Sunday, October 27, 2024
Here’s the conundrum: create up-to-the-minute content that has a best-before date of “tomorrow”, or create evergreen content that will remain relevant for months (or years) to come? How do you decide which strategy makes sense for you, and why you might prefer one over the other?
The benefit of evergreen content is clear: invest once, and it continues to pay dividends, over and over. It can appear in your blog, in a video, as an add-on to an email, as an appendix to a proposal, and in many other places. And because it is timeless, it will continue collecting inbound links from other websites, building your SEO ranking over time.
But the problem with evergreen content is that there is no urgency: there isn’t a time-bound reason for your reader to come back to your website (or social feed) on a daily or weekly basis. They can come and go. Another problem is that the content is less likely to be picked up by other time-bound sources: there is a reason why “news” is called “news”.
Time-bound content addresses evergreen content’s urgency problem. And in so doing, demonstrates that you are 100% on top of things. But depending on how you execute time-bound content, your positioning can be vastly different. If your time-bound content is merely reporting, then that’s all people will see you as: a compiler of up-to-date information, no different than anywhere else. On the other hand, if your content focuses on your insights and implications, it positions you as a thought leader.
Another benefit of time-bound content is that it changes the nature of your content from merely interesting or helpful, to “must-read”, and must read now. It’s stickier, and can grow your subscriber base for more quickly than evergreen content.
So, which of these strategies might you prefer? The answer depends on your business model and strategy, and how you choose to use the content in the context of everything else that you do. A better approach is to choose either one or the other, and then sprinkle the other type within. For example, a daily news blog might have evergreen content each Friday. Or, a daily commentary blog might include a weekly news-in-review post.
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This week’s action plan:
Review the content that you have created over the last three years, and flag anything that is time-bound. For some of the content, is it possible to change them from time-bound into evergreen? If so, then either re-edit the posts to maintain the inbound links, or create completely new posts designed from the ground up to be evergreen. (Or do both.)
Content marketing insight: How often have you seen a blog or video that could have been evergreen content, but a graphic or a key phrase has rendered it out-of-date almost immediately? If there doesn’t need to be a date reference, leave it out!
Related post: Top 10 Content Marketing Posts
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