that performs best in terms of ranking is that which delivers a comprehensive discussion.
You don’t want your visitors to feel as if they need to click out and go elsewhere to gather more information A well-written pillar blog post should satisfy their desire to fully understand the topic. However, writing a pillar blog post can be an overwhelming task for many online entrepreneurs.
Understand that the main goal of a pillar blog post is to rank your website high enough that you can secure a flood of free, organic traffic. It’s not simply to get people on your page so they can click out and buy something – people expect value within the post itself.
Not only are pillar blog posts much longer than a regular post, often exceeding the length of a short report, but they also have to be organized with the information, well-researched, and updated often.
Your pillar posts are going to be the strongest access points of your site. Not only will they rank well and deliver organic traffic, but other site owners will want to point to your pillar post as an external authority page on the topic as well.
This is such a large task that requires detailed information and an eye for optimization combined that it can take quite a while to create these pillar posts. You can, however, use the 11-step artificial intelligence (AI) pillar post-creation process below to make quick work of this strategy and begin applying it to your online efforts today.
Step 1: Use AI to Help You Choose a Topic for a Pillar Blog Post
You may have heard of pillar blog posts, but you’re not quite sure where to begin in creating them for your own blog. Every post on your site does not have to serve as a pillar blog post.
Think of it in terms of a mind map. You have your main topics and subtopics that shoot out from the main one. These are known as cluster topics or child posts. So your primary topic will be your pillar blog post.
You will then have other posts on your site that point back to that pillar blog post as the main authority page on that topic that covers everything. So for example, if you had a pillar blog post about Fasting for Weight Loss, you would have child posts to support the main pillar blog post.
These might include specific blog posts on intermittent fasting, alternate-day fasting, the 5:2 fasting method, 24-hour fasts (also known as eat: stop: eat), the 16:8 fasting method, 72-hour fasting, water fasting, and more.
If there is a lot of information on these particular topics, you could create a pillar blog post out of these child posts and then create smaller child posts for each of these, doing this until you get to a point where there’s not enough information to have multiple pages pointing back to the main pillar page.
For example, you might be able to create a pillar page for intermittent fasting, but there may not be enough information to create a pillar post out of the 5:2 fasting method, with child posts pointing back to it because it’s already a narrow topic.
Ask AI for Help
We are going to use our AI tool to help us find a good topic for our pillar blog post. First, we want to ask our AI what it needs from us in order to achieve this task. We will prompt the AI like this: “I want you to help me come up with a pillar blog post topic for my blog. What information do you need from me to help you do this?”
It will respond with the details you need to feed it in order to help it do the job for you, which might include:
- What is the focus of your blog, and what topics have you covered in the past?
- Who is your target audience, and what are their interests, pain points, and needs?
- What are the main goals of your blog, and what do you hope to achieve with your content?
- What are some of the key trends or challenges in your industry, and how can your blog address them?
- Are there any specific keywords or topics that you would like to target with your content?
Be As Detailed As Possible in Your Answers
Assuming we have started a blog teaching Internet marketing for beginners, we’d provide the following prompts to our AI engine:
* The focus of my blog is teaching Internet marketing to beginners. In the past, I have covered topics like how to find a profitable niche, how to pick a business model, how to start building a list, how to begin email marketing, time management, and productivity tips, how to build a blog, how to create an info product, how to write product reviews as an affiliate, how to get free site traffic using social media platforms, and more.
* My target audience is a mix of young adults to older seniors, both men and women who want to work from home or for themselves with the goal to earn more money, have flexibility with their schedule, be a hands-on parent, prevent isolation and boredom, etc.
* My main goal with the blog and content is to be the go-to resource for new online entrepreneurs to learn from when building their businesses. I want them to sign up for my list and feel confident buying products I create and recommend.
* The challenges in this industry for my audience are often information overload and shiny new object syndrome. Everything trends toward ease, automation, and profits.
* I’m not sure what topics would be best for me to target for a pillar blog post– can you help me with that?
Notice that in the last answer, we asked AI to do the work for us. You can do that on several of these if you don’t have a blog already created, and you’re starting off with a pillar blog post.
So let’s feed this into our AI tool to see what it can come up with.
