The Timeless Value of Evergreen Content

Content marketing can sometimes seem like an endless race.

You’re desperately working to produce content to promote and content to support that content and ad campaigns to publicize it and on and on and on. Phew! You barely have time to catch your breath!

“But wait!” came a strong, confident voice. “There is a better way!”

It’s called evergreen content, material that’s perpetually fresh, useful, and relevant to your personas at particular stages in their buying process. This is timeless content that doesn’t expire, available to be referenced long after it first went up and losing none of its value. Like evergreen trees, they never lose their luster.

That means you can bust it out again and again for promotion in addition to using it to generate long-term organic traffic.

So what is evergreen content exactly?

It can take the form of blog posts, content offers, informational and educational videos, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts – anything, as long as it remains valuable well into the future.

(not included: Betamax, DAT tapes)

In general, it hits three major points:

• It’s never outdated. While it may need a few tweaks over time to keep it up to date, great evergreen content never needs to be totally refreshed to retain its value.
• It’s awesome. Evergreen content needs to be high-value content that’s accurate, helpful, and super polished. That means that not only does it get noticed immediately, but it gets shared, quickly disseminating itself throughout the right social circles.
• It’s definitive. You can blog all you want about a topic, but your evergreen piece is the final word about it. It’s a definitive piece of content that’s in-depth, well-researched, and designed to be seriously – and regularly – referenced. In other words, it’s not a blog you whip out in ninety minutes.

In other words, think about evergreen content the way a magazine or television network thinks about a prestige piece; it’s a statement, and deserves time and attention. 

What does evergreen content do for you?

Well, tons, really. But the main thing it does is keep business coming your way. And it does that kinda forever. That’s because evergreen content is search engine friendly, drives traffic, and is great at generating leads.

It’s not super complicated actually. Just knowing how Google prioritizes content is enough to see why this works; because Google is bound and determined to always serve up the most relevant information, it pays crazy high attention to how much a page is being visited, how much it is being linked to, how much it is being shared, and whether other relevant sources refer back to it.

Basically, evergreen content produces a feedback loop. When you launch a high-quality valuable piece of content, it makes a splash, generating an initial flurry of visits, shares, and references, which generate its initial PageRank. But as the content is always valuable, the visits, shares, and references don’t stop; they produce a higher and higher PageRank, which drives more visits, encourages more shares, and leads to more references. And on and on and on.

That means you have a page that is swamped with highly qualified traffic that had a positive experience with your content.

Seems like a great place for a conversion opportunity, right?

As a direct result of the high volume of traffic, your evergreen content (properly utilized) will generate high quality leads well into the future – and more and more over time. You’ll even start to notice that evergreen content is your most consistent lead generator. While you can’t stop producing new content to attract new and different kinds of leads and demonstrate ongoing thought leadership, your high performers will regularly be content that is months or even years old.

Even as you stay up-to-the-minute with news-centric posts, you’ll always have fallback content backing you up on those days you just don’t strike the right chord.

Learn more about content marketing by consulting with Hudson Fusion’s expert team.

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