I think about blogging, a lot.

I’ve had plenty of good ideas and even more bad ones. But I think I’ve found something that’ll be very interesting to you.

It works insanely well for getting traffic, keeping people on your site, building trust, collecting leads, and I’ve never seen anyone else do it exactly like this.

Here’s the most advanced blogging strategy I’ve ever thought up.

Blogging and the Old School Advertising Rule of 7

Before we get into the strategy, you need to understand the thought process behind it. There’s an old school advertising concept that states:

“Consumers need to see an ad seven times before they’ll purchase.”

How does it apply to blogging?

I see blog posts as advertisements

If I stumbled upon your site seven times and read seven of your blog posts, then I’ll read your about page, opt-in, sales page, and probably send you an email thanking you for your blog.

With that in mind, your goal as a blogger is to get people to read seven blog posts.

Now let’s talk about how to do that.

Start with Pillar Articles for Each Category on Your Blog

Pillar articles have been around for awhile.

Basically, take your primary blog topic and split it up into categories. (You should’ve already done this to create categories for your posts.) Then write a 3,000-5,000 word, ultimate resource blog post for each category.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Top 101 Tips for [Category]
2. How to [Category]
3. [Category] 101
4. The Ultimate Guide to [Category]
5. [Category] for [Your Audience]

If you create a few master resources like this, people will start to trust you.

This is how you become a trusted authority in your niche.

Create Specialty Articles for Each Tip within Your Pillar Articles

Once you have a few ultimate resources on your blog, it’s time to split those ideas into specialty articles that go into extreme detail on each tip.

For instance, let’s say we create a post on IncomeDiary titled, 101 Ways to Make Money Online. It’d be difficult to get that post ranking well in search because “make money online” is such a competitive keyword.

For the specialty articles, we’d take each method of making money online and dedicate an entire post to it. These posts would rank better because they’re more niche, the keywords are long-tail, so there’s less competition.

This is how you start to get traffic.

Strategically Interlink Your Pillar Articles and Specialty Articles

In the SEO Blog Post Publishing article, I wrote about the importance of interlinking, but this strategy takes interlinking to the next level.

What we have here is a cluster of similar articles on specialty topics that naturally reel in search traffic. If a search visitor is interested in, “Make Money Online Strategy #1,” then they’re also interested in #2, #3, and #4. And they’re definitely interested in the 101 Ways to Make Money Online.

Remember, our goal is to get them to read seven blog posts. So the best way to keep them on your site is to tactically link to the other MMO strategies as the call to action, and make it obvious.

Think of interlinking as a sales funnel to get people to your pillar article.

Then, on the pillar article, link back out to each of them under their corresponding tip with:

More info: [title of specialty blog post]

They’ll get drawn into your site through the specialty article, work their way through the funnel, land on the pillar article, and find a whole bunch of other articles that they’re interested in reading.

It’s like leaving a trail of M&M’s into a candy store.

This is how you keep people on your site.

Point Pillar Article to a Squeeze Page

The beauty of the funnel is three-fold:

1. The pillar will get a ton of traffic.
   With the funnel, people will always be working their way back to the pillar article.
2. The pillar will constantly get re-shared.
   Since it’s one of your best articles, that’ll be the one they want to share, especially since they’ve already spent a bit of time reading your site and beginning to trust you.
3. The pillar will rise up in search engines.
   More traffic means more opportunities for people to link to it, not to mention all of the internal linking. Plus, social shares.

But the biggest benefit to this is that your pillar article becomes a perfect opportunity to collect opt-ins.

The problem with putting an email opt-in at the bottom of every post (not that I’m against it) is that I don’t trust you enough after reading just one post.

If I read two or three, then maybe.

If I read six or seven, then definitely.

People who read your pillars have probably read multiple posts and they’re looking for an opportunity to learn more from you.

You can collect emails one of two ways:

1. Put an opt-in box at the end of the pillar.
2. Make the call to action a link to a relevant squeeze page.

This is how you collect leads for people who are interested in a particular topic.

Implement This Strategy for Each Pillar Article in Each Category

The benefit of following this pillar article ? specialty article funnel strategy is that you can use it for every category. It’s like creating mini-networks of content within your blog. And each time you add a blog post, the mini-network becomes stronger and more valuable.

Not to mention, all of your pillar articles will begin climbing the search engine ladder for those competitive keywords.

Over time you’ll become the trusted authority in your niche and everyone, including big-budget corporations, will come to you with their questions.

The Final Word

The reason bloggers don’t do this is because it takes a super-human level of forethought, an incredible amount of planning, and a tremendous amount of work.

It’s a lot easier to come up with blog posts day-by-day or week-by-week.

But if you spend a little time strategically creating an editorial calendar with deliberate blog post ideas, you’ll be on your way towards creating a well-rounded, lead-generating machine, instead of just another measly blog.

I know this concept is a bit idealistic, but I think it’s something we can all strive towards.

Let me know if you’ve thought about or implemented this concept on your blog.

Image by: Rammy Storm