Hint: If you think it’s easy, you’re wrong
 
It happens all the time. You slave over a creative piece, you pour your heart and guts into it, you turn it in, proudly and/or terrified…
 
And then it tanks. 
 
What do you do? Did you fail? Should you fight back? 
 
In this article, we’re going to touch on the touchy subject of criticism. It’s universal; every creative soul faces it. Creative professionals get more than their share; it comes with the job. 
 
Fortunately, there are ways to deal with criticism that’s aimed at your creative work. There are ways to actually improve from the experience (even when said criticism seems patently boorish or unwarranted). Better yet, there are ways to avoid even getting the criticism in the first place. So get ready for lots of tricks, both procedural and mental. 
 
A chronological approach
 
Tracing a typical story in chronological order will help you to spot opportunities for improving your lot. 
 
It goes like this: You’ll be handed a creative assignment, either by a client or a superior/sponsor within your own organization. And when we say “creative assignment,” we mean something that requires interpretation. It won’t be something like “Make last year’s orange layout, blue.” It will be something like, “Figure out an exciting way to reach this specific audience via a direct mailer, with a given form-factor, based on our available budget.” 
 
Then you take that input, you huddle in your creative cave, and ideate your brains out. You choose what you believe to be the best idea, develop it, hone it, and turn it to your client/sponsor. That’s when they reject it/hate it/ask you what you were thinking/what you were smoking. And you try not to take it personally, but it still hurts. Because there are pieces of you all over that thing. 
 
Identifying the gaps
 
The story we just spun is ripe with opportunity. In other words, it’s rife with glaring gaps in the narrative. Do not take such a story for granted. If this is the way you receive, and then deal with, creative assignments, you’re shortchanging yourself. You’re making it too easy to get disappointed—and to disappoint others. 
 
Let’s take that “direction” that was given in the above story: “Figure out an exciting way to reach this specific audience via a direct mailer, with a given form-factor, based on our available budget.” Seems pretty detailed, right? 
 
Wrong. 
 
You can, and should, spend a lot of time with your client/sponsor at this point. “Tell me more about this specific audience!” That’s an hour-long conversation, easily. “What are we offering them?” “Why do they need it yesterday?” If you can’t get good answers, you can’t do good work. Be prepared to push back at this point; to quote the old computer adage, “garbage in, garbage out.” 
 
Here’s another gap in the supposedly gap-less story above: “You choose what you believe to be the best idea, develop it, hone it, and turn it to your client/sponsor.” Oops. That’s a lot of work in a vacuum. Instead, show your client/sponsor early/rough ideas. Don’t commit to in-depth execution without their sign-off. We have a great article devoted entirely to this topic: It’s called Why We Have Layouts.
 
Then what?
 
Let’s say you plug all the gaps in the above-spun story. You get good input. You follow a “gated” process for execution. And yet still the criticism comes raining down. What do you do? 
 
There are two important things to understand here. 
 
One: If you have indeed gotten good input and followed a “gated” process for execution, you can rule out those factors as the basis for the criticism. We can’t overstate the importance of that fact. Consider the opposite: If you didn’t do that, you wouldn’t know where to start, nor how to react. 
 
Two: The criticism probably has merit. Yes, there are always bone-headed clients making ham-handed suggestions; that’s part of the business landscape. But even the most brutal and seemingly senseless critique has, as its core, valuable intentions. Your job is to find them. 
 
Now you might expect us, at this point, to say, “Swallow your pride. Act professional. Find out what’s needed, so that you can minimize your time and effort on the next-round revisions.” 
 
That’s only partly true. Because advice like that ignores basic human behavior, especially if you’re the creative type. To wit: When you first get that heat-seeking email, you want to scream.
 
So scream. 
 
Indulge in some good old-fashioned primal therapy. Rant. Rave. Curse. Throw things. Burn off the anger and the aggression. Here’s the only trick: Do it privately. You may need to “take a breath of fresh air” and head out to the parking lot. You may need to simply close your office door and work out with a stress-relieving device like a spring-loaded finger-strengthener. Just get out all the knee-jerk anger first. Then you can take a nice long breath, consider the criticism, and work up your line of questions to help you nail that next draft. 
 
A parting word 
 
Creativity is subjective. You, as a creative professional, are an arbiter of taste. So sometimes, that first-round version you’d submitted is, actually, really really good. You’ll just need to make a new version, going in a slightly different direction. And other times, you’ll have to admit, that first-pass effort wasn’t your best. No one’s a machine. So be grateful for the second chance. 
 
Need help with that next creative assignment? We practice what we preach. Contact us today for a no-obligation assessment. 

In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a pillar page. Isn’t that great?! 
 
There’s only one question. 
 
What the @#$% is a pillar page? 
 
We’re so glad you asked. The answer, incidentally, can have a big impact on your business’ presence on the web. 
 
Okay, what is a pillar page?
 