It not only gives you an idea, but a basic summary of what the pillar blog post could offer. The main ideas it delivers are:
- The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing
- How To Monetize Your Blog Or Website
- The Top Social Media Platforms For Online Entrepreneurs
- How To Build High Converting Sales Funnels
- The Importance Of Mindset For Online Entrepreneurs
- How To Create A Successful Online Course
- The Top Mistakes To Avoid When Starting An Online Business
- The Ultimate Guide To Internet Marketing For Newbies
- 5 Proven Strategies For Generating Traffic To Your Website
- How To Overcome Information Overload And Shiny Object Syndrome
- The Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing
- The Top Tools And Resources For Online Entrepreneurs
- How To Create A Winning Content Marketing Strategy
The one that stands out to me for this particular target audience is the one about affiliate marketing. This is often a business model that newbies like to pursue because the upfront costs are low, just their domain and hosting.
When you look at the affiliate marketing topic, you can see that it’s broad enough that you can have dozens of child posts built below it to talk about more targeted or narrow affiliate marketing topics that will point back to your pillar blog post.
It says about this one: “This post could provide a comprehensive overview of affiliate marketing, including how it works, how to get started, and tips for maximizing commissions. You could also include case studies or examples of successful affiliate marketers.”
Have AI Find Sub-topics for Your Post
Now, let’s tell AI which one we have selected and see if it can come up with anything slightly more targeted. We will prompt it like this: “I like The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing, but I’m afraid that might be hard to rank for. What’s a slightly more narrow topic on that concept that I might have an easier time ranking for?”
AI will agree that it is a very competitive keyword phrase to rank for and suggest the following more narrow topics:
- How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote
- The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs Digital Affiliate Products
- How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews
- How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media
Now, we are still going to target: The Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing, but we wanted to get the AI to narrow down the topics so we know which child posts we might want to create at a later date and even use as subtopics in this particular pillar blog post.
Ideally, you want to write about the most pressing topics for your target audience and think about what’s easier to rank for. It will be harder to rank for beginners’ guide to affiliate marketing, but if you do it well, it will become a resource that other authority sites point to, and as your site grows and more of your pages point back to it, it will begin to rise with its own rank and authority.
Step 2: Create a Robust Keyword Strategy Using AI
If you don’t have a keyword tool, or you’re not familiar with how to use them well, you can use AI and have it do the work for you. You can also use it as a paired combination when using your own keyword tool.
For example, you can use Google as your free keyword tool, and get it to auto-fill keywords for you, and then feed it back into AI and tell it that you want keywords similar to this.
So for affiliate marketing, we’d find additional words like programs, jobs, meaning, courses, Amazon, for beginners, and more. But AI can do a great job for you, too – depending on what tool you use.
We will prompt the ChatGPT AI like this: “I’ve decided to write a pillar blog post called The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. I’d like you to come up with a strong keyword strategy for me, including the main keyword phrase to target as well as the cluster of semantic keywords that I need to use.”
The results it gives are the main keyword phrase we should be targeting, and it actually gives us two options: affiliate marketing for beginners or beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing.
You have to then make a decision about which one you want to select. It seems like more people would probably search for the first one, making it more competitive. So let’s go with the second one instead.
Next, the AI tool delivers a cluster of additional keywords that you’ll want to use throughout your post that shore up the support for your main keyword phrase. These include:
- Affiliate programs
- Commission rates
- Digital products
- Physical products
- Choosing a niche
- Affiliate networks
- Promoting affiliate products
- Affiliate marketing tools
- Tracking and analytics
- Affiliate marketing strategies
- Affiliate marketing tips
It also provides us with instructions about using variations of the main keyword phrase throughout the post, as well as where and how to use them. One of the examples is to use the phrase Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing in one of your subheadings.
The great thing about using many AI tools is that it will remember the conversations you have been having. So you can have it call upon the list that it has already created for you and use that data when completing the content creation portion of the task.
Step 3: Use AI to Make an Organized Outline for Your Pillar Post
Now it’s time to work with our AI tool to come up with a logical, organized, and comprehensive outline for our pillar blog post. Remember, previously, we had AI come up with some more narrow topics.
