Pillar Blog Posts Using AI: An Affiliate Marketing Case Study

When ranking your blog well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), you have to do more than write basic content that barely touches the surface of a topic. Here’s a process for pillar blog posts using AI.

In just about any niche, there are too many competitors vying for the exact keyword phrases for you to achieve that goal by doing the bare minimum. According to Google and other search engines, the content that performs best in ranking delivers a comprehensive discussion.

Instead of your visitors feeling like they need to click out and go elsewhere to gather more information, a pillar blog post will satisfy their desire to understand the topic thoroughly. But writing a pillar blog post can be overwhelming for many online entrepreneurs.

The first thing you want to understand is that the goal with a pillar blog post is to rank your website high enough that you can secure a flood of free, organic traffic. It’s not simply to get people on your page so they can click out and buy something – people expect value within the post itself.

Not only are pillar blog posts much longer than a regular post, often exceeding the length of a short report, but they also have to be organized with the information, well-researched, and updated often.

These are the pages that are going to serve as the most vital access points of your site. Not only will they rank well and deliver organic traffic, but other site owners will want to point to your pillar post as an external authority page on the topic as well.

Because this is such an enormous task requiring detailed information and an eye for optimization combined, creating these pillar posts can take quite a while. However, you can use the 11-step artificial intelligence (AI) pillar post-creation process below to quickly work on this strategy and apply it to your online efforts today.

Step 1: Help Pinpoint Topics for Pillar Blog Posts Using AI

You may have heard of pillar blog posts, but you need help figuring out where to begin creating them for your blog. Every blog on your site does not have to be a pillar blog post.

Think of it in terms of a mind map. You have your main topics and subtopics that shoot out from the main one. These are known as cluster topics. So your primary topic will be your pillar blog post.

You will then have other pages on your site that point back to that pillar blog post that has the primary authority page on that topic that covers everything. So, for example, if you had a pillar blog post about Fasting for Weight Loss, you would have cluster pages to support the main pillar blog post.

These might include specific blog posts on intermittent fasting, alternate-day fasting, the 5:2 fasting method, 24-hour fasts (also known as eat: stop: eat), the 16:8 fasting method, 72-hour fasting, water fasting, and more.

Now if there was a lot of information on these particular pages, you could create a pillar blog post out of these cluster pages and then make smaller cluster pages for each of these, doing this until you get to a point where there’s not enough information to have multiple pages pointing back to the central pillar page.

For example, you can create a pillar page for intermittent fasting. Still, there may not be enough information to create a pillar post out of the 5:2 fasting method, with cluster pages pointing back to it because it’s already a narrow topic.

We will find a good topic for our pillar blog post using AI. First, we want to ask our AI what it needs from us to achieve this task. We will prompt the AI like this: 

“I want you to help me develop a pillar blog post topic for my blog. What information do you need from me to help you do this?”

It will respond with the details you need to feed it to help it do the job for you, which includes:

• What is the focus of your blog, and what topics have you covered in the past?
• Who is your target audience, and what are their interests, pain points, and needs?
• What are the main goals of your blog, and what do you hope to achieve with your content?
• What are your industry’s key trends or challenges, and how can your blog address them?
• Do you want to target any specific keywords or topics with your content?

Let’s assume we have started a blog teaching Internet marketing to newbies. So we will provide the following answers to our AI machine:

• The focus of my blog is teaching Internet marketing to newbies. In the past, I have covered topics like how to find a profitable niche, how to pick a business model, how to start building a list, how to begin email marketing, time management, and productivity tips, how to build a blog, how to create an info product, how to write product reviews as an affiliate, how to get free site traffic using social media platforms, and more.
• My target audience is a mix of young adults to older seniors, both men and women, who want to work from home or for themselves to earn more money, have flexible schedules, be hands-on parents, prevent isolation and boredom, etc.
• My main goal with the blog and content is to be the go-to resource for new online entrepreneurs to learn from when building their businesses. I want them to sign up for my list and feel confident buying products I create and recommend.
• The challenges in this industry for my audience are often information overload and shiny new object syndrome. Everything tends toward ease, automation, and profits.
• I’m not sure what topics would be best for me to target for a pillar blog post– can you help me with that?

