5 Tips to Create Evergreen Content That Brings Value to Your Business

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Evergreen content marketing

Content is king, as the popular saying goes.

It is one of the most effective strategies to market your business, website, or online store. It is also the most affordable and doesn’t require a multi-million dollar budget. In fact, 66% of marketers now use blogs in their content. The trick of course is to find evergreen content that always stays on the mind of your readers. 

Every marketer wants their specific content strategy to provide value and attract organic traffic even after several years have passed at the same rate or even higher than it.   

However, not all types of content stay relevant for years to come. Some of your blog posts will be rendered useless due to changing trends or because a certain product or service you’re pitching has become obsolete and irrelevant.

Before we go into ‘evergreen’ content, we have to explore content marketing a bit more.

What Makes Content Marketing so Effective?

Written content has always been effective at marketing and creating awareness well before the internet became a mainstay. Who doesn’t remember funny commercials on TV, informative brochures, and product suggestions in magazines? All these types of content marketing channels proved effective at driving up sales. 

The internet has now made it significantly easier to access information online, but the tactics that were used back in the day have also survived into the digital-era: being informative and entertaining without coming across as too ‘sales-y’. 

But Why Choose Evergreen Content? 

If you are operating a business that offers products and services, your content marketing strategy should include evergreen content for your website. Remember, you’re not a news website that gives reports on the latest to audiences. For instance, if you did a story on the stock market in 2018, the relevancy of that blog post will have long become outdated only a few days after publishing, much less surviving 2020.

This is why you should create ‘ever-green’ content, or content that retains its value over time. 

Here are 5 tips to help you create ever-green content. 

1. Choose Blog Ideas that Qualify as Green Content

Green Content

Let’s say you’re selling mechanical keyboards with your eCommerce website. This is a very lucrative business but you are trying to grow awareness of your brand, this is where ideas for evergreen topics come in.  

You can write about specific brands and models of keyboards that you are selling, write in-depth reviews of your mechanical keyboards and so on. These posts are valuable for your audience, but they will only stay relevant as long as these keyboards remain a part of your offer.

Once you sell your products and get a completely different stock, those blog posts are rendered useless. Of course you can still write reviews for your new stock and encourage users to drop in reviews once they’ve bought them. However, if you want to create evergreen content, you should focus on the pain points of your audience. For instance, a great title for an evergreen article based on mechanical keyboards would be, “How to clean stains on mechanical keyboards”.

Bonus points if you choose a citable topic. This means that it is always possible to link back to authentic sources and original statistics. If you are running out of ideas, you can always use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to examine your competitor’s websites and blogs: 

  • Examine blogs that your competitors write about
  • Is it long form or short form (what is the average length of each blog post)
  • Learn about the latest trends
  • Identify content topics that aren’t popular among your user base

Once you’ve done an audit of your immediate competitors, you will be in a better position to identify topics and subjects that you didn’t think about. 

2. Do Your Homework 

Your Homework

The best way to write evergreen content is to  do your due research before writing on a blog post. It is important to realize your limitations too though. You might have domain expertise in your area but you cannot possibly know everything there is to know about your niche. 

Not to mention the fact that a well-researched article with numerous references and citations will be perceived as infinitely more trustworthy than your personal opinion alone. 

Of course, doing your research requires spending a significant amount of time and effort. This is why most businesses hire content writing services to save time. 

By creating an original, well-research article, you can easily stand out from the crowd and at the same time, attract backlinks to your post. This is extremely important if you want to boost your organic ranking in search engine result pages (SERP). 

It is worth noting that some of the studies you quote from will become obsolete after a few years. For example, if you’re citing data about rising internet usage, the data will become obsolete in just a few months or years. You should revisit these blogs and update the information accordingly. This will ensure your article from several years ago stays relevant for a long time to come. 

3. Choose Visual Aids

Visual Aids

Selecting pictures and infographics for your article is a time-consuming task, but it shouldn’t be neglected either. Using visual cues is important because online users have diminishing attention spans of less than 8 seconds; that’s less than that of a goldfish.

This means that most users won’t have the patience to power through a long-form blog post with over 4000 words even if it is well written and contains up-to-date information. 

Using pictures and visual aids becomes even more important if you plan on writing tutorials. This means having to make screenshots of the tool that you’re discussing, or taking high quality photos of a product you’re reviewing, and so on. Tutorials are a great example of ever-green content that always retains its value over time.  

Don’t have access to high quality original pictures? Don’t worry. There are many options you can choose from:

  • You can download high quality visuals from free source photography services such as Pixabay and Pixels. 
  • You can download free pictures from search engines 
  • You can hire a team of graphic designers to create your own designs and graphics

The number of pictures you need to insert in your blog post depends on the content type. If you are writing a tutorial, you will have to attach relevant screenshots for each step you describe. On the other hand, if you’re just writing a simple article, you will need to attach at least one high quality image. 

4. Your Content Should be Relevant to Your Brand

If you’re selling mechanical keyboards but your blog post is about predicting cloud patterns, you probably won’t attract people interested in mechanical keyboards. In order to attract more prospects, you should create articles related to keycaps, mechanical key switches, cleaning keyboards, cleaning solutions for keyboards, and so on. 

You can also do a review of products that are secondary to your own product line up. You could do a review of gaming mouse, desktop monitors, keyboard arm rests, and so on. Most people buy these products in combos of two and three. In the end, this is your main goal. 

5. List Posts

List posts contain so much data that they perform better over a longer period of time. In fact, studies show that blogs with numbered headlines perform extremely well CTR wise. If you’re selling mechanical keyboards, a few ideas include:

  • “X advantages of mechanical keyboards” 
  • “X problems with mechanical keyboards 
  • “10 Step guide on cleaning your mechanical keyboard”
  • and so on.

Wrapping up 

Content marketing is extremely effective at increasing awareness. It is cheap and can help you build a sustainable business by driving up traffic and with it, sales. The best kind of content that saves you time and money is evergreen content that lasts as long as your website stays operational.

If you enjoyed this article or want to give in your own suggestions, let us know in the comments below!