We are going to refeed those back to AI and ask it to come up with even more subtopics for our main pillar blog post. We will prompt it like this:
“My pillar blog post topic is The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. I have the following subheadings, but I want this to be a comprehensive piece of everything they need to know, so please tell me what other topics this blog post should discuss. Here’s what I have so far: How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote, The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs Digital Affiliate Products, How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews, How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media.”
The AI tool will deliver a list of options, which do not include the ones above. But always ask it the following question: “Are there more topics you think we can cover?” Keep going until it either says no or until the results are outside the scope of what you want to cover.
Compile Your List of Topics
Next, you are going to compile a list of all of the topics that you want to cover in your pillar blog post based on what it provided as well as anything else that you brainstorm on your own.
Then, feed it back to your AI tool and ask it to organize the information in a logical order for the reader. When looking at the results that it gave us on what to cover, sometimes you’ll see something that seems a little bit repetitive.
But be sure to read the details in the summary, because there is often a nugget of information that you can turn into an additional section in your pillar blog post. For example, we already have a section about writing affiliate product reviews.
But the AI tool also gave us another section called: Creating Content That Converts. That seems repetitive, but inside that section, it does mention the use of visual elements like videos and images, as well as optimizing the content for search engines – and both of these are topics we can turn into a subheading of their own.
Organizing Your Blog Post
We are going to prompt AI to organize our information, and the final topics we have include:
- Understanding Affiliate Marketing
- Choosing a Niche for Affiliate Profits
- The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs Digital Affiliate Products
- Finding the Right Affiliate Program
- Networking with Affiliate Managers for Perks
- How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote
- How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews
- Using Multimedia in Your Affiliate Reviews for Higher Conversions
- How to Optimize Your Affiliate Reviews for Search Engine Rankings
- Disclosing Affiliate Relationships
- How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media
- Email Marketing Tips for Affiliates
- Tracking and Analyzing Results of Your Affiliate Marketing Performance
- Scale Your Affiliate Success with Automation and Delegation
It didn’t really need to change anything, but it did give a paragraph for each about why it should be the next logical subheading or section. Sometimes, it will rearrange your outline and always tell you why it feels it should be in a new order.
Check Your Results
Keep in mind that artificial intelligence is just that – artificial. It’s not necessarily better than what a human could determine. So don’t take its word as gospel. Instead, see if what it says makes sense, and if it does, you can adopt it into your strategy – but don’t be afraid to decline its suggestion.
Once you have your content organized in a logical manner, you want to have the AI tool drill down in every single subsection until you have a comprehensive outline that will be easy to write on your own or to have AI write for you.
You will prompt AI like this: “I’d like you to outline in a comprehensive manner what the first subtopic should cover.” Read through the results, and if you have anything you know that should be added to or eliminated from that section, fix that now.
You can also ask AI if there’s anything else it feels should be covered in that section. Simply say: “Is there anything else you feel should be covered in that section?” You may find additional information that fits well within that particular subheading, or you may even find things that should be in its own subsection.
When we did this, it added three additional ideas that were perfect for the first subsection, so then we simply prompted AI by saying, “Can you add the first three results to the outline for this first subtopic?”
And it did! But double-check because sometimes it will say it did, but it didn’t. So you might have to tell it “You didn’t add the third one.” It will then apologize and correct the results.
Drill Down for a Full Outline
Once you have a thorough outline of everything you want to cover, and you have used AI to drill down the topic into a full outline, you can either take the results and go write a unique pillar blog post, or use the tool to help you craft the content before you go back and then personalize it with your own stories and tone.
There may be times when the AI tool is too generic with its information. Remember, this is a pillar blog post, so you want all of the information to be very specific about your main target keyword phrase.
For example, when we asked AI to give a comprehensive outline for the section about email marketing tips for affiliates, the results were lackluster and very generic about email marketing in general.
So we had to go back and prompt AI by saying: “Can you redo it specifically tying it into affiliate marketing?” The results were much better this time. Keep redirecting your AI tool until it gives you exactly what you want, and don’t just settle for whatever it delivers the first or second time.
Step 4: Create the Content with AI
Section-By-Section with Expansion Prompts
By now, you should have a comprehensive outline that is many pages long. You are going to take each section and feed it back into your AI tool and have it write it to your satisfaction.