Notice that we asked AI to work for us in the last answer. You can do that on several of these if you still need to create a blog and start with a pillar blog post.

So let’s feed this into our AI tool to see what it can develop. It gives you an idea and a summary of what the pillar blog post could offer. The main ideas it delivers are:

• The Ultimate Guide To Internet Marketing For Newbies
• 5 Proven Strategies For Generating Traffic To Your Website
• How To Overcome Information Overload And Shiny Object Syndrome
• The Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing
• The Top Tools And Resources For Online Entrepreneurs
• How To Create A Winning Content Marketing Strategy
• The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing
• How To Monetize Your Blog Or Website
• The Top Social Media Platforms For Online Entrepreneurs
• How To Build High-Converting Sales Funnels
• The Importance Of Mindset For Online Entrepreneurs
• How To Create A Successful Online Course
• The Top Mistakes To Avoid When Starting An Online Business

The one that stands out to me for this particular target audience is the one about affiliate marketing. This is often a business model that newbies like to pursue because it only costs their domain and hosting.

This is also an excellent way to secure recurring income as an affiliate because you can promote domain registration and hosting, which will bill month after month.

You can also promote page-building tools they can use on their blog and stock image deals, such as the Deposit Photos deal that always comes out through App Sumo, plugins, and more.

But they are all great concepts, so put them in your back pocket for later use. Additionally, when you look at the affiliate marketing topic, you can see that it’s broad enough to have dozens of cluster pages built below it to discuss more targeted or narrow affiliate marketing topics that will point back to your pillar blog post.

It says this: “This post could provide a comprehensive overview of affiliate marketing, including how it works, how to get started, and tips for maximizing commissions. You could also include case studies or examples of successful affiliate marketers.”

Let’s tell AI which one we have selected and see if it can come up with anything slightly more targeted. We will prompt it like this: 

“I like The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing, but I’m afraid that might be hard to rank for. What’s a slightly more narrow topic on that concept that I might have an easier time ranking for?”

AI will agree that it is a very competitive keyword phrase to rank for and suggest the following more narrow topics:

• How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote
• The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs. Digital Affiliate Products
• How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews
• How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media

Strategy-wise, we will still target: The Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing, but we wanted to get the AI to narrow down the topics. Hence, we know which cluster pages we want to create later and even use as subtopics in this particular pillar blog post.

Ideally, you want to write about the most pressing topics for your target audience and think about what’s easier to rank for. It will be harder to rank for a beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing, but if you do it well, it will become a resource that other authority sites point to. As your site grows and more of your pages link back to it, it will begin to rise with its own rank and authority.

Step 2: Have Your AI Tool Deliver a Robust Keyword Strategy

If you need a keyword tool or are unfamiliar with how to use it well, you can use AI and have it do the work for you. You can also use it paired with your keyword tool.

For example, you can use Google as your free keyword tool, get it to auto-fill keywords for you, and then feed it back into AI and tell it you want similar keywords.

So for affiliate marketing, we’d find additional words like programs, jobs, meaning, courses, Amazon, for beginners, and more. But AI can do an excellent job for you, too – depending on what tool you use.

We will prompt the ChatGPT AI like this: 

“I’ve decided to write a pillar blog post called The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. I’d like you to develop a strong keyword strategy, including the main keyword phrase to target and the cluster of semantic keywords I need to use.”

The results it gives are the primary keyword phrase we should be targeting, and it gives us two options: affiliate marketing for beginners or a beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing.

You have to decide which one you want to select. More people would search for the first one, making it more competitive. So let’s go with the second one instead.

Next, the AI tool delivers a cluster of additional keywords that you’ll want to use throughout your post that shore up the support for your primary keyword phrase. These include:

• Affiliate programs
• Commission rates
• Digital products
• Physical products
• Choosing a niche
• Affiliate networks
• Promoting affiliate products
• Affiliate marketing tools
• Tracking and analytics
• Affiliate marketing strategies
• Affiliate marketing tips

It also provides instructions about using variations of the primary keyword phrase throughout the post and where and how to use them. One of the examples is to use the phrase Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing in one of your subheadings.

