Hey savvies. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I’m so happy that you’re here. In today’s episode, we’re talking all about using content pillars for your podcast.

I have been a huge fan of content pillars in my business for years and use them to plan all of my social media, email, and podcast content so I wanted to share a breakdown of how you can start using content pillars for your own business. 


Before we dive in, I wanted to share my content calendar template with you so that you can start taking action today. Grab your free Airtable content calendar template here. 

What are content pillars?

Content pillars are 3 to 5 topics you will consistently talk about on your podcast. 

For example, my content pillars for this podcast are start, grow, and scale. 

So some topics in the start phase would be how to launch a podcast, how many episodes should I launch with, and basically any and all topics related to starting a podcast. 

Topics in the grow phase would be things like how to market your podcast to get more listeners, how to analyze your podcast data, and basically any topics that can help you start growing your podcast listenership. 

And finally, topics in the scale phase would be things like guesting on other podcasts, monetizing your podcast, etc. 

Having these content pillars helps me create content much easier because I always know it’s going to fall under one of my three pillars. 

The difference between content pillars and brand pillars 

  • Content pillars represent the structural skeleton of your overall content strategy.
  • Brand pillars are the touch points of a business, the personality and values that a brand communicates, and how the public perceives it. 

Benefits of having content pillars 

  • Allows you to plan ahead.
  • Makes it easier to stay consistent. 
  • Keeps your episodes focused on what your listeners actually want. 
  • Allows you to demonstrate authority in your niche. By educating people, you give yourself a competitive advantage over the competition by providing answers to questions.
  • Can position your solution as the answer to the problems faced by your audience.

How can I decide what my content pillars should be?

Understanding your audience is so important so knowing what they need is the first step in figuring out your content pillars. 

Things to consider: 

  • Your audience’s values and motivations
  • The problems they may have that you have the solutions for
  • The demographics of your audience

Other things you can look at: 

  • Your analytics to see what content your audience has enjoyed in the past.

Setting up your content pillars 

Take a look at the content you’ve already created 

Likely, you have already been producing content of some sort for a while even if it’s just social media or email content. Look at what you have created and how it performed. Did people like what you created? Did they comment on it, share it on social media platforms, or ask you to create more pieces that are similar? This is a good sign that they found value in it so you should continue creating content similar to this for your podcast. 

Figure out what your main types of content are going to be

There is no use in creating content pillars if they don’t make sense for your audience. This is where keyword research comes in handy. Going through this process will show you what types of content your audience wants to consume, and where you have “content gaps” as well. 

Plan your content pillars

Now that you know what type of content you need to make, it’s time to break it down into a few “main topics.” These will be your content pillar topics. 

Like I mentioned before, my pillars are start, grow, and scale and they all relate to the different phases of your podcast. 

For example, say your podcast is for brand designers. 

Your pillars could be – marketing, operations, and sales.

Each episode would fall into one of those three categories. 

 Start creating your episodes based on these pillars 

Now it’s time to start mapping out your episode topics. 

Going with the example mentioned previously, a podcast for brand designers you would start mapping out different episode ideas based on your pillars of marketing, operations, and sales. 

Some marketing topics could be things like how to market your brand design business on social media. 

With operations, you could dive into things like streamlining your operations as a brand designer, must have tools for brand designers, etc. 

With sales, you could cover how to get booked out as a brand designer, how to rock your discovery calls, etc. 

There are so many different things you can do within each pillar, now it’s your time to get creative. 

I’d love to know, do you already have content pillars for your podcast? If not, do you plan on creating them soon? Let me know over on Instagram. My handle is podcastingforentrepreneurs.

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