Because this is supposed to be a comprehensive piece of content, you want to read through the results that AI delivers and see if it is specific enough and well explained. You don’t want it to gloss over any topics.
Prompt AI like this: “Now we’re going to go section by section and you’re going to write the content for this pillar blog post. Start by writing the introduction of the first subheading (Understanding Affiliate Marketing). It should cover: Definition of affiliate marketing, an Explanation of how affiliate marketing works, Brief history of affiliate marketing, an Overview of the benefits of affiliate marketing for beginners, and Affiliate marketing terminology.”
Don’t be Afraid to Ask AI to Correct or Explain Itself
It did a fantastic job giving me a paragraph for each of these items. However, in the last one, it simply said: “As with any industry, affiliate marketing has its own terminology that can be confusing for beginners. In this guide, we will cover the most common terms and concepts to help you navigate the world of affiliate marketing with ease.”
So we will have it correct itself like this: “Can you rewrite that last paragraph and instead of saying in this guide, we will cover… simply give them a few of the most important and common affiliate marketing terms they may hear and explain them briefly?
It corrected itself and gave five of the most common terms, along with a brief definition. This is just good to get people started. It covered the words: affiliate, commission, tracking link, conversion rate and affiliate network.
Something really cool may happen when you are having AI write your content. For example, in the first section of our pillar blog post, when I prompted it to write the second subsection, it mentioned that it was very similar to the first, and gave me an alternative to use instead, which worked out much better! It’s nice that it can catch its own repetition or similarities, and make improvements on its own.
Step 5: Ask Your AI Tool to Improve Your Pillar Post with Great Examples
One thing you may want to do with your pillar blog post is to include examples that are woven throughout the content. Sometimes, your AI tool will automatically include examples, but they’re not very detailed.
You may have a specific example that you want to be included in your post, or you can ask AI to help you find the best places to include examples. We will prompt it like this: “Now that we’re finished with the pillar blog post, I’d like to include some examples to explain the concepts better. What areas of the post do you feel might be good for examples, and can you create them for me?”
It returns the following, which you can include in your pillar post if you want to:
Example of a clear and compliant disclosure statement:
“Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something that we have recommended. While clicking these links won’t cost you any extra money, they will help us keep this site up and running! Thank you for your support!”
Example of a lead magnet for building an email list: “
Sign up for our weekly newsletter and receive our free guide to mastering social media for your business, including tips and strategies for maximizing your presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more!”
Example of an effective email campaign promoting an affiliate product:
“Subject: Don’t miss out on this exclusive deal! Get 20% off our favorite product of the month!
Dear [Subscriber],
We are excited to share a special offer with you for our favorite product of the month. For a limited time, you can get 20% off when you use our unique link to purchase.
[Product name] has been a game-changer for us, and we know you’ll love it too. Don’t wait – this deal won’t last forever!
Best,
[Your Name]”
Example of a delegated task for affiliate marketing:
“Hire a freelance writer to create product reviews and comparison articles for your website, ensuring that all content is accurate, informative, and engaging for your audience.”
Example of using social media automation tools to scale affiliate marketing efforts:
“Schedule a month’s worth of social media posts promoting your top-performing affiliate products using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. This will save you time and effort while still maintaining a consistent presence on social media.”
You can stick with a variety of short examples, as it has been provided above – or, you can pick one of those and have it do a more in-depth example for you. You can even feed it an example of something you want to showcase, and then have it write the steps out for you to share with your readers.
Step 6: Have AI Help You Find Text Breaks and make Multimedia Suggestions
Breaking up the content is very important when you have a pillar blog post. Because it is a lot of text in one straight block, it would be almost unreadable in that format. You can ask AI to help you with this task. For example, you can prompt it like this: “I have a very long pillar blog post with tons of text. Where would be good places to break up the content with multimedia pieces and what do you suggest I put in those spots?”
Now at first, it’s going to be very generic. The results will sound like this:
* Introduction: Consider adding a short video or infographic to your introduction to grab your reader’s attention and provide a visual representation of what your post is about.