The great thing about using many AI tools is that they will remember the conversations you have been having. You can have it call upon the list it has already created for you and use that data when completing the content creation portion of the task.

Step 3: Craft Organized Outlines For Your Pillar Blog Posts Using AI

Now it’s time to work with our AI tool to develop a logical, organized, comprehensive outline for our pillar blog post. Remember, previously. We had AI come up with some more narrow topics.

We will refeed those back to AI and ask it to develop even more subtopics for our main pillar blog post. We will prompt it like this:

“My pillar blog post topic is The Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. I have the following subheadings, but I want this to be a comprehensive piece of everything they need to know, so please tell me what other topics this blog post should discuss. Here’s what I have so far: How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote, The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs. Digital Affiliate Products, How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews, How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media.”

The AI tool will deliver a list of seven options, which do not include the ones above. But always ask the following question: 

“Are there more topics you think we can cover?” 

Keep going until it either says no or until the results are outside the scope of what you want to cover.

Next, you will compile a list of all the topics you want to cover in your pillar blog post based on what it provides and anything else you brainstorm on your own.

Then, feed it back to your AI tool and ask it to organize the information in a logical order for the reader. When looking at the results it gave us on what to cover, sometimes you’ll see something repetitive.

But be sure to read the details in the summary because there is often a nugget of information that you can turn into an additional section in your pillar blog post. For example, we already have a section about writing affiliate product reviews.

But the AI tool also gave us another section called: Creating Content That Converts. That seems repetitive, but inside that section, it does mention the use of visual elements like videos and images, as well as optimizing the content for search engines – both of which are topics we can turn into a subheading of their own.

We are going to prompt AI to organize our information, and the final topics we have include:

• Understanding Affiliate Marketing
• Choosing a Niche for Affiliate Profits
• The Pros and Cons of Promoting Physical vs. Digital Affiliate Products
• Finding the Right Affiliate Program
• Networking with Affiliate Managers for Perks
• How to Choose the Right Affiliate Products to Promote
• How to Write Effective Affiliate Product Reviews
• Using Multimedia in Your Affiliate Reviews for Higher Conversions
• How to Optimize Your Affiliate Reviews for Search Engine Rankings
• Disclosing Affiliate Relationships
• How to Promote Affiliate Products on Social Media
• Email Marketing Tips for Affiliates
• Tracking and Analyzing Results of Your Affiliate Marketing Performance
• Scale Your Affiliate Success with Automation and Delegation

It didn’t need to change anything, but it did give a paragraph for each about why it should be the following logical subheading or section. Sometimes, it will rearrange your outline and tell you why it should be in a new order.

Keep in mind that artificial intelligence is just that – artificial. It could be better than what a human could determine. But don’t take its word as gospel. Instead, see if what it says makes sense, and if it does, you can adopt it into your strategy – but feel free to decline its suggestion.

Once your content is organized logically, you want to have the AI tool drill down in every subsection until you have a comprehensive outline that will be easy to write on your own or have AI write for you.

You will prompt AI like this: 

“I’d like you to outline thoroughly what the first subtopic should cover.” 

Read through the results, and if you have anything you know that should be added to or eliminated from that section, fix that now.

You can also ask AI if there’s anything else it feels should be covered in that section. Simply say: 

“Is there anything else you feel should be covered in that section?” 

You may find additional information that fits well within that particular subheading or things that should be in their own subsection.

When we did this, it added three ideas that were perfect for the first subsection, so we simply prompted AI by saying: 

“Can you add the first three results to the outline for this first subtopic?”

And it did! But double-check because sometimes it will say it did, but it didn’t. So you might have to tell it, “You didn’t add the third one.” It will then apologize and correct the results.

Once you have a thorough outline of everything you want to cover and you have used AI to drill down the topic into a complete outline, you can either take the results and write a unique pillar blog post or use the tool to help you craft the content before you go back and then personalize it with your own stories and tone.

