What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is that which is still interesting and relevant weeks, months or even years after its initial publish date.

It doesn’t date like news can, it can deliver value in terms of traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.

The best examples are aligned with our audience as well as our paid content and other services.

This is a strategy which has worked well for us and has delivered growth in traffic and revenues over the last five years.

These are some of the formats we use at Econsultancy, and that have worked well for us…

How-to guides

Of course, some of the platforms and tools may date over time, but useful content like this should have a longer shelf life than most posts.

Example posts: 

How to get sales teams to buy into digital transformation

How to use Google Analytics URL builder to track campaigns

How to setup Twitter Cards for a WordPress blog

Beginner’s guides

While we obviously have a sophisticated and highly intelligent audience on this blog, everyone has to start somewhere, and we try to pitch content at various levels of experience.

Beginner’s guides provide an entry point and explain new concepts and marketing disciplines to readers.

Incidentally, it’s also a great way to train your writers. If they can explain something to beginners, they have to first understand it for themselves.

Example posts: 

What is marketing attribution and why do you need it?

What is Negative SEO and how can you protect your website?

What is marketing automation and why do you need it?

Answer questions

Most obviously this means creating content that is genuinely helpful. This could mean educational content, as people often search for answers to specific questions on Google.

Find relevant questions and provide some answers by creating the right kind of articles (and other forms of evergreen content), which may become long-standing and well-ranked reference resources.

You can use Google’s suggested queries for ideas, by prefixing a query about your key topics with ‘how’, ‘why’ or ‘what’.

Example posts: 

How can automotive brands use digital to appeal to car buyers?

What are Rich Pins and how can you use them?

How can ecommerce sites use Instagram?

Make sense of trends

Yes, this can date, but as long as the trend lasts it will be useful content.

When a new product or platform comes out, like the iPhone, or something more recent like Meerkat, marketers want to know the opportunities that it presents.

Example posts:

Eight ways brands can add Meerkat into their marketing mix

How small businesses can make the most of Pinterest

Seven big opportunities that wearables offer to marketers

 

Become a curator

There are lots of great resources out there, and you can do your readers a real favour by rounding them up into one place.

Example posts:

17 fantastically useful tools for content writers and bloggers

16 essential social media management tools we love

24 resources and tools to inspire digital marketing beginners

12 evergreen resources for content managers 

Transform news stories

This one is a slight curveball, as news dates, but some stories have a longer-term impact than others.

News articles are easily replicated and tend to be very samey (which is why we avoid this), but a news story can provide you with a nice jumping off point.

Figure out how to spin news stories into something more long lasting, more unique and more useful, such as a how-to guide.

Example posts: 

Six thoughts on Google’s ‘mobile-friendly’ search announcement

Panda 4.1: what’s it all about?

Twitter Cards: in the right place at the right time to create a new kind of web

Case studies

Case studies are great, as they provide real world examples which help marketers to make a business case for investment in new channels.

Example posts:

Seven customer experience case studies that generated loyalty and ROI

Six useful mobile marketing case studies

A negative SEO case study: how to spot an attack & fix it

Definitions

Digital marketing is full of new terms, acronyms, and plenty of jargon.

People appreciate it if you help them to understand these terms and cut through the jargon.

Example posts:

Econsultancy’s colossal digital marketing jargon-buster

A dictionary of SEO words, terms and phrases

A beginner’s dictionary of Google Analytics

Lists

We use lists a lot, because they are easy for readers to digest, they help the writer organise their thoughts, and they work well.

Example posts:

10 of the world’s best mobile commerce checkouts

10 emerging examples of best practice in social customer service

10 insightful GOV.UK blog posts on service design

Best practice

We’re in the business of highlighting best – and worst – practice.

Our reports offer a comprehensive overview topics, such as checkout or search optimisation.

This blog offers us the chance to dig into the detail, to go niche, and to explore new topics that may ultimately lead to the production of a best practice guide.

Example posts:

35 examples of ecommerce best practice from Hobbycraft

Nine best practice tips for Facebook advertising

Local SEO best practice: dos and don’ts

Dig into the detail

Broad overview posts have their uses, but getting into the detail, however niche it may seem, can be very useful for readers.

Example posts:

12 useful tips for optimising email deliverability

A blogger’s guide to setting up a WordPress site: customising your template

Best practices for e-commerce consumer surveys: part one

Checklists

Checklists can be a great resource, easy to scan, and helpful to marketers.

Example posts:

A prioritised web development & site migration SEO checklist

16 essential success factors for ecommerce checkouts

The essential small business website checklist

Share your secrets

We want to share knowledge from others, so it’s only fair that we reveal a little of that ourselves.

As the Econsultancy blog has grown, we’ve learned a lot on the way about what works, and what doesn’t. We hope this information will be useful to others.

Example posts: 

Our blog now exceeds 1m monthly page views, but does it generate ROI?

What I’ve learnt from writing 333 blog posts on Econsultancy

Which content marketing metrics are valuable for Econsultancy?

Stats

Stats date, but over a period of months and years, and people are always keen to find data to back up their business cases.

We provide a huge resource with our Internet Stats Compendium, but we also present plenty of stats on the blog.

Example posts:

12 illuminating ecommerce stats from January-March 2015

20+ Instagram stats marketers need to know

11 staggering stats from around the digital world

Five tips for an evergreen SEO strategy