* Examples: Adding images, screenshots, or even short videos to illustrate your points can be a great way to make them more tangible for readers. For example, if you’re discussing how to optimize your affiliate reviews for search engine rankings, you could include a screenshot of a well-optimized review or a before-and-after comparison of a poorly optimized review and a well-optimized one.
* Infographics: If you’re providing readers with a step-by-step guide on a particular topic, consider creating a video or infographic that visually walks them through the process. This can be a great way to help readers better understand the information you’re providing and make it easier for them to follow along.
* Case studies: If you’re discussing a particular success story or case study, consider including a short video or audio clip featuring an interview with the person or company involved. This can provide readers with a more personal and engaging look at the topic, and can help to build credibility and trust.
* Summaries: If you’re covering a lot of information in your post, consider breaking it up with short summaries or bullet points. You can also use images or infographics to summarize key points and make them more memorable for readers.
Have AI Fill These Out For You
Those are all very good ideas, but let’s prompt AI to tell us exactly where to use them in our post. You can prompt the AI tool to create one of each of these items for you. For example, start with the introduction.
We already know where this particular suggestion should go. So we’ll prompt it like this: “I want to 
create a short video for the introduction for what the post is about. Can you create a storyboard for me with narration for what should go in it and keep it under 3 minutes?”
You can do the same for each one, but ask AI for where it should go based on what it’s written for you. Just say something like this: “I want to create an infographic for one of the sections that visually walks the reader through a process. Which section do you think that’d work best in and write the infographic for me.”
It will return the results for you in seconds. It created an infographic for the section How to Set Up Tracking and Analytics for Affiliate Marketing. You can even tell it to tell you what images should be used on the infographic.
Step 7: Curation Links – Don’t Trust AI for Curation But Get Its Advice on What to Find
Some AI tools have a horrible track record of providing incorrect links to resources. In fact, it will pretend as if it’s giving you a real link to a real article. If you ask it why the link doesn’t work, it will tell you to simply Google the title of the article, which often doesn’t exist.
Therefore, you may want to get advice from the AI on what kind of curated information would be good to include in each of your sections. We will prompt AI like this: “I’d like to curate some data for my pillar blog post. Which section(s) would be good to have curated data or statistics in, and what should I be looking for online?”
Getting Advice From AI Tools
It gives you some great advice, such as:
Introduction: Curated data or statistics can be used in the introduction to provide a high-level overview of the affiliate marketing industry, the size of the market, or the growth of the industry in recent years.
Understanding Your Audience and Platform Preferences: Curated data or statistics can be used to provide insights into the demographics of social media users, user behavior on different platforms, or the popularity of specific social media platforms among different age groups.
Creating Effective Email Campaigns for Affiliate Promotions: Curated data or statistics can be used to show the effectiveness of email marketing, such as the average open and click-through rates for different industries or the ROI of email marketing campaigns.
Monitoring Affiliate Marketing Metrics and Analytics: Curated data or statistics can be used to provide benchmarks for different metrics, such as the average conversion rate or AOV in a specific industry, or to show the impact of different optimization strategies on performance.
It even tells you what to look for, including industry reports, research papers, surveys, government data, social media posts and more. So we can then go to Google and type in: overview of the affiliate marketing industry, the size of the market, or the growth of the industry in recent years.
The very first post tells us “Global affiliate marketing market was valued at $19,217.4 million in 2021 and the value is expected to surpass $36,902.1 million by 2030 at a CAGR of 7.7% during the forecast period, 2022-2030. Affiliate marketing is on the rise and expanding among business professionals.”
So we can add that to the introduction if we want to, and link back to the original source, which is PR Newswire. You can click on that and go to see if there are any quotes or better information you want to curate and then use that in your pillar post.
Step 8: Get AI’s Feedback on Your Internal Linking Structure
The next thing we want to do is have the AI tool help us figure out how to link our internal pages. Although it sounds good, you can’t just prompt the AI like this: “When you first told me what I needed to provide to you in order to help me write this pillar blog post, you told me it would help to know what other content I had already published. Based on that information, what pages should I be linking to within my own site and where in my post should I link out to them?”
The above returned a very generic answer, such as telling you to link to relevant blog posts. Therefore, we had to restate what we had already told it, even though it should remember the information.