There may be times when the AI tool is too generic with its information. Remember, this is a pillar blog post, so you want all the information about your primary target keyword phrase, to be precise.

For example, when we asked AI to give a comprehensive outline for the section about email marketing tips for affiliates, the results were lackluster and very generic about email marketing in general.

So we had to go back and prompt AI by saying: 

“Can you redo it, specifically tying it into affiliate marketing?” 

The results were much better this time. Keep redirecting your AI tool until it gives you precisely what you want, and don’t settle for what it delivers the first or second time.

Step 4: Create the Content For Your Pillar Blog Posts Using AI With Section-By-Section Expansion Prompts

By now, you should have a comprehensive outline that is many pages long. You will take each section, feed it back into your AI tool, and have it written to your satisfaction.

Because this is supposed to be a comprehensive piece of content, you want to read through AI’s results and see if it is specific enough and well explained. You don’t want it to gloss over any topics.

Prompt AI like this: 

“Now we’re going to go section by section, and you’re going to write the content for this pillar blog post. Start by writing the introduction of the first subheading (Understanding Affiliate Marketing). It should cover: Definition of affiliate marketing, an Explanation of how affiliate marketing works, a Brief history of affiliate marketing, an Overview of the benefits of affiliate marketing for beginners, and Affiliate marketing terminology.”

It did a fantastic job giving me a paragraph for each item. However, the last one simply said: 

“As with any industry, affiliate marketing has its own terminology that can confuse beginners. This guide will cover the most common terms and concepts to help you easily navigate the affiliate marketing world.”

So we will have it correct itself like this: 

“Can you rewrite that last paragraph, and instead of saying this guide will cover… simply give them a few of the most essential and standard affiliate marketing terms they may hear and explain them briefly?”

It corrected itself, giving the five most common terms and a brief definition. This is just good to get people started. It covered the words: affiliate, commission, tracking link, conversion rate, and affiliate network.

Something cool may happen when you are having AI write your content. For example, when I prompted it to write the second subsection in the first section of our pillar blog post, it mentioned that it was very similar to the first and gave me an alternative to use instead, which worked out much better! It’s nice that it can catch its repetition or similarities and make improvements.

Step 5: Improve Your Pillar Post Using AI with Eye-Opening Examples

One thing you may want to do with your pillar blog post is to include examples that are woven throughout the content. Sometimes, your AI tool automatically contains examples that could be more detailed.

You may have a specific example you want to include in your post, or you can ask AI to help you find the best places to include examples. We will prompt it like this: 

“Now that we’re finished with the pillar blog post, I’d like to include some examples to explain the concepts better. What areas of the post might be good places to include examples, and can you create them for me?”

It returns the following, which you can include in your pillar post if you want to:

Example of a clear and compliant disclosure statement: 

“Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something we have recommended. While clicking these links won’t cost you any extra money, they will help us keep this site up and running! Thank you for your support!”

Example of a lead magnet for building an email list: 

“Sign up for our weekly newsletter and receive our free guide to mastering social media for your business, including tips and strategies for maximizing your presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more!”

Example of an effective email campaign promoting an affiliate product: 

“Subject: Don’t miss out on this exclusive deal! Get 20% off our favorite product of the month!

Dear [Subscriber],

We are excited to share a special offer with you for our favorite product of the month. You can get 20% off using our unique link to purchase for a limited time.

[Product name] has been a game-changer for us, and we know you’ll love it too. Don’t wait – this deal won’t last forever!

Best,

[Your Name]”

Example of a delegated task for affiliate marketing: 

“Hire a freelance writer to create product reviews and comparison articles for your website, ensuring that all content is accurate, informative, and engaging for your audience.”

Example of using social media automation tools to scale affiliate marketing efforts:

 “Schedule a month’s worth of social media posts promoting your top-performing affiliate products using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. This will save you time and effort while maintaining a consistent social media presence.”

You can stick with various short examples, as provided above – or you can pick one of those and have it do a more in-depth example. You can even feed it an example of something you want to showcase and then have it write the steps out for you to share with your readers.

