Has your digital marketing department built up a fantastic content library? And you have been told that library is useless because of only new content matters for SEO?
Hold your breath!
Although you may hear a lot about the value of fresh content for SEO, evergreen content is a powerful tool you have at your disposal to improve the popularity and visibility of your website.
Evergreen content is content that never runs out of value, relevance, quality and style.
 

Here are ten examples of evergreen content that you cannot afford to bury deep into your archives.

• Five Essential Tips to drive traffic to your website
• A complete guide for digital marketing
• Product reviews
• Human interest stories
• How to build your digital marketing strategy in five simple steps
• The ultimate guide to blogging
• Here is why you need a guest blogger
• Common mistakes content writers make
• The worst mistake to make when creating social media posts
• Everything you need to know about google analytics

Here is a list of three examples of websites that always publish long term evergreen content.

• Wikipedia
• Answers.com
• Ehow.com

Benefits of evergreen content

Just like a blossoming fruit tree, evergreen content never runs out of value and usefulness. It is long term quality content that has no expiry date and quickly becomes a reference point for readers because of its relevance and cost to the readers.
Evergreen content should always be part of a good content marketing strategy. This type of content will consistently drive traffic to your site, improve search engine rankings, and position your content as a unique brand, by continually connecting your audience to social media.
Now that you have understood the formats and benefits of evergreen content, you need inspiration not to sink your evergreen content deep into your archives.
Here are ten essential steps you need to take to promote your evergreen content.

1.Take stock of your evergreen content 

Don’t get your green content off the radar. Check out your old content and sieve out what you consider to be evergreen content. You will be able to share your “How to do” content or listicles even a year after it was published.
For example, if you write travel blogs, a post like “how to find the best holiday destinations” will remain relevant from one year to another. Holiday destinations will not shift locations, and that’s why your content remains relevant and of good value to the reader.
So, take a deep dive and conduct a quick inventory into your old content identifying all the evergreen articles, review and update and then repost them.
One way of refreshing your evergreen content is by adding new link attributions to update the information.
Create an ever an evergreen SEO checklist and check it regularly to identify the changes in algorithms.

2. Conduct regular updates of your evergreen content

One of the best things about evergreen content is that there will always be something different to add to the content.
For instance, you may have published a “how to find great holiday destinations” post, this time you may find a better way to share the same post but with a twist to the update and you have something like; “5 tips to your next holiday destination.”
Regular updates of your evergreen content provide additional freshness to the previous versions. Here is what you need to update your content

• Conduct research and find out that there is any new information that you can add.
• Add fresh and creative visuals to the old post
• Use infographics to illustrate key points
• Add some tips to boost the content
• Recreate an old post with a new format such as question and answer.

Refresh your evergreen content with the new information and, of course, the content will be as good as new.

3. Ensure robust evergreen material

All evergreen material shares some unique characteristics.
The content is longer and written comprehensively, and they add depth to the subject matter, they take advantage of keywords for SEO purposes and tend to utilize link building.

4. Increase top-performing social content and optimize it for conversions

Don’t get surprised if some of your evergreen content becomes one of your site’s top traffic drivers.
The reason is mainly that the evergreen content appeals to the needs and interests of your readers compared to the recent posts that you have been sharing on your site.
If you manage to scoop evergreen content that instantly drives traffic to your page, then you need to take two more steps to retain this traffic.

• Launch an ad campaign on your social media pages
• Optimize that content to drive conversion

For example, you can drive additional social traffic to your evergreen content by launching a targeted Facebook ad set targeting a specific demographic, within a defined region using a small budget.
Investing in Facebook ads means that you need to optimize your content for conversions. A simple trick as inserting a call to action will make a whole lot different.
Additionally, consider applying sidebars and take advantage of the pop-up ads that drive conversions.

5. Unveil your evergreen content alongside a related new post

One great tactic to promote your evergreen content is by posting it alongside a new post that focusses on the same subject matter.
You could do this by adding a sidebar at the bottom of your page showcasing either related content or even comments generated from your previous posts.
This tactic gives you value by driving new traffic to your site and will increase your click-through rate from people who are interested in the subject matter contained in both the latest and the evergreen content.
Introduce more internal links wither automatically or manually to broaden the crawl depth into your content. You can set what webpage elements to consider when determining relevance.
You can modify the look and feel of the relevant block posts by:

• Selecting the number of posts to be displayed
• Creating the intro
• Showing /hiding the excerpts and setting the list type

6. Craft a schedule for posting evergreen content 

You may consider using the search engine journal where the top 200 evergreen posts generated each year are scheduled using the buffer WordPress plugin and shared on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The search engine journal schedules these posts carefully ensuring that there is no interference with any new posts appearing at the same time. Besides, each post has tactical hashtags (triggered by its silos or titles), and the writer is tagged.
Using the search engine journal allows you to post evergreen content ever on your site consistently.
The Tweet Old Posts plugin is another great option, mainly if you are focused on Twitter.
This plugin, would automatically tweet posts from your blog archives and enable you to set a prefix to Hashtags for the use of tweets: this allows you to decide how often the plugin is auto-selecting and tweeting a blog post for you.

7. Curate several evergreen contents in Roundups 

Roundups provide additional exposure to your previously published posts. With a touch of creativity, you will be able to design thematic roundup that reflects the content in your evergreen posts.
For instance, if you are starting as a blogger on cars and travel, that talks about the types of vehicles and their durability, you can create a new blog post that shows a roundup of all the new cars that were brought into the market this year. This roundup will drive new traffic to your evergreen content.
These roundups are helpful because they allow you to connect naturally with a bunch of your evergreen articles.

8. Promote Evergreen content on Social media and newsletters 

One other great way to promote your evergreen content is by shifting your content onto another channel. For instance, if you published your blog, consider promoting that content on either your Facebook page or even tweet the link to the twitter user. Using this tactic will help you reach new audiences and attract fresh traffic to your site.
Additionally, if you know of an organization that produces newsletters, you could offer some links to your evergreen content to be published in the newsletter for that market audience. This technique too will drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure to post your evergreen content on social media channels that don’t dwell so much on trending topics, because this may overshadow your posts especially if the content does not relate to the trending topic for the day.
If you decide to update your evergreen content with infographics, photos or video clips, then bear these tips in mind.

• Make sure that your images are strikingly high in terms of colour, and resolution
• Your infographics are clear and educational
• Provide a step by step guide
• Provide a URL and a clear description of your images.

9. Provide downloadable freebies along with your evergreen content 

Let us face it. Who doesn’t like to get a freebie, especially after sparing some time to read a long exciting article? That’s just one reason why evergreen content should be versatile.
Your text, images, video and audio clips may all be excellent, but take a straightforward step and give your reader something free.
Freebies could include an e-book or a one-week course about something of interest to the reader.

10. Make your evergreen content mobile-friendly 

It’s a fact by now that most people access the internet through mobile devices. Make sure that your evergreen content can be accessed through any mobile device. That’s a bonus tip for promoting your evergreen content.
 

Final takeaways

Evergreen content differs from newsworthy content. As already highlighted in this article, evergreen content continues to blossom long after it was first published and can generate new interest and drive more traffic to your site.
As noted, evergreen content has no expiry date, but you can always polish it a bit with some links to related posts.
You now know what evergreen content is. Add it to your digital marketing strategy today!
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