I’ve built my business on writing evergreen blog posts, which has meant long-lasting organic traffic to my website. Blogs I wrote in the 2010s are still driving traffic to my website here in the 2020s. 

The SEO and strategy around my content means search engines like Google and social platforms like Pinterest keep sending traffic my way.

A challenge has always been knowing which pieces of content will most likely stand the test of time. Backlinko and BuzzSumo teamed up for an evergreen content study. It shows what types of content continues to stay alive on the web long after you write them. I’ve also looked at the posts that have stuck from my own 11 years of blogging.

What is evergreen content?

Firstly, are you wondering what is evergreen content? The definition of evergreen content is: content continually found through organic search and has long-lasting relevance.

While in most cases it’s not time sensitive, sometimes it remains relevant because of continual updates.

What we’re specifically talking about in this post is evergreen blog posts.

The best types of evergreen content 

There are many evergreen content types. It doesn’t necessarily mean that if you choose one of these types, you’ll instantly have an evergreen post. That would be nice, right?

What the study found and what my own blog reflects is that these are the particular evergreen topics that work the best. 

They are:

List posts or listicles

Numbers attract us – especially odd numbers. So using a number in a blog post headline means you draw people’s eye to the post to first be able to attract the click. Of course, this type of content then needs to still share quality within the list. Just winning the click won’t help your content marketing strategy.

Best Ofs are also a popular form of list posts. When you’ve done the hard work to collate all the information someone is looking for into one space, you’ve given them the gift of time.

Think about what you do in your business or the tools you use that you could collate into a Best Of.

BuzzFeed became what it is because it shares lists and people can’t help but want to share those with others. While you might not be sharing funny lists, those lists still hold value to the people you serve.

This online marketing tools example is a “page”, rather than a “post”. But it highlights the tools I use and recommend to clients to save other business owners the heartache of wasting money on tools that might not work.

A blog post example is on plugins to share what plugins I use on my site.

Even this section here is a list of the type of posts you can use!

How To posts

Many of my first blog posts on this site were “how to” posts. I’m naturally drawn to teaching, so they seemed easy to write. I liked stepping the reader through what I was already teaching coaching clients. I still revert to How To posts a lot.

How To posts hold a lot of value because they educate and solve specific problems, making them highly shareable. The other aspect of this type of post is that often “how to…” is what we’re searching for in Google to answer our questions.

My clients are mostly service-based businesses, which How To posts work particularly well for. But they can also work for product and ecommerce businesses too. Think about the processes you go through to make or sell your product. People are fascinated with how things work, and it creates buyer confidence. They can see what they’re purchasing is quality and created with care.

If you’re in an industry where things change, you can still update the post and include the words “updated” + “year” at the top.

Social media is one of those areas that’s always changing. If you’re in this space you may be wondering how you’re ever going to create evergreen content. Just because the content dates, doesn’t mean it can’t be evergreen. If the strategy will mostly remain the same, then you can update the content to reflect any technology changes that might happen.

Here’s an example of an updated blog post that was a “how to” in the social media space.

Guides

Similar to the Best Of list posts, having a complete guide saves someone time in researching how to complete a task. An in-depth guide has some great benefits, including showing your expertise in an area.

People want others to view them as an authority or expert. By sharing your guide, that positions them as “in the know”.

You can look to your Google Analytics to see what keywords you’re already ranking for. Then expand upon that with a “complete guide” that can act as a Pillar Post or Core Blog Post. From there, link out to Support Act posts.

Templates

This one has worked particularly well for me over the years. I cottoned on to it back in 2013 when I wrote a post that still gives back to me today. 

In the marketing space, people are looking for shortcuts to get tasks done. Templates help achieve that. That’s why these pieces of content rarely date.

This how to create a media plan combines the “how to” and the “template”. It has many keywords it ranks for that have high search volume. 

What could you create that would save your audience time?

Answer reader questions

It’s been a while since a “reader” sent in a question, to be honest. In my early days of blogging the comments section of this website’s blog was full of comments and questions. It always provided plenty of inspiration for future content. 

Unfortunately, people are commenting less on blogs these days. That sense of community a blog once created has gone in favour of social media.

Instead, if you have clients, do sales calls or network with people like your ideal client, these conversations can spark content ideas.

When I do a discovery call with a potential client, I’m taking copious amounts of notes. You see, it’s during these calls when people are most open about what they’re struggling with in their business. If I can answer what they’re most struggling with, then I’ve created a valuable piece of content.

A question I’m asked about is how to do business storytelling, so I created a list of business storytelling examples.

Industry insights or data

If you’ve ever had the job of finding out specifics about what’s happening in a particular industry, then looking for insights and data from that industry can be a big job.

When you find a well written blog post that’s updated to the latest data, it becomes valuable to that person.

Of course, if it’s data that dates, then you’ll need to make sure you keep it updated. Remember, pop a “year” reference at the top to show when you last updated it. But maybe you have insights about your industry that never date. Things that someone would want to know as a customer.

You can also have a combination of the above 

I’ll write more examples of evergreen blog posts soon, but for now these should get you started.

Evergreen blog post ideas to help increase success

Some evergreen content ideas and tips that will help your chances of creating long-lasting content include:

Update evergreen content regularly

Sounds counterintuitive, right? If it’s evergreen, then should it not be set and forget? Not exactly. That’s one of the myths of evergreen strategies marketers promote. Evergreen doesn’t necessarily mean hands off. You still need to be tweaking and improving what you’ve got.

