Content Pillars for a Founder Brand: How to Decide What You Talk About

Content pillars for a founder brand are the three to five topics you commit to being known for. You don't have to invent them; your customers' questions already wrote the list. Here's the framework I use to help founders choose theirs.

For most of LinkedIn's history, the feed ran on relationships. The platform showed your posts to the people you knew, and if your connections engaged, their connections saw it too. Visibility spread through who you knew. LinkedIn's engineers called this the social graph. The LinkedIn algorithm (actually a group of about 19 algorithms) decided who saw your post based largely on your network's engagement.

The LinkedIn algorithm is gone now. It's been replaced by AI and large language models (LLMs). And that means everything has changed.

In March 2026, LinkedIn's engineering team published a detailed explanation of the new feed. The platform now runs on what's often called an interest graph. Instead of routing your content through your network, LinkedIn's AI reads your posts the way an editor would. It analyzes what you're saying, decides what topics you cover, and routes your content to the people most likely to care about those topics, whether they know you or not. Relevance now beats relationships. In fact, only about a third of what shows up in your feed comes from your direct connections.

Two consequences follow, and they change everything about how founders should think about content.

First, LinkedIn's AI system decides what you're about before it decides who sees you. LinkedIn's engineering documentation confirms that your profile itself, your headline, your experience, your skills, gets bundled into the AI's understanding of every post you publish. Then it looks at your posting history. Post consistently about a defined set of topics, and the system learns exactly who to show your content to. Post about leadership on Monday, industry gossip on Tuesday, and productivity hacks on Wednesday, and the system reads you as a generalist. Generalists get general distribution, which means almost none. LinkedIn is using your activity to establish your topical credibility.

Second, this same dynamic now extends beyond LinkedIn. When buyers ask AI assistants who understands a problem, the models answer based on who has published consistently and credibly on that topic.

All this means that the question "what do I talk about?" is a strategically critical decision. And your answer determines whether the right people see your content, because it drives how the machines categorize you.

So let's talk about how to answer that crucial question. It's not as simple as it seems.

Content pillars: what you talk about

We start with content pillars. Content pillars are the three to five topics you want to be known for. Each pillar is a subject you return to again and again, the way a news columnist owns a beat. Nearly every piece of content you publish should map to one of your pillars.

Pillars work because they concentrate your signal. Each post on a pillar topic reinforces LinkedIn's AI's confidence about who should see your content, and each post reinforces your audience's memory of what you're about. Human memory and machine categorization reward the same behavior: showing up repeatedly on the same themes.

Your goal is to become known as a subject matter expert or thought leader on those specific topics.

You'll sometimes see "pillars" used to describe categories like educational content, promotional content, or engagement content. Those categories describe the post's purpose. But that's different from a pillar. They describe why a post exists, not what it's about. So let's talk about that next.

Content purpose: why each piece exists

Content purpose is the reason you're writing a specific piece. Nearly everything you publish serves one of three purposes:

Affinity. Content that helps people know you and like you. Personal stories, lessons learned, opinions, behind-the-scenes moments. Affinity content builds the human connection that makes everything else land.

Authority. Content that demonstrates you know your subject deeply. Research, frameworks, teaching, analysis, point-of-view pieces and case studies fit here. Authority content builds the credibility that makes buyers trust your judgment.

Action. Content that asks the reader to do something. Register for the workshop, download the guide, book the call. Action content converts the trust you've built.

Pillars and purpose are two different axes, and your content strategy is the grid where they cross. Every piece you publish sits in one cell of that grid: a pillar, crossed with a purpose.

What this looks like in practice

Here are my five pillars:

1. AI in marketing and sales
2. Founder branding
3. LinkedIn strategy
4. B2B sales
5. Visibility and authority

Everything I publish maps to one of those five. And across them, I rotate purpose deliberately.

• For affinity, I write stories about my personal experiences. My #MondayMarkups series builds connection through something lighter.
• For authority, I do deep research and publish frameworks, like this article series.
• For action, I promote offers like our workshops.

