Paula Writes

Evergreen content, as the name suggests, is content which will remain fresh and relevant, in the months and years to come.

It doesn’t tend to date and, as such, will be valuable, in the long-term.

In other areas, such as literature and music, we tend to use the term “classic”.

It means essentially the same thing.

Some of the poems from Sophie Hannah’s excellent collections, most of which were published in the 1990s, contain cultural references, such as WordPerfect 5.1 and floppy disc trays. Oh dear. That really takes you out of the poems, when reading them today.

There are, on the contrary, many poems, created much earlier than the 1990s, which could easily have been written last week.

This only works to a point, because there have been significant language changes, but certainly, pieces by Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Jennings, amongst others, have that classic element: one reason why they remain popular, and stand the test of time.

Okay, so let’s bring the subject back to content creation and, in particular, blog posts – although, of course, this would apply to other forms of online content, such as You Tube videos.

You’ve probably heard that you should be producing posts that are evergreen, as opposed to ones, such as news items, that are time specific.

Some people even go as far as to claim that all of your content should be evergreen, with which I don’t entirely agree – and this does also vary, according to your particular niche.

However, in general, I would suggest that the majority of your posts should have the classic quality, that will make them potentially worth sharing for years to come.

Evergreen content is good for SEO.

Let’s face it, SEO – ranking on search engines, such as Google and Pinterest – is a consideration.

And it’s a long game. The more classics you have on your blog, the more successful you’re likely to be, in this area.

Why, in 2020, would a search engine want to show visitors a news item, from 2004 or 2018, that no longer has much, if any, relevance?

For author bloggers, the good news is that many of the topics that we naturally cover happen to be evergreen.

After all, novelists will always need to name their characters – and, having named them with such care, find methods for killing said characters off. They will always need to create believable dialogue, and describe their stories’ various locations. You get the idea.

So, now that we’ve established what constitutes “evergreen content”, the next step is to write your latest blog post, keeping all of this in mind.

As I mentioned before, a blog doesn’t necessarily need 100% evergreen content, but aim to produce as much of it as possible – particularly if SEO is a priority for you, and it probably should be.

 

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