Evergreen content remains relevant to your audience no matter when it is accessed. It does not depend on the current trend or another hot topic people are dying to read about. It is like the wisdom of the ancients – it can be applied anytime.
Take for instance the importance of quality content. The importance of quality content never wanes no matter when you use it, no matter how you use it and no matter which channel or which language you use to publish and distribute it. If you read Dostoevsky or any other such writer you will realise that, although the circumstances happening inside the novel might be related to that time, the inherent message, the inherent dynamics of how the characters react to different situations, have timeless attributes.
The greatest benefit of creating evergreen content is that it gives you a steady stream of traffic over a long period of time. Since the traffic does not depend on a particular time a post that you write in 2014 may go viral in 2016 due to some related events taking place. I will give you a small example. I’m a big fan of cleanliness and whenever I get an opportunity to write something on this topic, I do it with great enthusiasm. So a few months ago I wrote about how great I feel when the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi again and again stresses upon the need to clean up India at the earliest. As I say, the article was published many months ago. Then this October 2, 2014 (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday) Narendra Modi launched his government’s “Clean India” campaign and the online newspaper that had originally published my piece on cleanliness replugged it on Twitter and it got more hits than it had got when it was published and promoted for the first time. This is the article I’m talking about.
Another benefit of creating evergreen content is that it increases the level of familiarity among the regular net surfers. Since there is a greater chance of evergreen content being shared on multiple websites over a long period of time, people will come across it multiple times helping them remember your brand name or your company name or your name. Familiarity and trust are very important for any business to grow on the Internet.
But how to write evergreen content?
Some good examples of evergreen content are:
- A blog post that is repeatedly updated according to new developments taking place centered around the chosen theme (The football World Cup statistics spanning multiple world cups)
- Why your product or service is the ultimate solution to the perennial problem being faced by your prospective customers and clients
- Your FAQs section giving answer to possibly every question someone may have about your product or service
- Chronicling the activities of your office pet animal
- The common grammar mistakes repeatedly made by professional content writers
- Using historical references to explain your business tactics
Remember that the basic idea of writing evergreen content for your website or blog is to give people something that they can make use of, share or talk about at any time whether they do it now or 10 years from now. Even 100 years.