"Online Community Management & Pillar Content Experimentation" (Content Lab)

Yesterday was a really exciting day.

IMPACT Director of Audience Engagement and Community Stephanie Baiocchi (whom some of you know from IMPACT Elite) saw her massive guide on online community management for businesses go live! 

One of my favorite things about managing these projects -- and taking our thought leaders here at IMPACT through my (fairly intense) pillar content creation process -- is how much I get to learn about a particular topic from some of the smartest people in this industry.

In the case of Stephanie, her online community management guide taught me:

• The difference between a business' audience and their community. (I didn't realize there was a difference, to be perfectly honest.)
• The benefits of creating an online community for a brand. 
• The avoidable (and unavoidable) problems associated with community management.
• How important it is to set the right goal for your community. 
• The process you need to go through to create the best online community strategy for your company.
• And a lot more. Like... a lot. That beast is 14,000+ words. 

Speaking of pillar content, yesterday was also a big day because I unveiled the results of of my experimentation with measuring the success of pillar content.

Thanks to some creative hacking of HubSpot, I was able to determine that $195,000+ of revenue was associated with our pillar strategy -- but the way I got that information was not through HubSpot's traditional topic cluster reporting options. 

Want more pillar content goodness? 👇

Listen to These Pillar Content-Focused Episodes

"Link-Building & Guest Blogging the Right Way" with Justin Champion of HubSpot (Ep. 24)

If you want to get the maximum amount of return from your topic cluster-based content strategies, you need to listen to this episode. In it, Justin Champion of HubSpot returns to talk about link building and guest blogging strategies -- two methodologies in the inbound marketing world that have gotten a bad reputation because a large percentage of folks are approaching them with the wrong tactical mindset. 

In this episode, we talk about why link-building is so critical to the success of your pillar content and topic clusters, the exact steps you need to go through to plan and execute a guest blogging strategy that actually works, how to build relationships with publishers, how to write pitches that actually get accepted, and much more.

"What It Takes to Write Pillar Content with Carina Duffy of IMPACT (Ep. 14)

During this conversation, IMPACT HubSpot Specialist Carina walks us through a candid pillar content creation retrospective, as she recently finished writing a draft of a pillar on HubSpot Marketing Hub. She talks about what surprised her, what she’s learned, and what advice she would give to others who have a similar pillar content mountain to climb. 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who is tackling a pillar content strategy or is being asked to write a piece of pillar content. Actually, it's a great episode for anyone being asked to tackle a super long-form piece of content, period.

"Demystifying Pillar Content" with Justin Champion of HubSpot (Ep. 1)

Pillar content is a complex topic that has prompted a lot of discussion in the digital marketing community, and no one should be surprised by that. Pillar content is massive, scary, intimidating, and exciting. It's also the future of content.

To help me unpack and demystify pillar content in this episode, I invited one of my absolute favorite fellow content nerds and industry friends -- Justin Champion, content professor at the HubSpot Academy.

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