How to Blog a Book

Inspiring You to Build Visibility, Boost Authority and Become an Author Post by Post

Inspiring You to Build Visibility, Boost Authority and Become an Author Post by Post

  • Home
  • About
    • Vote This Blog One of Writer’s Digest’s Annual 101 Best Internet Sites for Writers
    • Resources for Nonfiction Authors and Bloggers
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Service
  • The BOOK!
    • Table of Contents
    • Page One
    • NEW! Revised and Expanded–2nd Edition–of How to Blog a Book
    • How to Blog a Book (Revised and Expanded Edition) BLOG TOUR
    • Previous Virtual BookTours
  • Services
    • Blog Services
    • Coaching
      • Blog and Blog-to-Book Coaching
      • Author Coaching
      • Writing and Book Coaching
  • Courses
    • The Productive Writer Course
    • Inspired Creator Community
    • High-Performance Writer Group Coaching Program
    • Turn Your Blog Into a Book Production Machine
    • Build a Business Around Your Blog
    • How to Blog a Book Audio Course
    • How to Blog a Book eCourse
    • How to Blog a Book Audio Recording
  • Contact

April 13, 2021 by Nina Amir 1 Comment

How to Create Your First Pieces of Cornerstone Content

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Print
  • More
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket

how to create cornerstone content for your blog

You’ve likely heard talk of the power of cornerstone content. And you understand that the success of your blog depends, in part, on producing these written pieces, but you don’t know exactly how to do so. If you are asking, “Is cornerstone content a post or a page? Is it evergreen or time-sensitive material?” no worries. Jay Artale (@BirdsOAFpress) has you covered! In this post, she explains the exactly what type of content to produce and how. Follow her advice, and you’ll be on your way to creating powerful pieces of cornerstone content.

Readers and search engines look for valuable content. It’s your job to produce blog posts that provide the information they seek. That’s where “cornerstone” posts come in. This foundation content has the greatest ability to attract readers and improve your site’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

Before we dive into how to write a cornerstone post, it’s imperative to understand the difference between a post and a page. This knowledge ensures your compelling content stands out and your site is easy to navigate.

Blog Posts vs. Pages

Understanding the difference between a page and a post is essential at the beginning of your blogging journey. Sometimes, new bloggers get confused about where on the site to publish blog posts. When you launch your first website, be sure the appropriate content gets published on pages, and the rest is shared as blog posts. Otherwise, your cornerstone content won’t be easily found or noticed.

Readers and search engines look for valuable content. It’s your job to produce blog posts that provide the information they seek.

Click To Tweet

Blog Posts

The key to a successful blog is to create a continual stream of fresh content as weekly or monthly posts. Your publishing frequency is less important than the consistency of your approach. Consistent new content helps the search engine bots get to know your routine and crawl your site regularly. If your latest blog posts get indexed by the bots, they stand a higher chance of inclusion in search results.

Some of your blog posts will be time-sensitive, and others will be evergreen. You can differentiate between the two by determining if the blog post will still be relevant after three months, six months, or a year. There’s no time limit to evergreen content. If there’s a chance the information will become outdated, it’s not evergreen.

You can make a post evergreen by continually updating it, but that entails keeping track of those posts and reviewing them periodically to keep them current. Another approach is to check your top 10 posts each month and make sure they’re kept current and optimized for SEO. If these posts are driving traffic to your site, it’s worth spending time maintaining them. Eventually, you end up with a blog consisting of a mix of time-sensitive and evergreen content.

Pages

Think of your initial blog pages as static content. These rarely change. Additionally, pages tend to contain the necessary information that helps visitors understand who you are and what benefits you provide.

Every website has a home page. Yours also needs an About Page and Contact Page. These pages help create transparency and make it easier for your audience to connect with you. If you’re offering products or services, create pages to feature these, too.

If you are blogging a book, you might also have a page that features the book’s table of contents. This makes it easy for readers to follow along as you write and publish related posts. And you’ll likely want to create an About this Book page, too.

Although you should review your pages periodically to ensure they’re current, the bulk of this content will remain constant.

Cornerstone content has the greatest ability to attract readers and improve your site’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

Click To Tweet

Cornerstone Content

The more posts you create, the more you need to streamline the content organization to make your site easy for visitors to navigate. One way of achieving this is by creating cornerstone content. These foundational long-form articles are intended to help your audience identify and navigate your blog’s core topics.

There are a couple of different schools of thought about whether cornerstone content should be a post or a page. The benefit of making it a post is that you can open your article up to comments, but that means it will have a publication date. I prefer using a page because it keeps the content timeless. The whole point of cornerstone content is that it’s evergreen.

