Evergreen content is content that will stay relevant for the life of your blog. It's also content that is valuable for which people will continue to look for in the years to come.
Let's look at books for a parallel. A book on criminal law published in 1850 is no longer relevant, other than as a piece of historical curiosity, and will usually no longer be in print. On the other hand, the writings of Plato are still published thousands of years later because they discuss concepts that will only cease to be relevant to us if humanity itself ceases to exist.
The problem with the Internet is that search engines are slow. It can take days, weeks, months, and even years on occasion, to get a good piece of content listed. If the content you're publishing has a short shelf-life, then the effort put into getting content indexed goes to waste. This sort of content needs to be promoted via social media to generate traffic before it gets too old. Content that is useful forever continues to turn one-off search engine visitors into regulars for years to come.
I believe a piece of quality evergreen content, sometimes referred to as pillar content, has the following characteristics:
You'll notice that I am not focusing on social media appeal or fast trafficgenerating ability here. Linkbait is about getting a huge injection of traffic to the site quickly. It doesn't last long and not many of the visitors are going to stick around, but it gets the site's name out there and known.
On the other hand, evergreen content is about the slow and steady race. You start off with no traffic, and over time, the article's position in the search engines improves because it's useful enough to receive links from other blogs. Eventually, you get large amounts of traffic from search engines on a daily basis, but it's a slow process.
There are a good many people out there who believe that you should only ever publish evergreen content. It's not the best strategy. We've established that linkbait and evergreen content are very different, and each serves a different purpose. A good strategy is to publish a mixture of the two along with more general content in between.
It's important to launch with quality evergreen content and it's the sort of content you want to publish most frequently in the very beginning. Of course you'll want to continue publishing evergreen content over the course of the blog's life, but it's especially important to get it out there right at the start because you want to secure good search engine rankings and a number of inbound links from the get-go.
It's easy to get stuck for ideas with evergreen content, when posting another top ten list just seems so easy to throw together. The easiest way to come up with new evergreen content is to identify the problems people interested in your niche are having, and then solve them with an article. The reader you're after is the person typing, "How do I…" into Google.
Since you're (hopefully) no longer a beginner in the area you're writing about, some of the problems neophytes encounter won't come to mind right away – they seem too obvious to you now! Observe and interact with these people and find out what they're struggling with. Keep a running list of content ideas on your computer so you don't forget them.
Evergreen content is often how-to content. Keep in mind that it can also come in the form of less hands-on but equally useful educational posts, like a series of articles on the principles and theory of graphic design – in this case you'd be writing about the theory behind selecting color schemes as opposed to going through a step-by-step process in Photoshop.
Evergreen content serves as an entry point for new visitors to your site from search engines and inbound links, and it is high-quality stuff that gets people to stick around. Make sure they do stick around by linking to other content from your blog in relevant places. If there's a side note about a topic that's been covered in more detail elsewhere on the blog, link it up so that people who are interested in that topic go deeper into the site. The more of your content visitors read, and the more time they spend on the site, the more likely it is you'll earn their loyalty.
It's hard to make an affiliate sale or entice a reader to click on a contextual ad from a top ten list; the reader is a regular at the site, or came from a social media promotion, or is just reading for entertainment. Evergreen content fulfills a need. It's a stable resource that educates the reader, who has probably discovered your article after seeking answers from Google. Your reader has a problem that needs solving, and the person with a problem is the best customer if you have a product that can solve it.
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Roger Hill at
02172011
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