Here's how I might write posts with 3 different purposes for the same pillar:

Pillar: founder branding

Affinity: I wrote a story about the time I dug up my cilantro seeds because they weren't sprouting fast enough. And I connected that story to why we have to be patient and not expect instant results when building a founder brand.

Authority: Then I publish a framework explaining how visibility becomes credibility and credibility becomes trust. It's especially effective if I include the framework as an image or document in the post so people can see and download it.

Action: Next, I might post about an upcoming workshop, link it to the prior posts saying I'll teach them how to build a founder brand and include a link to register for the workshop.

Three posts, one pillar, three different jobs.

But most founders (and marketing teams) are so focused on demand generation that they get the ratio wrong. And that will backfire.

The overwhelming majority of what I publish asks for nothing. It's how the math of trust works. Affinity and authority content earn the attention and build credibility. Once you've built that trust, it's easier to make the occasional ask convert. Founders who invert the ratio, mostly asking while only occasionally offering value, train their audience to scroll past them.

Here's the breakdown I recommend for your monthly strategy:

• Affinity content should be 35-40% of your posts
• Authority content should be at least 55-60% of your posts
• Action content should be limited to 5% or less.

You can also plan content sequences: a run of posts on one pillar over several weeks, each approaching the theme from a different purpose or angle. Sequences let you build a bigger argument than any single post can carry, and they concentrate your signal on that pillar while the sequence runs.

But write each post to stand alone. On today's LinkedIn, the interest graph routes every post to whoever it decides is relevant, and most of those people probably didn't see your last post. Treat a sequence the way a good blogger treats a series: the posts reward the reader who catches them all, but no post assumes you read the one before it.

You can link between the posts by using a unique hashtag. For example, I did a series on how I pivoted my business strategy in 2025. I added the hashtag #PropelGrowthPivot to help readers find the rest of the series. Just make sure your hashtag is unique. It won't work if it's a common hashtag (like #FounderBrand).

One more thing: this framework is not exclusively a LinkedIn tactic. I follow the same pillars and the same purpose rotation in my email newsletter and my blog. Pillars are a brand decision. The platforms are just distribution.

How to choose your pillars

Your pillars live at the intersection of three things: what your customers ask about, what you can talk about endlessly, and what you want to be known for. It's crucial that you link these to what your customers need to learn and what they're interested in reading about (not always the same thing!)

And the good news is, you already have the answers.

Start with customer questions. Go through your sales calls, your support threads, and your inbox. The questions that keep showing up are your market telling you what it wants help understanding. Pillars built on real customer questions never run dry, because your conversations with customers keep writing your content calendar for you.

Then apply the authenticity test: could you talk about this topic at 2am, unprepared, with genuine enthusiasm? If not, it's not your pillar. You're going to be publishing on these themes for years. Forced pillars produce forced content, and readers smell it instantly. For example, one of my clients in the Microsoft channel gets asked a lot about email deliverability. It's important, but it's not in this founder's lane. He hired specialists to address this critical issue for his customers. So while it's interesting to clients, it's NOT going to be one of his pillars.

Finally, check the shape of each pillar. Too broad ("business," "leadership") and the system can't categorize you while your content wanders. Too narrow ("MS Teams governance settings") and you'll exhaust it in a month. You want themes focused enough to build association and broad enough to sustain years of ideas.

And your themes also need to be relevant to the right audience level. Talking about how to use specific features in the GL when closing books each month might be interesting to the controller. But if you need to appeal to more senior-level decision makers, you might want to speak at a more strategic level. That said, if controllers are part of the buying committee, then month-end close strategies might need to be one of your pillars.

Three pillars is enough to start. Five is the practical ceiling. Beyond that, you dilute the signal you're trying to concentrate.

Pillars tell the system what you're about. Stories make people care.

A pillar is a category, and nobody but you remembers the categories. People remember stories. Research on LinkedIn content performance keeps finding the same thing: posts that tell a story and make a strong point dramatically outperform generic advice.

