What is cornerstone content and why is it so valuable?
Cornerstone content, pillar content, lead magnet, your core message…
There are many names for the type of content we are going to be discussing in this post. But for the sake of simplicity, we will call it “cornerstone content.”
This is your foundational, most important content to your entire business. This is the content that your entire expertise is built upon.
In this article, we are going to explain what Cornerstone Content is and why it’s often the most important place for companies to start in their content strategy.
What cornerstone content is
When you think of an expert who has written a book that summarizes their core expertise, that is cornerstone content.
When you think of a white paper or long-form piece of content that focuses on a companies core area of focus, that is cornerstone content.
When you think of the one thing you are best at... capturing that in an article is considered cornerstone content.
At it's core, cornerstone content is 1-3 long form pieces of content that capture the foundational value and expertise of your company.
These pieces are well thought out, well crafted, and provide significant value to the reader.
Even one piece of cornerstone content can impact your business
One of our clients is a niche expert in software negotiation. We created a few pieces of cornerstone content for his business. Each captures a core area of expertise.
First, we started by creating an article on Negotiating with Salesforce for . For a long period of time, this was the ONLY piece of content that this company had.
Yet this single piece of cornerstone content alone generated over $1M in new business for the firm. The content was long, in-depth, and gave away significant amounts of information and value about his expertise in Salesforce Negotiation.
This "Negotiating with Salesforce" article was the first piece of cornerstone content. In one long-form, helpful piece of content, he captured his area of expertise and shared his secrets with the world.
Examples of cornerstone content
After the initial success with the "Negotiating with Salesforce" article, we ended up creating several more pieces of cornerstone content around the other practice areas of his consultancy. These included:
Best Practices for IT Sourcing during Merger & Acquisition Initiatives
This piece helped his showcase expertise around M&A activities.
What to Look out for when Negotiating with ERP providers like Oracle & SAP
This modeled a similar approach to the Salesforce article but shared expertise in other areas.
Each of these content pieces is long-form, in-depth, and provides value to the reader. While Content Allies helped him to create these pieces, the expertise came from his head. Each article was paired with multiple interviews to extract the firms expertise.
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As another example of cornerstone content, we created A How to Guide to LinkedIn Lead Generation for Lead Cookie. This in-depth guide gives away all of the company’s best secrets and frameworks surrounding LinkedIn outreach.
We took the core of their service and turned it into an educational piece for their customers.
Another example is our CEO’s guide to the Top Podcast Production Companies & Services. This is a definitive guide of all of the companies in the space which ranks on search and provides prospective buyers a clear breakdown of all of their options.
How to pick your topic for cornerstone content?
In most cases, this isn't too hard. Simply ask "What’s our area of expertise?" and then build your content around that simple question.
For many firms, you may have multiple areas of expertise. If that's the case, then feel free to split out into more than one piece of cornerstone content.
What makes for good cornerstone content?
This is simple. It needs to be valuable, actionable to your target customers and it should solidify your expertise.
For our client, his Negotiation article about Salesforce was valuable because it gave away all of his secrets and showcased his expertise. After reading it, many people reached out to hire his firm because they realized the work was more complicated than they initially anticipated.
For Lead Cookie, the LinkedIn Lead Generation guide gave away all of the company’s secrets and approaches. But as soon as someone tried to implement them, they realized how much work it is and then reached out to Lead Cookie for help.
If you are truly an expert in your field, give away your secrets.
At first, this may seem scary. You think "Why would anyone hire me if I gave it all away?" But this is what makes for valuable content that gets shared amongst others.
While some people did read the Negotiating with Salesforce article and then implement on their own, many also saw it, realized how complex the process was and then decided to hire him for implementation.
Give away your secrets. That is how you create value.
And when you create value, the world will bring it back to you.
How to create cornerstone content if you are not a writer?
Just because you are not a writer doesn't mean you cannot create cornerstone content. There are many ways to hire a writer to handle your work.
In previous articles, we break down the specifics of how to outsource technical writing effectively.
Summarized in a few steps:
Find a quality writer.
Work with them to create an outline.
Have the writer interview you to extract details.
This is what we do at Content Allies. We specialize in extracting the expert ideas out of our client’s heads. As an alternative, you can also look into sites like Upwork.com where you can hire contract writers directly.
Create your cornerstone content now, leverage it for years
Our client published their Negotiating with Salesforce in March of 2018. That single article is still generating business for his firm and acting as social proof today.
One single article that took a couple of weeks to create, has generated over $1M in new business for his firm and served them for multiple years.
This is why we say that content is an investment. Create it once, and it will pay for itself for years to come.