We broke Penfriend... again

_{Day 223/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I have to admit something.

When we pushed the most recent big update to Penfriend.
We broke literally everything else.

Which is a bad thing, and a good thing.
It means I have an excuse to improve it.

And by excuse, I mean deadline.

So, first on the list to fix is Clusters.
You know, that little feature where you can define 4-16 articles at once and have Penny write them all for you. With links and URLs…

Yeah, that little feature.

As we lead up into the re-release of one of the most important features of Penfriend, I have prepared a little surprise for you all.

Clusters - A mini masterclass

All this week I’ll be breaking apart what clusters are, why you need them, and how to build them out. And at the end of the week, the tool will be back and you can start building out your own topical authority.

Clusters 101 - What even is a cluster?

In content marketing a cluster could mean a number of things. A group of content. A group of terms or keywords.

We consider a cluster a single hub article and all the articles that link to it. In the hopes that it’ll rank better.

It’s the main characters and the supporting roles.

The hub is the index and the invitation.
It explains the whole topic in brief and points you outward.

Each spoke answers one job.
One intent per page. One clear next click.

Links run both ways.
Spokes link to the hub in the first 100 words.
The hub links to every spoke once, grouped by intent.

URLs share a family name.
/content-calendar/ as the hub.
/content-calendar/templates/ as a spoke. You get the idea.

Your hub is written last.

The easiest win this week

1. Choose an article you want to rank.

2. Find 5+ articles that cover similar topics to your chosen article

3. Add links from the 5 to the One.

4. Congrats. You just started making a cluster

Why clusters still win

Search engines reward depth over dabbling.
Readers do too.

A cluster turns “some posts on a theme” into a map.
Hub in the middle. Spokes around it. Links like glue.

When I ran my first real cluster in 2019, I did it backwards.
I wrote the hub first, made it grand, then starved the spokes.

It ranked… nowhere.
The moment I flipped it - ship spokes, then assemble the hub - the whole thing lit up.
The hub is a combination directory of your spokes + completely guide of the cluster theme.

Once you have that, you just need to start writing.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Cluster-master" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

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

P.S. Once you see a cluster as spokes are a collection of guides, and the hub is the article table of contents, it all starts making sense.

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