Step 6: Pinpoint Text Breaks with Multimedia Suggestions For Your Pillar Blog Posts Using AI

Breaking up the content is very important when you have a pillar blog post because it is a lot of text in one straight block. You can ask AI to help you with this task. For example, you can prompt it like this: “I have a very long pillar blog post with tons of text. Where would be good places to break up the content with multimedia pieces, and what do you suggest I put in those spots?”

Now at first, it’s going to be very generic. The results will sound like this:

Introduction: Consider adding a short video or infographic to your introduction to grab your reader’s attention and visually represent your post.

Examples: Adding images, screenshots, or even short videos to illustrate your points can be a great way to make them more tangible for readers. For example, if you’re discussing how to optimize your affiliate reviews for search engine rankings, you could include a screenshot of a well-optimized review or a before-and-after comparison of a poorly optimized review and a well-optimized one.

Infographics: If you provide readers with a step-by-step guide on a particular topic, consider creating a video or infographic that visually walks them through the process. This can be a great way to help readers better understand your information and make it easier for them to follow along.

Case studies: If discussing a particular success story or case study, consider including a short video or audio clip featuring an interview with the person or company involved. This can provide readers with a more personal and engaging look at the topic and help build credibility and trust.

Summaries: If you cover much information in your post, consider breaking it up with short summaries or bullet points. You can also use images or infographics to summarize key points and make them more memorable for readers.

Those are all excellent ideas, but let’s prompt AI to tell us exactly where to use them in our post. You can prompt the AI to create one of these items for you. For example, start with the introduction.

We already know where this particular suggestion should go. So we’ll prompt it like this: 

“I want to create a short video for the introduction to what the post is about. Can you create a storyboard for me with narration for what it should include and keep it under 3 minutes?”

You can do the same for each one, but ask AI where it should go based on what it’s written for you. Just say something like this: 

“I want to create an infographic for one of the sections that visually walks the reader through a process. Which section do you think that’d work best in, and write the infographic for me.”

It will return the results for you in seconds. It created an infographic for the section How to Set Up Tracking and Analytics for Affiliate Marketing. You can even ask it what images should be used on the infographic.

Step 7: Don’t Trust AI on Curation Links But Get Its Advice on What to Find

Some AI tools have a horrible track record of providing specific resource links. It will pretend to give you an actual link to a genuine article. If you ask why the link doesn’t work, it will tell you to simply Google the article’s title, which often doesn’t exist.

Therefore, you may want to get advice in pillar blog posts using AI for what kind of curated information would be good to include in each section. We will prompt AI like this: 

“I’d like to curate some data for my pillar blog post. Which section(s) would be good to have curated data or statistics in, and what should I look for online?”

It gives you some great advice, such as:

Introduction: Curated data or statistics can be used in the introduction to provide a high-level overview of the affiliate marketing industry, the market size, or the industry’s growth in recent years.

Understanding Your Audience and Platform Preferences: Curated data or statistics can provide insights into the demographics of social media users, user behavior on different platforms, or the popularity of specific social media platforms among other age groups.

Creating Effective Email Campaigns for Affiliate Promotions: Curated data or statistics can show the effectiveness of email marketing, such as the average open and click-through rates for different industries or the ROI of email marketing campaigns.

Monitoring Affiliate Marketing Metrics and Analytics: Curated data or statistics can provide benchmarks for different metrics, such as the average conversion rate or AOV in a specific industry, or show the impact of varying optimization strategies on performance.

It even tells you what to look for, including industry reports, research papers, surveys, government data, social media posts, etc. So we can then go to Google and type in: “overview of the affiliate marketing industry, the market size, or the industry’s growth in recent years.”

The very first post tells us, “Global affiliate marketing market was valued at $19,217.4 million in 2021, and the value is expected to surpass $36,902.1 million by 2030 at a CAGR of 7.7% during the forecast period, 2022-2030. Affiliate marketing is on the rise and expanding among business professionals.”

We can add that to the introduction if we want to and link back to the source, PR Newswire. You can click on that and see if there are any quotes or better information you want to curate, and then use that in your pillar post.