Many bloggers confuse cornerstone content and evergreen content and use the terms interchangeably. Although all cornerstone content should be evergreen, not all evergreen content is a cornerstone.

Let’s look at how cornerstone content differs from evergreen content.

Creating Your Cornerstone Articles

Your cornerstone content constitutes the most important articles on your site. Cornerstone content contains information your audience needs to know to familiarize themselves with your website and topic. For example, my self-publishing website’s core topics are writing, marketing, book production, and design. All blog posts I write are related to one or more of these four topics, so I only need to create four cornerstone articles.

My site features one page for each of the four articles. Each page contains insights and information to help site visitors get a broad understanding of each of these four keyword topics. The articles I post there also include inbound and outbound links to make it easy for the reader to explore the topic in greater detail.

Your articles should be the best written, linked, laid out, and illustrated articles on your site. They need to be optimized for SEO and contain (and link) so much useful information that other bloggers are excited to link back to your article from their website. Cornerstone articles take a lot of effort to create. However, done right, they’ll help your site visitors in their discovery and make them eager to share the piece across social media.

As you add new blog posts to your website, you may need to include links to them from your cornerstone page. That means your cornerstone content will need regular monitoring and maintenance to keep it evergreen and relevant.

Although all cornerstone content should be evergreen, not all evergreen content is a cornerstone.

Click To Tweet

Choosing Your First Cornerstone Page

Hopefully, you’ve been using categories and tags to identify your content. These tools help define which cornerstone page to create first.

Use your category tags to identify the keyword about which you’ve written the most blog posts. Then assess how you could summarize the content to make it easy to digest. In effect, you’re creating a content index page to lead your readers in the direction that’s most useful and relevant to them.

For example, I could create a book marketing cornerstone content page and use sub-headings for topics like Content Marketing, Social Media, Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, Book Promotion Sites, etc. I’d include a summary of the subject and links to related content within my site, and also link to other reliable sources.

This would create a cornerstone page that becomes a valuable landing page to which I can drive traffic.

Commit to Creating Valuable Resources

Creating cornerstone content is a commitment—not just to the initial creation of the article but also to keeping it evergreen. At the end of the day, though, the effort is worth it. Your cornerstone content becomes a valuable resource for your site visitors and a tool to help you attract more readers. Think of well-planned and well-written cornerstone content like a gift that keeps on giving. Indeed, it will pay off long after you create it.

Do you have any questions about creating your first cornerstone page? Let us know in the comments below. And share this post with other writers and bloggers so they can start creating cornerstone content, too.

About the Author

Jay Artale abandoned her corporate career to become a digital nomad and full-time writer. She’s an avid blogger and a nonfiction author helping travel writers and travel bloggers achieve their self-publishing goals. Join her at Birds of a Feather Press where she shares tips, advice, and inspiration to writers with an independent spirit.

 

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Print
  • More
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket

Filed Under: Writing for the Internet, Writing Posts/Chapters Tagged With: blog, blog a book, blog posts, blogging, cornerstone content, writing posts

Comments

  1. Cassie Journigan says

    May 4, 2021 at 4:31 am

    Thanks for your well-written, informative article. I’ve got quite a bit of work to set up my website as you suggest. Sounds like it’ll be well worth the effort!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Nina Amir

Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, inspires writers to create published products and careers as authors as well as to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose and potential.

Read More . . .

Follow Me!

Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on Google+Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on LinkedInFollow Us on PinterestFollow Us on YouTubeFollow Us on SkypeFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

As Seen On:

social proof2

How to turn your blog into a book

Amazon.com
Barnesandnoble.com
IndieBound.com
WritersDigestShop.com

Create a Successful Author Website!

Book. Books and laptopPurchase a copy of my eBook!

Bestselling authors like Michael Hyatt and Joanna Penn use Scrivener and endorse this course! I tried Learn Scrivener Fast, too, and found it a quick, easy way to learn the Scrivener writing technology. Plus, you can use it to produce produce ebooks!
Click here to find out more!

250x250

bluehost

Writer's Digest: 2013 Best Writing Websites (2013)
This website has been awarded a Best Writing Website.
Sponsored by Writer's Digest, Writer's Market,
Writer's Digest University & Writer's Digest Shop.

TFOI Badge

Popular Posts

  • Are You Blogging a Book? List it here!
  • Can You Publish Blogged Material As a Kindle Ebook?
  • Darren Rowse on Book Deals and Discovery in the Blogosphere
  • 4 Ways Digital Marketing Helps You Blog A Book
  • Selling Your Ebook on Your Own Website vs. Amazon

Search

Categories

Archives

Copyright © Nina Amir 2023

»
«
Powered by Conversion Insights: Boost your online revenue.  
Are you a productive, semi-productive or unproductive writer? Take My Quiz To Find Out!
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.