Are you producing enough evergreen content for your website?
Evergreen content stays relevant for potentially years to come. It can be on any (relevant) topic for your website: a blueberry muffin recipe is evergreen, for instance, as is a guide to hiring the best employees.
You might want to think of evergreen content as being the opposite of news content. For instance, if you write about the latest developments in your industry, or your company’s newest product plans, that might get lots of immediate traffic and attention – but it’s not necessarily going to be relevant after a few weeks, let alone months or years.
Why does evergreen content matter?
Evergreen content might not get a huge wave of traffic instantly – but it’ll serve you well for the long-term. People searching for that type of content could find it years from now, and it’ll still be relevant.
Evergreen content is also the type of content that people might link to if they’re putting together a set of resources on a particular topic, as it’s not going to become quickly dated.
You can reuse your evergreen content, too: for instance, you might share it on social media a year after publishing it, or you might link to it from other content you create.
You could even republish it on your blog, or turn it into a different form of content – for instance, you could take an evergreen blog post and expand it into a free ebook, or you could take an evergreen podcast episode and rework it as an infographic. If you have an email newsletter, you could highlight an evergreen post or two in each newsletter in addition to your newsworthy content.
Types of evergreen content you could produce
Although the exact type of evergreen content you produce will depend on your industry, these types of content often perform well.
“How to” posts or videos
These will walk the reader or viewer through the process for accomplishing something. Unless they’re based on something that changes rapidly, they can be relevant for a long time to come. They’re the sort of content that people often search for or bookmark to come back to.
Example: How to get verified on Twitter
Lists of tips or ideas
These will often be fairly timeless. For instance, you might write “Ten Crucial Tips for First-Time Parents” if your site sells baby products, or “Twenty Great Gifts You Can Make at Home” if you sell craft products.
Example: Ten ways to increase traffic to your website
Definitions of key terms or concepts
If your website audience is made up of a lot of beginners, then it’s often a good idea to create evergreen content that helps explain the basics. For example, if you offer WordPress hosting and support for new bloggers, you might have posts titled “What is a Widget?” and “What is a Domain Name?”
Example: What is the Facebook Relevance Score?
Lists of tools or resources
While this type of post can date a little faster than some others, it’s still a very useful form of evergreen content if you’re willing to update it every so often, such as once per year or so. If you’re an affiliate for some of the tools/resources on the list, it could also be a great source of income.
Example: 50 best social media scheduling tools
Updating evergreen content
Content can still be evergreen even if it needs updating from time to time. In fact, even if nothing about the facts or ideas included in your content has changed, you might still want to update it periodically to ensure it’s serving your business as effectively as possible.
Create a schedule for updating and re-promoting your evergreen content. If you’re making major updates, rather than minor tweaks, you might even want to republish the original piece of content so that it appears as a new post on your blog.
When you’re updating your evergreen content, ask yourself:
Have any facts, processes, or best practices changed since this was written? In some industries, things move on fast: the resources you recommended or tips you shared might not be quite so relevant now.
Could I link to any more recent content from this evergreen content? Maybe you wrote a piece on a similar topic or produced a video a year after your evergreen content went live. Make sure you take the opportunity now to link to relevant pieces you’ve created, or to new services or products that you offer.
Are all the links still working … and are they still the best resources to link to? Websites that you linked to a couple of years ago might no longer exist, or they might have changed their URL structure. New resources may have been produced that would be an even better fit for your post. Spend some time updating links where necessary.
Does this piece still fit with our branding and style guide? Maybe you’ve got a new template for branded images, or you’re now using sentence case rather than title case for subheadings. Make sure you update your evergreen post to bring it into line with the rest of your content.
Could I add anything that would improve this piece? Maybe your original piece of evergreen content was a bit short or lacked examples or images. Now’s a great opportunity to update it to make it as useful and attractive to your audience as possible.
Evergreen content can take some work to create – but that work could pay off for years to come. This week, come up with one new piece of evergreen content to create and go back through your archives to find one existing piece that you could update.
You put a lot of time and effort into your evergreen content, and you want to get as much traction for every piece of content as possible. Install our social media share buttons to make it easy for your visitors to share your content to all their favorite social networks with just one click. They’re simple to install and free to use, so you can start getting more exposure for all your evergreen posts today!
