In the busy world of the internet, businesses are often looking for ways to be found and heard. They want their message to get to existing customers but also find new ones. They want to sell their products but also make a connection. They walk a fine line between marketing, selling, and connecting.
There are some tried and true rules to being a business online and interacting with customers. You need to have a website, social media pages, and a blog. You have to incorporate search engine optimization so you can be ranked on search lists, and you have to offer valuable content to readers.
Each of these elements sounds easy enough to do. Creating a website isn’t nearly as challenging as it used to be, and anyone can sign up for social sites and write a blog. The trick is standing out from all the other businesses who are also doing the exact same thing.
Generating content isn’t always easy. Finding ideas and writing posts can be time-consuming and challenging. However, there are ways to develop valuable content ideas and have people read your work. It takes some planning, but it can be done. One way to accomplish that goal is to create evergreen content.
What Is Evergreen Content?
This seems to be the new buzzword of the day, but it’s an important one. In essence, evergreen content on a website is information that can stand the test of time. It’s not tied to a specific season or occurrence. It’s informative and helpful now and will continue to be later in the future.
Things that are not evergreen content include breaking news, statistics for a specific industry or for a particular point in time, the latest trends in anything, or posts that talk about specific seasons. These are important to incorporate into a marketing strategy and keep customers informed, but they aren’t evergreen.
Creating Evergreen Content
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Creating this type of content means relying on certain formats to generate sustainable traffic to your company’s website. Like other parts of marketing, there are tried and true formulas to incorporate to ensure this content is successful. Below are five formats to consider using in your business blog.
- How-to Blogs
Explaining to customers the best way to use your products is something that will be appealing and helpful for a long time. You may consider changing things up and doing a how-not-to post, which can be fun and entertaining.
- Listicles
Making lists about anything that applies to your business will appeal to customers because these are often quick, easy reads. The attention span of internet surfers continues to grow shorter, so getting them interested in a short amount of time is important. They also have places to be and other things to do, so being able to read the information in a short amount of time is also important.
- FAQs
This can be an incredibly informative and highly visited page on your company’s site. If formatted for easy navigation, it gives people one place to go to find answers to questions they may have about your products. It is also something that will stand through time and won’t have to be updated often.
- Product Reviews
A lot of people rely on reading other customer’s reviews when deciding if they should try a new product—from restaurants to shoes to clothes to cars and everything in between, reviews are an important part of finding and retaining customers.
There’s no way that anyone is going to have all positive reviews, so don’t stress about trying to reach this unattainable ideal. However, it’s important to have more positive reviews than negative reviews. Highlighting the positive is important, and this can be an evergreen content format that will last for a long time and have a major impact on traffic to your site.
- Explanation of Industry Concepts
People love getting an inside look at an industry, and they enjoy learning new things about what goes on in that industry and understanding difficult or confusing concepts. Incorporating this on your blog could be a good way to connect with customers and give them information about the business and clear up any confusion.
Generating evergreen content is a great way to get sustainable traffic to your site. It also means having content that doesn’t have to updated frequently because it stands the test of time and is helpful and informative.