The term ‘evergreen content’ is used to describe content that stands the test of time. For example, an article such as “10 Business Blogging Tips” is likely to still be relevant even a few years after it’s been written.

If you focus purely on current newsworthy topics for your blog, you’ll get good traffic spikes but then the interest will soon fade away.

Before I look at how to create evergreen content, let’s talk a bit about why you should:

Incoming links

If you write an article or produce an infographic or video that is ‘evergreen’ then the chances are it will keep generating incoming links for you over an extended period of time.

There’s nothing wrong with promoting content that you produced a year or two ago if the information in it still applies.

A steady stream of visitors

I still get people reading blog posts I wrote a while ago even without promoting them. This is because they are well optimised for the search engines and the content is as relevant today as it was when I wrote it.

Of course you can ‘piggyback’ on current news stories to get more visitors, but when the fuss has died down you’re back to square one trying to attract more visitors.

Tips for creating evergreen content

Don’t date your posts

One of the first things people see when reading blog posts is the date. Even if the content is evergreen, the date may put them off reading further if it was a long time ago.

There are two sides of this argument. If you write about current news stories as well as focusing on evergreen content, you need to make a decision if you want your blog to show a date or not. Showing the date can be a good thing if you’ve written about a particular recent news story.

Get back to basics

Think about things in your niche that have been the same since you started out. For example, if you run a garden centre, you could write about the best way to look after certain types of plants as this will never change.

Go back and update

Even when you think you’ve come up with evergreen content, there may be something you want to add to update your video or blog post. Even if you just add a paragraph of text saying how your original blog post still stands true and then promote it again, it will have benefits for your business.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2013 at 8:14 am and is filed under Copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.