“I like to compare evergreen posts to the foundations of a house. You may put up new wallpaper, patch up the roof, or even change the tiles on the floor – but rarely do you need to change the foundation of the house.”
Read the full article at: www.contentmarketinginstitute.com
Al Gomez‘s metaphor about evergreen content being your house’s foundation is a powerful image that grasps the concept of evergreen in a simple and catchy way. I’ll add a side note that if you’re starting to blog and do not have evergreen content yet, you’re still going to be able to live in your house. If you blog regularly, some articles will quickly become evergreen pieces simply because they raise good arguments and embrace your vision and tone. You do not need your first 10 pieces of content to be evergreen posts, rather focus on blogging consistently and they will come up over time.
That being said, creating evergreen content is not sufficient. Just like a meaningful relationship, if you want it to last / succeed, you need to improve it over time, make efforts (updating it, making sure it’s comprehensive to your readers) and give it some love (promote it on a regular basis). If you’d like to know how to write good content for your audience and for SEO, read our step-by-step methodology.
The impact of the new SEO on evergreen content.
As you know, the SEO rules have changed. There is no such thing as traditional SEO anymore. Some even say SEO is dead.
But the new SEO is smarter, more genuine, and fair. Create good content, answer your audience’s needs, don’t put links that aren’t relevant to your readers (and all the other logical rules you could think of) and your blog post will start ranking. If you’d like to see how content curation can help you improve SEO, you should read this eBook.
And as anyone else, you write good pieces of content and great pieces of content. For the latter, your evergreen pieces, you want to cherish them. Al’s tips to help you deal with your evergreen pieces are great: make sure the content is comprehensible, update it on a regular basis, market it on the right social media platforms and offer downloadable goodies (put CTAs within your text). From our experience, here is a set of quick additional tips to help you get the most out of your evergreen posts.
Keep improving your evergreen content over and over.
– Update part of the article: the world evolves, and so does your domain. Don’t hesitate to scratch a paragraph if necessary, add a new one if there are new findings, provide more data if you do a survey on the topic, etc.
– Change your CTAs for new goodies when applicable, because you might create content that fits even better in your post.
– Use the Yoast plugin (it’s free) to get an overall score of how easy your post is to read.
– Update your links when you update the content, and don’t hesitate to link newer pieces of content if they make a good case for your argument.
Share your evergreen content on a regular basis.
Now that’s the tricky part if you don’t have a tool. Since they might have been written a while ago, it can be time consuming to manually dig them up and share them. Here are two ways to share your evergreen posts on a regular basis:
– Use a set of free tools: Google docs, Google sheets or Evernote to maintain your list of evergreen articles and their urls. Then Google Analytics to keep track of how much traffic these posts are generating. Then share them on your company’s social media channels. Don’t forget to ask your co-workers to share them on theirs too.
– Or get a content marketing tool in which you can identify your evergreen posts to find them in one click. Then use the same tool to prepare and schedule the messages on all your social media channels (including those of your co-workers):
It takes about 15 seconds to plan as many social media messages as you want for a post on your calendar.
Feel free to share your tips to make evergreen posts succeed in the comments!
And if you’d like to know how you can start blogging consistently in 30 minutes a day or less, read our eBook!
Image by me (and it took me 30 seconds :).
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Thanks for sharing awesome Information. For any blogger content is KING to get the organic traffic. I will definitely visit you site very often and I am going to inform to all of my friends to visit this site. Kudo’s to you for sharing valuable information.
Hey Julie, love your post!
Best of all, your tips will be relevant many years from now. I also want to say thank you for the ebook you are linking to.
By the way, I have send you an email, hopefully you’ll reply 🙂
Thanks for sharing awesome Information.