In this step, you will need to review your product's value proposition as well as your ideal customer profile.
Combine your audience's challenges with the challenges your product can solve to find a common theme you can cover in your blog.
To identify your first pillar theme, start by looking at a specific feature that solves a specific user problem.
Next, formulate this problem as a general concept, as in this model:
Product (or specific feature) > specific user problem topic > pillar topic
To give you an example, let's say I create a blog for writers.
I sell an SEO copywriting tool (product) that helps my users write sample cell phone number in philippines optimized texts (problem), a concept that is widely known as “SEO copywriting” (pillar topic).
I can define other pillar topics, such as “content marketing”, “content management” or others that are relevant to both my audience and my tool.
Content plan - Pillar topics
Formulate 5-10 pillar topics to keep your blog's focus clear and save it in a file that you can expand later.
Since this model is tied to organic activity, make sure your pillar topics are getting online searches.
To do this, analyze each topic with a keyword tool and find the most popular synonyms for these topics.
Liz Moorehead suggests that your core pillar topic should have a substantial search volume , but not too much: 500 searches a month may not be worth it, 1,200-6,400 is more suitable, while 33,000 is too much.
Please note that these are only approximate figures and can vary significantly from industry to industry and country to country.
Once you have found your pillar topic, the next step is to find topics in your cluster that you can cover using different data sources.
My recommended tools:
Keyword Magic Tool to check my keyword volume and find popular alternatives.
Google Sheets to save the topics.