Step 8: Determine Where to Link Your Internal Pages to Pillar Blog Posts Using AI

The next thing we want is the AI tool to help us figure out how to interlink our internal pages. You can’t just prompt the AI like this: “When you first told me what I needed to provide to you to help me write this pillar blog post, you told me it would help to know what other content I had already published. Based on that information, what pages should I be linking to within my site, and where should I link to them in my post?”

It will be very generic with its answers, such as telling you to link to relevant blog posts. Therefore, we must restate what we have already told it, even though it should remember the information.

We will remind it by saying the following: “I have covered topics like how to find a profitable niche, how to pick a business model, how to start building a list, how to begin email marketing, time management, and productivity tips, how to build a blog, how to create an info product, how to write product reviews as an affiliate, how to get free site traffic using social media platforms. In this current pillar blog post that you wrote, where should I link out to these? Give me specific spots to link to these other content pages.”

That gives us a much more detailed piece of advice. It tells us:

Based on the topics you’ve covered, here are some suggestions for where you could link out to your other content pages within your pillar blog post:

In the “Understanding Affiliate Marketing Business Models” section, you could link to your post on “How to Pick a Business Model” to provide additional context and guidance on this topic.

In the “Building an Email List for Affiliate Marketing” section, you could link to your post on “How to Start Building a List” to provide readers with more in-depth information on this topic.

In the “Creating Effective Email Campaigns for Affiliate Promotions” section, you could link to your post on “How to Begin Email Marketing” to help new readers get up to speed quickly.

In the “Using Social Media to Promote Affiliate Products” section, you could link to your post on “How to Get Free Site Traffic Using Social Media Platforms” to provide readers with more tips and strategies for leveraging social media for their affiliate marketing efforts.

In the “Tracking and Analyzing Results of Your Affiliate Marketing Performance” section, you could link to your post on “Time Management and Productivity Tips” to help readers better manage their time and stay organized as they track their affiliate marketing efforts.

It also gives us some advice about how to naturally link out to the other content in an organic way so that it doesn’t feel forced and distract the reader. Now you want to optimize the content that it wrote.

Step 9: Screen Your Pillar Blog Posts Using AI for Better On-Page SEO

Initially, AI came up with the concept of the Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing. But let’s ask if that’s the best title for us if that’s the phrase we want to rank for. It comes back with advice about researching other relevant keywords that align with the topic and trying to incorporate those into our content.

But we don’t want to do that ourselves, so you simply tell AI: “Okay, do that for me!” And it does. It comes back with some hyped-up pillar blog post titles that we can use instead of that initial boring one.

They include:

• “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know”
• “Affiliate Marketing 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Making Money Online”
• “How to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide”
• “A Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Tips, Tricks, and Strategies for Success”
• “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting Your Online Business”

All you have to do is then choose the best one. You can even search those exact titles to see if anyone else uses something along those lines. That can allow you to spy on the competition and ensure that your pillar blog post performs better than theirs.

For our example, we will go with the following: 

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know. 

This is something that will appeal to people who are searching for this information.

Next, you want to prompt AI to help you with the meta description for your pillar post. Ask AI:

 “I’m going with The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Everything You Need to Know. Please create a meta description for this post.”

The first result it comes back with may sound like it is selling an info product. You don’t want people to be shying away from the link just because they think you’re selling something to them.

So you can redirect AI and tell it to mention that it’s free information. It comes up with:  “Discover everything you need to know about affiliate marketing in this free beginner’s guide. Learn how to start your journey to earning passive income with affiliate marketing.”

You can repeat the process and have it give you many different examples until you get what you want, or you can mix and match specific sentences or phrases so that it sounds exactly as you want them to.

AI can also help write your anchor text for certain external links. Simply ask it: 

“If I’m linking to a good resource about writing affiliate reviews, what’s some good anchor text to use for that purpose?”

It will give you some ideas – and these help with on-page SEO factors:

• Tips for writing effective affiliate reviews
• How to write honest and informative affiliate reviews
• Best practices for writing affiliate reviews
• Writing product reviews that convert
• The ultimate guide to writing affiliate reviews
• Expert tips for writing affiliate product reviews
• Mastering the art of writing affiliate reviews
• Writing compelling affiliate reviews for your readers
• Creating valuable affiliate product reviews
• How to write affiliate reviews that build trust and drive sales.