How to Get Detailed Linking Advice from AI
We will remind it by saying the following: “I have covered topics like how to find a profitable niche, how to pick a business model, how to start building a list, how to begin email marketing, time management, and productivity tips, how to build a blog, how to create an info product, how to write product reviews as an affiliate, how to get free site traffic using social media platforms. In this current pillar blog post that you wrote, where should I link out to these? Give me specific spots on there to link to these other content pages.”
That gives us a much more detailed piece of advice. It tells us:
Based on the topics you’ve covered, here are some suggestions for where you could link out to your other content pages within your pillar blog post:
In the section on “Understanding Affiliate Marketing Business Models,” you could link out to your post on “How to Pick a Business Model” to provide additional context and guidance on this topic.
In the section on “Building an Email List for Affiliate Marketing,” you could link out to your post on “How to Start Building a List” to provide readers with more in-depth information on this topic.
In the section on “Creating Effective Email Campaigns for Affiliate Promotions,” you could link out to your post on “How to Begin Email Marketing” to help readers who are new to email marketing get up to speed quickly.
In the section on “Using Social Media to Promote Affiliate Products,” you could link out to your post on “How to Get Free Site Traffic Using Social Media Platforms” to provide readers with more tips and strategies for leveraging social media for their affiliate marketing efforts.
In the section on “Tracking and Analyzing Results of Your Affiliate Marketing Performance,” you could link out to your post on “Time Management and Productivity Tips” to help readers better manage their time and stay organized as they track their affiliate marketing efforts.
It also gives us a little bit of advice about how to naturally link out to the other content in an organic way so that it doesn’t feel forced and distract the reader.
Now you want to optimize the content that it wrote.
Step 9: Allow AI to Check Your Pillar Post for Better On-Page SEO
Now originally, AI came up with the concept of: Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. But let’s ask it if that’s the best title for us if that’s the phrase we want to rank for. It comes back with advice about how to research other relevant keywords that align with the topic and try to incorporate those into our content.
Get Ideas for the Pillar Blog Post Title
But we don’t want to have to do that ourselves, so then you simply tell AI: “Okay, do that for me!” And it does. It comes back with some hyped-up pillar blog post titles that we can use instead of that boring one.
They include:
- “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know”
- “Affiliate Marketing 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Making Money Online”
- “How to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide”
- “A Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Tips, Tricks, and Strategies for Success”
- “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting Your Online Business”
All you have to do is then choose the best one. In fact, you can even search those exact titles to see if anyone else is using something along those same lines. That can allow you to spy on the competition and make sure that your pillar blog post will perform better than theirs.
For our example, we are going to go with: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know. This is something that will appeal to people who are searching for this information.
Get a Meta Description
Next, you want to prompt AI to help you with the meta description for your pillar post. Ask AI: “I’m going with The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know. Please create a meta description for this post.”
Now the first result that it comes back with may sound a bit like it is selling an info product. You don’t want people to be shying away from the link just because they think you’re selling something to them.
So you can redirect AI and tell it to mention that it’s free information. It comes up with: “Discover everything you need to know about affiliate marketing in this free beginner’s guide. Learn how to start your journey to earning passive income with affiliate marketing.”
You can repeat the process and have it give you many different examples until you get what you want, or you can mix and match certain sentences or phrases so that it sounds exactly as you want it to.
Ideas for Anchor Text
You can also have AI help write your anchor text for certain external links, too. Simply ask it: “If I’m linking out to a good resource about writing affiliate reviews, what’s some good anchor text to use for that purpose?”
It will give you some ideas – and these help with on-page SEO factors:
- Tips for writing effective affiliate reviews
- How to write honest and informative affiliate reviews
- Best practices for writing affiliate reviews
- Writing product reviews that convert
- The ultimate guide to writing affiliate reviews
- Expert tips for writing affiliate product reviews
- Mastering the art of writing affiliate reviews
- Writing compelling affiliate reviews for your readers
- Creating valuable affiliate product reviews
- How to write affiliate reviews that build trust and drive sales.
You can also have AI come up with alt text ideas and image file name ideas to help you maximize every bit of your SEO efforts with your pillar blog post. And if you haven’t already figured out your codes, you can ask AI to help you with H1 and H2 header tags.