Three narrative angles turn pillars into stories:

Customer pain stories. The moment a customer hit the wall your market fears, and what happened next. These work because your reader sees themselves in them. (Change details to protect confidentiality. The pattern is what teaches, not the name.)

The transformational shift. The change happening in your industry, told as a story with stakes: what's ending, what's emerging, who wins and who gets left behind. This angle positions you as the person who sees around the corner.

Your personal journey. What you've learned, gotten wrong, and figured out while building. This is the angle founders resist most and audiences reward most, because it's the one nobody can copy.

Every one of your pillars can be expressed through all three angles. That's months of content from a single grid.

Give your story a villain

The strongest founder brands go one step further. They pick an enemy.

Not a competitor. Attacking competitors is a really bad idea. And not a person. This is about ideas, not individuals.

A brand villain is an idea: the broken assumption, a common myth, an outdated practice, or the comfortable lie your market keeps paying for. For example, HubSpot's villain was interruption marketing. Salesforce's villain was on-premise software.

I didn't plan my villains. They emerged from pure frustration. My inbox is jammed with pitch-slaps. Dozens of sellers are running virtually identical automations. The sequences never end. I started complaining about these practices, and #NoBots came out of that frustration. When I tried to explain why the approach fails, I landed on names for it: #AnnoyanceAtScale and #AlienationAtScale.

Naming the villain changed everything. Once a practice has a name, you can describe it, point to it, and teach against it. Those hashtags became shorthand for an entire mindset, and that gave me a way to call it out and start talking about a better way.

Then something happened that I didn't expect: people joined the fight. Every week, readers send me examples of terrible outreach they've received. My #MondayMarkups series works because my audience has been targeted by the same tactics. Even sellers who use these approaches join in, because seeing the practice attacked, rather than themselves, lets them recognize the impact without feeling accused. Hundreds have abandoned these tactics. That's the quiet power of a villain. It lets people change sides without losing face, and it lets you teach without sounding pedantic.

Not everyone agrees with me. Good. I encourage the debate, because if everyone agreed, the problem wouldn't exist. A villain nobody defends isn't a villain. It's a platitude.

Behind my specific villains sits a bigger one: invisibility. The belief that great work speaks for itself, that the founder can stay heads-down while the market somehow discovers them. Every pillar I write about fights that villain from a different angle.

A brand villain helps differentiate you, because now your content is part of a larger fight instead of a pile of standalone tips. It helps you become known as the mighty warrior working to rid the world of your villainous vermin. It gives your target audience something to rally behind, safely, since you're attacking an idea and not a person.

Without a villain, you blend in, and nobody knows what you actually stand for.

Plus, honestly, it's fun.

Rotate, don't wander

A farmer doesn't plant forty crops, and he doesn't plant just one. He plants a handful and rotates them, because rotation keeps the soil productive year after year.

Run your content the same way. Pick your three to five pillars. Rotate your purpose across them, heavy on affinity and authority, light on action. Tell stories inside each one. And keep every piece pointed at a villain.

Do that consistently and the payoff compounds. Buyers start quoting your ideas back to you. The algorithm learns exactly who needs your content and puts it in front of them. When a prospect asks an AI who understands their problem, your name comes back. That's what it means to own your topical pillars.

This article is part of my founder brand series, which also includes Why a Founder Brand Is the Last Durable Competitive Moat in B2B, Why B2B Demand Generation Is Failing (And How a Founder Brand Fixes It), Your Founder Brand Won't Sprout for a Year. Plant It Anyway., and You Don't Have Time Not to Build Your Founder Brand.

About the Author

"Your biggest competitor isn't another firm—it's your invisibility."

Candyce Edelen helps B2B founders build a founder brand that drives visibility, credibility, and authority. She surfaces your expertise from your conversations with clients and shapes it into strategic LinkedIn content. This builds trust with buyers before they're ready to buy. The result: improved customer acquisition costs, higher close rates, and bigger deal sizes. Candyce has been building founder brands as part of a go to market strategy for for over 25 years. During that time, she’s interviewed more than 250 executive-level buyers, and those interviews have shaped her understanding of how to help founders build credible authority that drives business results.