As a content marketer, evergreen content is the gift that keeps on giving.
It has sustained interest over time so it guarantees a steady stream of traffic, plus all the repurposed content you create from it will have a longer shelf life too, meaning the ROI is high.
This blog post covers how you define evergreen content, what are some great examples of it, and why is it so repurposable.
Press play to listen to the podcast episode.
Or keep reading to discover:
- The different types of evergreen content
- Examples of what evergreen content is… and some of what is not
- The repurposing benefits with evergreen content
First, let’s define evergreen content. You would have heard the term hundreds of times before, but just so we’re on the same page...
Basically, it’s any content you create, for example content for your website, blog or social media that has an always-on level of relevance. It stands the test of time.
It’s the content that we all want and need in our content strategy!
There are two degrees of evergreen content
1. Content that is always desired and valuable
This content is timeless and will always be useful to your audience.
For example, for a business that creates content to help and empower sales teams an evergreen piece of content might be Three Powerful Words to Use in a Sales Negotiation – that’s a timeless piece of content whether you’re selling horses to cowboys in 1822 or electric cars to people today.
If those powerful words are useful, the content is useful, so it’s evergreen.
But the content called The Best Sales Events to Attend in 2022 is going to be out of date in 2023 and onwards.
Or another non-evergreen example could be 10 Sales Tools Everyone Needs in 2022.
With evergreen content, no matter what time of year or how many years pass, there are always a lot of people who are going to be interested in and searching for these topics and the content is always useful.
2. The type of content that is ‘kind of evergreen’
This is content that has a long shelf-life – but may need a refresh at some point as technology and tools change and update.
For example, The Best Way to Repurpose your Video into a Podcast Episode or How to Repurpose a Podcast Episode into Audiograms.
This might change at some point, so it will remain evergreen until the process changes, if it does.
It might be that you need to change the screenshot images or update a process flow within a tool.
At Content 10x we always aim to create evergreen content where possible and it makes sense. However that still means that we have to make updates from time to time.
We keep an eye on posts that mention stats and figures from previous years, where it would be helpful if they are changed to reflect the current year, as well as mentions of tools or platforms that have become defunct or out of date.
A work in progress!
These posts are ‘kind of evergreen’ because even if you didn’t make those updates it wouldn’t have a big impact because the actual content itself is still valuable to your audience and everything stated is still factual.
But making those small updates would enhance its relevancy and optimize the content.
Content that lends itself to being evergreen
You probably have a supply of this available already.
Examples include:
- Frequently Asked Questions
- “How To” guides
- Case studies
- Tutorials
- Sharing research findings or a study
- Listicles
- A best practice style guide e.g. video repurposing best practices
- Product or service reviews – as long as the product or service is still as it was
- Content reviews e.g. blog, book, YouTube channel reviews
- Glossaries
These are the opposite of seasonal and topical content, which includes topics that are tied to a certain time of year or a trending event in the news or on social media.
For example content called What Will Elon Musk’s New Twitter Look Like? published in October 2022, debating if the platform is going to change massively or if everyone will leave or, if anyone will actually pay for the blue tick, will be out of date within a month or so as things reveal themselves.
This kind of content is important and definitely has its place, but it’s the evergreen content that is going to increase your traffic over time and generate interest for years to come.
So how do you go about ensuring the content that you want to be evergreen is actually evergreen?
Here are three top tips…
1. Choose topics relating to what your audience wants to know
Evergreen content revolves around keywords, so select topics relevant to your business or brand that your audience often ask about or engage with.
Do your keyword research, there are lots of tools to help with this, such as Google Adwords Keyword planner, and paid tools like SEM Rush and Moz and Wincher.
There are also really useful resources like Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, google trends and keyword.io.
Further information on this can be found in our blog post, How to Dig for Content Gold.
The metric to pay the most attention to with evergreen keywords is Search Volume. The ones you choose should create at least 1000 searches monthly.
If a keyword is bringing in that number on a monthly basis then you can pretty much guarantee that there is long-term, sustainable interest in the topic.
That’s not to say that you should not create content if your keywords doesn’t reach that. It depends how niche you are.
For example, the content we create is often very niche, so search volumes aren’t always high, but it’s the content our audience want.
If you want to look further at finding out what your audience want, you can read our blog post 8 Ways to Ask Your Audience What They Want...
2. Avoid reference to specific events or dates
This might sound obvious but it’s so easy to slip up on this one. Especially when you are adding calls to action.
Things like, ‘read last week’s blog post for more’ instantly removes your content’s evergreen potential.
Instead of referencing a timeframe, you can use the headline or the link – for example the blog post we referenced above.
Think about things like “In the past year, Instagram has made some big updates to...” – that could simply be changed to “In late 2021 and the first half of 2022 Instagram made big updates to...”- see how that then becomes evergreen.
Another thing to remember is that even massive, catastrophic global events won’t be relevant forever. So if you have references to ‘unprecedented times’ or ‘as things get back to normal’ in your content, in a couple of years it will only highlight the fact the content is out of date.
Have a good review of your content and pick up on anything that with a minor tweak turns the phrase used from non-evergreen to evergreen.
3. Remember to update it as and when required
Keep an eye on your killer bits of evergreen content and plan to spruce them up every now and then.
Update any references to stats or figures and remove tools that no longer exist.
Also, something new might have happened related to the topic, so add that in and it gives you a chance to reshare and repurpose that content.
Your process flow should be – create, repurpose, distribute, optimize...
With quality content comes quality content repurposing. Never has that been more the case than with your evergreen content.
It makes total sense that evergreen content, will be repurposed into more evergreen content.
For example your evergreen blog post that you repurpose into a LinkedIn image carousel, a LinkedIn article, an infographic and a script for a video – all of that new content gets the evergreen tick too – so it will have greater ROI and be sharable over and over again.
You can put your repurposed evergreen content into your content treasure trove, which is something we cover in How to Create a Content Treasure Trove for Unlimited Repurposing.
In Conclusion
We put so much time into creating content, especially quality, pillar evergreen content.
But that’s okay because evergreen content benefits our audience and us in the long run – and evergreen content has high repurposing potential.
So when we also spend a lot of time repurposing our evergreen content, we know the repurposed content will be evergreen, timeless and continue to have potential to generate a solid return on our investment in time and resources for a long time to come.
If you want help repurposing your evergreen content, we can help! We offer fully done-for-you content repurposing services for video and audio content.