At BlogWord 2010, I attended the Evergreen seminar with Jeffrey Powers and Mignon Fogarty (aka GrammarGirl).As you may know, “evergreen” is information without an expiration date (or a shelf life so long it’s practically timeless). It’s either always fresh, or it can be reused at a later time. Thus, it’s never truly out of date.
Compare that to “expirable” content which is information that goes out of date relatively quickly and becomes irrelevant. Expirable information is usually content that matters right now (like a local sporting event), but will fall out of interest within a few weeks.
Now that we know the difference, here’s more information on evergreen content, how it helps your membership site, and why you should “go green”.
Evergreen has a longer shelf life
People have more time to find it and use it.
The more people that use it, the more who link to it. Thus, your SEO goes up.
They do this because you’re satisfying a need by providing content they can use for their own visitors. One of the most time consuming and difficult tasks can be creating new content. Many site owners ask themselves why they should spend time to create when there’s perfectly good content readily available for immediate use.
As long as they ask permission and credit the author, most people wind up happy. Readers discover new content as they get a need satisfied while the site owner gets kudos for finding it, and you (the creator) get more visitors. If you like this scenario and want to use it, you’ll have to unprotect that specific content as most places will not link to content they can’t view first.
Evergreen gives you more promotional opportunities
Many news sites search for evergreen and then invite the creator of the content to give an interview. Many times it’s just repeating the same information in another format. A video interview is one such example.
Evergreen content gives you more traffic
Archived content leads to better search engine results. Ideally, you’ll leave part of your post unprotected so search engines can find it, people know the content exists, and get interested enough to join.
If your content cannot be partially protected because it exists in another format (such as mp3 files), describe what the content is in SEO rich terms so people can find it and eventually join up. You can leave the file in the protected area.
Don’t be surprised to find your archived data accounting for most of your traffic.
For example, a site should get more visitors long term for a “How to save money” article verses an article about a three year old merger or a business closing.
Evergreen is the bread and butter of a site
Most content on successful sites is evergreen and covers a wide range of subjects.
There’s no limit to the topics you can tackle and make timeless. How to, Business Fundamentals, Personal Stories, Fitness tips, etc. are all great evergreen topics as people are always interested in those subjects.
Evergreen content is easy to schedule
You can’t schedule a post about an upcoming natural disaster, launch day news, or political scandal. If you can, there are much more lucrative opportunities awaiting you elsewhere
A scheduled post about aquatic exercise is safe to schedule as you can be pretty sure members need to work out even while you’re on vacation.
You can’t do that with timely news as the information could change and lead to embarrassing situations.
Evergreen saves time
Certain events happen every year.
Articles on holidays can be set to post every year. Your old members will be reminded of the tips and information, while new members see content that’s new to them.
Evergreen can be altered to be breaking news
A product review (semi-evergreen) can be updated with information about the next version or re-written as a comparison between versions. An old post about a celebrity becomes breaking news after their death with just a few added lines.
Stick around for my next article on evergreen content as I share ways to make money, ways to reuse content, and ways to get better businesses opportunities.
In the meantime, visit Jeffrey Powers and Mignon Fogarty aka GrammarGirl for more insightful tips.
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