Step 10: Develop a Single, Strong CTA Using AI
Your main goal for these pillar blog posts is not to have tons of spammy links everywhere selling things. Your primary goal is to make your site a sticky page with authority. That means delivering a ton of value.
But at the very end of your post, you definitely want to have some sort of call to action that tells the reader what to do next. At this point, they should be impressed with your level of knowledge on the topic as well as the detail that you went into.
You have to think of the secondary goal that you want to achieve with this post other than ranking well in the SERPs and enjoying the organic traffic that comes with it. Whatever that goal is, that is how you will craft your call to action using your AI tool.
For example, your call to action may be to get someone on your list. You have already impressed them with your content, and it’s a good time to get them to sign up as a subscriber so that you can market to them for years to come.
But you may also want to sell them an info product, or some sort of tool or system. Maybe you have a private coaching program that you can sell where you walk them through the process they have just read about with more hand-holding and personalized attention.
Have AI Write Your Call to Action
Whatever your goal, you need to ask AI to help you write a strong call to action to place at the end of your pillar blog post. You can prompt your tool like this: “I need a strong call to action that gets people to sign up to my list after reading this pillar blog post. Write a paragraph with the CTA at the end and give me several options to choose from.”
Some of the results leave something to be desired, but there are several that are effective. We will choose this one: “Want to take your affiliate marketing efforts to the next level? Join my email list for expert advice, industry insights, and actionable tips that will help you grow your business and increase your revenue. Sign up now to get started!”
Sometimes, when you give AI instructions, it will come back with a disclaimer that it cannot ethically or legally do this. It says that it cannot serve any commercial interest. But then, it will give you the examples anyway.
Prompt Ai with the following: “I want you to write a call to action paragraph at the end of the blog post that gets them to buy coaching for affiliate marketing and give me several options.”
After it gives you that disclaimer, it will give you the examples that you asked for. It provided three, but we would choose this one: “Want to avoid the common pitfalls and mistakes that many new affiliate marketers make? Our coaching program is designed to help you accelerate your learning curve and fast-track your results. You’ll get access to our insider tips and strategies, as well as personalized feedback and guidance to help you stay on track. Take advantage of this opportunity to invest in your future and join our community of successful affiliates. Enroll now and start your journey to affiliate marketing success!”
Step 11: Not All AI Tools Are Equal – Use Different AI Tools to Update Your Pillar Post with Recent Developments
Part of keeping your pillar blog posts in place in the search engine results pages is to frequently update them with new information so that Google and other search engines see them as fresh content.
You want to keep track of which posts on your blog are your pillar posts and have an outline of what is included in them. You can set up Google alerts or research information periodically using AI tools that have a current database to help you freshen up your content.
Some AI tools are stuck with information from 2021. But if you use a tool like Google’s BARD, you can have the latest information that can help you enhance your post. Go and prompt it like this: “I need to freshen up a blog post about affiliate marketing for beginners. What’s some new and trending information they might appreciate that just emerged in 2023?”
If you didn’t include the year, some of the results would be very generic and could have occurred in any year. But with the specific year or even the month, you’ll get results that are more detailed such as:
- The rise of live-stream shopping
- The growth of influencer marketing
- The increasing use of artificial intelligence for affiliate marketing
- The growing importance of video content as an affiliate
- The importance of creating a personal brand, even as an affiliate
You can set a schedule for yourself on how often you want to go back and freshen up your pillar blog posts, and a lot of this will depend on how competitive it is to rank for certain phrases that you are targeting.
In some cases, you may want to go back on a monthly basis, and in others, you may want to go back every six months, every quarter, or every year. Once you have completed the process of creating your first pillar blog post, make sure you have a cluster of smaller blog posts that point back to this one.
Now that you have these steps and the types of prompts to use with AI, you can create additional pillar blog posts, until your entire site is filled with supportive content that meets the needs of your target audience, while at the same time adhering to the requirements of search engines that want to boost valuable content to their users.
I hope you have had some ah-ha moments while reading and hopefully trying things out while you were at it. You can use this information for many different types of AI searches and perhaps you now have some new ideas on how you can use AI to speed up content creation.
