How I stopped writing content nobody remembered

_{Day 109/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

I’ve built a lot of content pillars.

A few of them held up.
Most of them fell over and crushed my will to live.

That’s why today we’re doing something useful:

Building Content Pillars That Don’t Suck

Not just keyword clusters.
Not “social themes.”
Not ideas you saw on a Notion template and thought, yeah that’s probably good enough.

We’re building them right.

From the ground up.

Not just what you rank for.
What you rally around.

With AI overviews and ChatGPT making Google feel like a blender full of soup,
then content pillars are your ladle.

You need real shape.
Real focus.
Real reasons to write.

The mistake I used to make?
I’d build them around traffic potential.

“Great search volume.”
“Low competition.”
“Clear commercial intent.”

Boring.

I’d end up with a bunch of lifeless posts that technically performed but had zero soul.
And zero staying power.

No one shared them.
No one quoted them.
No one cared.

Because there was no conviction behind them.

So here’s how I do it now.

A good pillar sits at the centre of three things.

At Penfriend, ours are:
→ Content strategy (what to write)
→ Content creation (writing it well)
→ Content research (making it useful)

Squint, and they all blur together.

But that’s the point.
Each one feeds the others.
And the content we make under them? It actually matters to the business.

Call it a Venn diagram if you want.
(I call it penance.)

• We can speak on it for hours.
  Not with prompts. Not with prep. Just open mouth, go.
  This is your expertise. Your lived-in niche. The dinner party rant you have locked and loaded.
  

• It actually helps people.
  Real, useful problems.
  Not “content marketing trends 2025” — but the kind of content that makes someone tab over and do something.
  

• It connects to what the business sells.
  Sounds obvious. But you’d be shocked how many brands build entire libraries about things they’ll never make money from.
  It should hint at your offer. Lead people toward it. Create demand, not just traffic.

This pillar built different. (Mostly out of regret.)

If I could go back, I’d scrap 80% of what I used to publish.

I built too wide.
Too generic.
Too divorced from anything I actually believed.

And here’s the thing:

No one’s ever said

But people do remember the pillars you stand on.

So make them strong.
Make them sharp.
Make them yours.

✌️ Tim "Still recovering from the pillar called “Marketing Tips for 2019”" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. I got 3 more beta testing spots open.
You need a paid plan, and to reply “I WANNA TALK TO PENNY” and I’ll get you in on Monday.

We’ve done a lot of cool things with Penfriend, and this is the one I’m the most excited about by far.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.