The importance of creating evergreen content for inbound marketing

It's easy for us to neglect our websites when we get busy. I'm just as guilty as you are!

Recently I've been so focused on ghost blogging and writing web copy for my customers, I've neglected to update my blog. The cardinal cyber sin. 

We know Google loves websites that are regularly updated. However, evergreen content is also an important component of your website. If you write articles that are 'timeless', you can keep on sharing them, without them losing their value. Whenever I create marketing content for customers, I try to produce articles that won't go out of date quickly. They form part of a long-term, ongoing marketing campaign. 

You can create a series 

As an example, here's a collection of eight blog posts I wrote last year for an excellent website design agency, CBJ Digital: 

1. Pssst. Does your website make the grade?
2. 3 reasons people want to read your blog
3. Your website deserves more than random acts of sharing
4. Looking for the perfect partner online?
5. Is your site SEO prepared?
6. 'Do I look good on this?' Do you want the truth?
7. Fat footers and free hugs
8. Re-skinning your website needn't be painful!

Of course, website design is evolving all the time. However most of the points in these posts are still valid. There's value in sharing them again now, since readers can add comments to highlight any of those changes. A blog post is a living thing.

You can breathe new life into your content with fresh images

Blog posts come alive if they include a provoking image. That's part of what I enjoy about writing. It's challenging and satisfying to find an image that underpins your message.

One way to get more from your evergreen content is to update the images in your posts. When CBJ recently updated their own website, they also updated the blog images to showcase their design portfolio and increase exposure to their customers' sites.

Sometimes you find a more pertinent image a few weeks after publishing your original post. Keep fine-tuning your images in the same way you refine your words.

You can see ideas for new content proliferate

The beauty of creating evergreen content is that it also inspires new ideas for more content. You can repurpose evergreen content by:

• Creating a summary blog post that incorporates previous posts (like this one)
• Creating a detailed post that describes one topic in your original article in much more detail 
• Writing a revised version of your original blog post that highlights recent developments

One evergreen post is the seed for many new ideas: 

Great oaks from little acorns grow

What creative ideas do you have for prolonging the life of your blog posts? Care to share?

P.S. After working so long as a ghost blogger for CBJ, I asked them to design and develop my website. I'm rather happy with the results.