To answer this question, you need to back up a little and consider the world from Google’s point of view. That’s what search engine optimization, or SEO, is all about anyway. The “SE” in “SEO” is basically code for “Google.” Spoiler alert: Pillar pages are all about SEO, kind of a newfangled skeleton key for improving your search rankings. 
 
Back to Google. In the old days—not very long ago, actually—Google would scour the web for information it could organize (the company’s foundational mission) by searching for keywords: phrases that would indicate the contents of a given page. This, incidentally, is what transformed Google from a dot-com also-ran into a global behemoth: They figured out that they could monetize the search for keywords. Today, Google AdWords is basically still that: A reverse auction whereby advertisers bid on the keywords they want to own. 
 
So keywords still exist. But over the years, Google has gotten much, much smarter than just looking for keywords. It’s also searching for metatags, depth of content, appropriate images, video, and so on. The overarching goal, now as before, is to serve up useful content. 
 
Google has gotten much better at this. We’re sure you remember, not too long ago, when you might search Google for a certain term, and the top hit would appear to be exactly what you were looking for. ...But then you’d click that link and discover that it was essentially junk: Just a landfill of “aggregated content” and slapped-together keywords, created solely for the purpose of tricking Google into ranking it highly. You’d see a page like that, get frustrated, and go back to your search results. Only this time, you’d be wary: Would the second item on the list yield the same junk? There was a good chance of it. 
 
Today, you rarely encounter such situations. Credit Google: They’ve gotten smarter. Not only do they update their search algorithms, they update them continually, and in secret, so that junk advertisers like the one we just described can’t easily reverse-engineer Google’s search parameters and thus game the system. 
 
In an article about “pillar pages,” you might think that we’ve gotten significantly off-topic. In fact, we haven’t. 
 
The bigger picture
 
Google, as we said, wants to serve you the best information it can. (It also wants to make the most possible money doing so, but that is actually off-topic here.) 
 
Now. Think. What is one particular website that’s known, better than every other site on the internet, for the information it serves up for free? Here’s a hint: Imagine a student trying to write an essay about “The Roman Empire.” What’s the first site they’d visit? It sure wouldn’t be “RomanEmpire.com,” (We just made that up.) 
 
It would be—no suspense—Wikipedia. 
 
Here’s where things get interesting. Wikipedia is, inarguably, a great source of information. But it’s not always the best source. Still, the way it presents its info is clear, logical, and authoritative. 
 
So if you’re Google, wouldn’t you want to find other websites that are equally clear, logical, and authoritative?
 
Of course you would. 
 
And those—ta dah!—are pillar pages. 
 
Here’s a quick and dirty definition of a pillar page: 
 
A pillar page is single, long-form, informative page that’s structured very similarly to Wikipedia, but doesn’t reside on Wikipedia. 
 
A counterintuitive approach
 
Wikipedia gets tons of traffic. It’s one of the most-visited sites on the entire internet. Wouldn’t you love to have even a sliver of that kind of traffic for your business? 
 
This is where the pillar page comes in. If you can craft a good pillar page, then Google will recognize it, and reward you with strong placement for your efforts. 
 
But if you’re new to this, prepare to go in unfamiliar directions. Again, think of Wikipedia. Does it have advertising? No. Does it self-promote? No. Does it feature a call-to-action? No. 
 
These are all things that you naturally assume would be on any website page you create! But in the land of pillar pages, they’re verboten.
 
Incidentally, we keep saying “Wikipedia.” But it’s not the only example. Wikipedia is, after all, infamously dry and boring. So you’re free to do a better job. You can make your pillar page fairly conversational. You can make the layout pretty. Think of, for example, a good introductory college textbook. 
 
So you’ll want to craft a pillar page about a topic you absolutely own. Something you’re a world-class expert on. You’ll create it just like a Wikipedia page—replete with a table of contents at the top, hyper-linked to all of the chapter subheadings—and devoid of hype that promotes your business, or even a call-to-action. 
 
You’ll want the thing to be deep. Aim for 4,000 to 5,000 words. (You can always update it and lengthen it, going forward. In fact, Google likes it when you do.) Include Google-friendly elements, such as diagrams, illustrations with metadata and captions, bullet lists, embedded video clips, and so on. 
 
So how does this build your business? Well, the answer is subtle. First off, this big, huge, authoritative page does not reside on Wikipedia.com; rather, it lives on your website. So Google is driving all the traffic there. That’s the second benefit: the obvious SEO boost, if you do this right. And once those visitors arrive at your site, they automatically associate this authoritative information with your business. And they’ll be able to learn more about you: Your pillar page can still include things like top nav-bar links to the rest of your site, and ads for your services here and there, which can link to landing pages on other parts of your site. 
 
Admittedly, this is an unusual exercise. If you’re used to creating strong, promotional web content, prepare to downshift to a stranger gear. But it’s worth the effort: A good pillar page can really dominate its intended search results. We know: We’ve helped clients attain this exact goal. 
 
Need help creating a pillar page of your own? You don’t have to go it alone. Contact us today. We’ll help to ease the journey, and improve the destination.