You can also have AI develop alt text ideas and image file name ideas to help you maximize your SEO efforts with your pillar blog post. And if you haven’t already figured out your codes, you can ask AI to help you with H1 and H2 header tags.

Step 10: Develop a Single, Strong CTA For Your Pillar Blog Posts Using AI to Achieve the Goal You Want

Your primary goal is to make your site a sticky page with authority. That means delivering a ton of value. A secondary goal of these pillar blog posts is to have only a few links for selling things.

But at the end of your post, you must have a call to action telling the reader what to do next. At this point, they should be impressed with your level of knowledge on the topic and the detail you went into.

You have to think of the goal you want to achieve with this post other than ranking well in the SERPs and enjoying the organic traffic that comes with it. Whatever that secondary goal is, that is how you will craft your call to action using your AI tool.

For example, your call to action may be to get someone on your list. You have already impressed them with your content, and it’s an excellent time to get them to sign up as a subscriber so that you can market to them for years to come.

But you may also want to sell them an info product, tool, or system. You may have a private coaching program to sell where you walk them through the process they have just read about with more hand-holding and personalized attention.

Whatever your goal, you need to ask AI to help you write a compelling call to action to place at the end of your pillar blog post. You can prompt your tool like this: 

“I need a strong call to action that gets people to sign up to my list after reading this pillar blog post. Write a paragraph with the CTA at the end and give me several options.”

Some results aren’t so good, but others are effective. We will choose this: 

“Want to take your affiliate marketing efforts to the next level? Join my email list for expert advice, industry insights, and actionable tips to grow your business and increase revenue. Sign up now to get started!”

Sometimes, when writing pillar blog posts using AI and you give it instructions, it will come back with a disclaimer that it cannot ethically or legally do this. It says that it cannot serve any commercial interest. But then, it will give you examples anyway.

Prompt AI with the following: 

“I want you to write a call to action paragraph at the end of the blog post that gets them to buy coaching for affiliate marketing and give me several options.”

After giving you that disclaimer, it will give you the requested examples. It provided three, but we would choose this one: 

“Want to avoid the common pitfalls and mistakes that many new affiliate marketers make? Our coaching program is designed to help you accelerate your learning curve and fast-track your results. You’ll get access to our insider tips and strategies and personalized feedback and guidance to help you stay on track. Take advantage of this opportunity to invest in your future and join our community of successful affiliates. Enroll now and start your journey to affiliate marketing success!”

Step 11: Improve Your Pillar Posts Using AI Bard for Recent Developments

Part of maintaining and improving your pillar blog post positioning in the search engine results pages is frequently updating them with new information so that Google and other search engines see them as fresh content.

You want to keep track of which posts on your blog are your pillar posts and have an outline of what is included in them. You can periodically set up Google alerts or research information using AI tools with a current database to help freshen up your content.

Some AI tools are stuck with information from 2021. But if you use Google’s BARD, you can have the latest news for your post. Prompt this: 

“I need to freshen up a blog post about affiliate marketing for beginners. What’s new and trending information they might appreciate?”

If you didn’t include the year, some results would be very generic and could have occurred in any year. But with the specific year or even the month, you’ll get more detailed results such as:

• The rise of live-stream shopping
• The growth of influencer marketing
• The increasing use of artificial intelligence for affiliate marketing
• The growing importance of video content as an affiliate
• The importance of creating a personal brand, even as an affiliate

You can set a schedule for yourself on how often you want to go back and freshen up your pillar blog posts, which will depend on how competitive it is to rank for specific phrases you are targeting.

In some cases, you may want to go back every month; in others, you may want to go back every six months, quarter, or year. Once you have completed creating your first pillar blog post, ensure you have a cluster of smaller blog posts that point back to this one.

Then, you can create additional pillar blog posts until your entire site is filled with supportive content that meets the needs of your target audience while simultaneously adhering to the requirements of search engines who want to boost valuable content to their users.