There’s a few aspects to this strategy:

1. Look at your Google Analytics to determine popular posts by the amount of search traffic you get to pages or target keywords. If you have your Google Search Console connected to your Google Analytics, this makes it easier to see.
2. If you update old blog posts, it’s a trigger for Google to come and look at it again. Even better, once you update it, push it through Google Search Console to get it reindexed. This means you don’t have to wait for Google to do its next crawl to find your updated post.
3. Add the year at the end of the post. Each year you can update that post. While the content may constantly date due to the technology or data changing, what doesn’t date is your strategy. Including {Updated 2021} lets people know it was updated. I also know that often I search for a keyword with the year at the end. I don’t want to spend ages looking at old blog posts that are no longer relevant to how the platform works.

Keep sharing your content

What I often see is an evergreen blog post published, shared for a week, and then never seen again. 

Use a social media recycling tool to ensure it’s shared long after you publish. Content applies to evergreen social media too and these blog posts are perfect content to share repeatedly. 

The idea behind a social media recycling tool is that if you have 20 evergreen blog posts inside your tool and one evergreen blog content piece goes out a week, then by week 20 it recycles back to blog post number 1. I’m pretty sure that if you write the social media post in a way that it doesn’t date, people aren’t going to remember that you shared the blog post 20 weeks earlier.

Link to other blog posts on your site

Make sure to create an internal linking strategy between your content. I’ll share more about how to create an evergreen content strategy in an upcoming post, but for now look at developing a core piece of content first. Secondly, branch off into supporting blog posts – each linking to the other. This is what I call the Content Topic Canvas and is part of my evergreen content framework.

Here’s an example of my evergreen content strategy in my Content Topic Canvas. It includes my Core Topics and then branches out into the Support Topics.

If you want to learn more about doing this in your business, join me in the monthly The Content Effect. This blends learning the Content Strategy Framework and dedicated time creating your purposeful content for long-lasting growth.

Ensure you write valuable evergreen blog posts

I see plenty of posts on my journeys throughout the blogosphere that are merely grandstanding. They’re a long list of one-liners aimed at  garnering attention, but generally end up being a long ramble with no great purpose, substance or call to action.

When I write blog posts, I want someone to have an aha moment, a take away they can implement in their business or clarity around an issue they might have previously had.

For me, it needs to provide value. Don’t write thin content that gives the reader nothing or there’s no motivation for them to want to share it.

Understand how to use SEO keywords

No one expects you to know everything there is to know about search engine optimisation (SEO). If you don’t even know what SEO blog posts are, in its basic form it’s when someone searches for a keyword or phrase in Google (or another search engine) and your blog post appears.

I’ve had clients tell me they don’t need to write blogs because their ideal client isn’t a blog reader. But when I ask them how their ideal client solves problems that relate to what they do, one of the answers is always “they Google it”. So then, what do they click on once Google gives them a list of answers? A blog post, of course! If your competitor is ranking ahead of you, that gives them the edge. This is why you need Google to feature you.

Nobody knows all there is to know about ranking a blog post in Google, so don’t expect you need to be an expert in this area. But knowing even the basics can go a long way to improving your website traffic, leads and sales.

One place to start is looking at long-tail keywords fr your blog post SEO. This means rather than trying to rank for content marketing, you might aim to rank for ultimate guide to content marketing. That then, of courses, ties in beautifully with our guide content type.

What’s the next step?

Make sure there’s a next step from your evergreen blog posts, otherwise you’re not building a business. Next steps can include:

• Signing up to your email list via an opt-in offer
• Booking a strategy call with you
• Buying your low dollar offer
• Awareness and interest in a high ticket offer

Most of my blog posts go to a lead magnet or opt-in offer as a way to grow my list. It can be difficult to sell directly from a blog post, but experiment with what works for you. I’ve outlined how to determine your blog post goals that might help.

Regularly create content

Google will soon forget you if you don’t keep creating content. I’ve seen it myself. I still have a personal blog that I haven’t blogged on for many years. Over the years, that traffic has slowly dwindled. Sure, there are a few pieces that still get the odd trickle of visitors, but it’s not many now.

When you write regularly, you’re showing Google that your site is constantly having fresh content added to it and gives it a reason to rank you higher.

One of the challenges of my clients is the ability to find the time to write in the first place. Or they spend an age putting together great content marketing plans, but then never create the actual content to publish.

If that’s you, it’s an easy enough trap to fall into. We have clients we need to service and so finding time to write gets harder and harder. It was one of the reasons I started the Content Effect – Create Purposeful Blogs For Long-Lasting Growth. It’s a program that helps you not only learn how to do content marketing the right way so it pays you long into the future, but also have time to write and implement on a regular basis.

You can get on the waitlist to hear more here.

I’ve been part of programs where they promise a year’s worth of content in 2 hours, but all I ever achieve is more lists and content plans. There’s no actual content written, uploaded to WordPress (or whatever your platform of choice is) and ready to publish. 

That’s the purpose of The Content Effect.

If you need to first start with your Content Marketing Plan, download a free copy below.

And if you need to learn how to create a blog in WordPress, learn how to make a WordPress blog.