Sites like Engadget turn over a huge amount of money every month. Enough to employ writers, videographers, editors, advertisers and presenters all around the world. They get invites to the launches of new devices and they are considered as major players in their niche.
All that is great, but the company could be earning more money.
Why? Because it lacks ‘evergreen’ content.
A Business Model Without Evergreen
The majority of the content that a company like Engadget publishes is going to be news and reviews. In other words, the company will cover the release of new phones, new tablets and new computers. When the devices are announced, it will cover news of that release. And then, when the devices are available, it will review them and let readers know if they should buy them.
So, when a big device like the Galaxy S10 comes out, or the inevitable iPhone XI, the company will cover that and it will get millions of views on its YouTube channel and even more readers on its blog. It will make money from all this attention by:
- Selling advertising space on the blog
- Promoting affiliate products elsewhere on the site
- Potentially selling products of its own through partnerships
- Showing adverts on the YouTube videos
- Maybe finding a sponsor
That is the business model and with millions of views guaranteed for at least every few videos, it is enough to sustain a very big and successful business.
But here’s the problem: what happens during a ‘slow news’ few months? When no new phones are announced?
During this time, the company will have little that is truly high-profile to cover, and as such, there will be little reason to bring such a huge amount of traffic to the site. It will not get as many ad views, companies will be put off of advertising.
The Role of Evergreen
Now imagine if the site did more to cover broader topics. Maybe it could cover development-related content and teach people to make apps. Maybe it could talk about how to be more productive with a smartphone, how to customize it. Maybe it could run down the very best apps for this or that. Maybe it could do a video on the ‘history of Nokia’ and make it a documentary-style post.
Now, all of a sudden, you have evergreen content.
In case you hadn’t already guessed, evergreen means that the content is interesting and relevant all-year round: rather than being something that is temporarily of interest but will go out of style in no time at all.
With this kind of content on your site, you’ll now have a reason for people to keep coming back.
Imagine if all of those old videos on the Samsung Galaxy S6, S7, S8 and S9 were still just as relevant today. Imagine if they were all still getting potentially millions of views!
If Engadget could accomplish this, then it would immediately multiply its number of views and its income several times over. The same goes for the blog.
This would be one of the very best changes that a site like this could make.
And the same goes for any other site that covers news. Have a games news site? Then make sure you’re also posting great evergreen content: content about the benefits of gaming for the brain, content about how games are art-forms etc.
You can also then use this content in other ways to promote your site: for instance, you can link your new news posts to that evergreen content and that way give your readers somewhere that they can go to continue getting new information from you.
Whatever your site, whatever your channel… make sure that you also provide some kind of evergreen content!
More Benefits to Evergreen Content
There are other benefits to evergreen content too.
For one, evergreen content is fantastic for targeting long-tail keywords. These are phrases that people will occasionally use in order to find your website or blog posts, but which aren’t the ‘hot’ current keyphrases.
So that means things like ‘how do I increase vascularity in my forearms?’. It’s not exactly a keyword or phrase in the conventional sense because it’s too specific to be something that gets searched for regularly. But there are countless examples of long-tail phrases like this that people can use to find content on your site and if you target lots of them, then you can bring in a steady stream of new visitors to your site without having to compete for the most popular terms.
In fact, avoiding competition is another of the biggest advantages of evergreen content in general. If you can find a topic that people search for a lot – that has a universal and timeless appeal but that marketers may have forgotten about – then you can jump to the top of the SERPs with something new and shiny and get JUST as much traffic from that success as you would do from a post on the latest trending subject.
One more great thing about evergreen content is that you can keep resharing it. One of the most important tips for success on social media – especially Facebook Pages – is to post as regularly as possible. This is hard if you run a one-man-or-woman operation and don’t have time to write a new post a day.
But if you can dive into your vaults and reshare something old, updating it to give it some more Google-love… then you can benefit from it all-over again!
Multi-Pronged Assaults
Overall, the best way to approach your content schedule is to ensure that you have a good balance of both new and old content. Post news when it comes out to be seen as that official ‘resource’ and provide a good amount of discussion and informative posts too. You’re giving people more reasons to go to your site and more ways to get there! And that can only be a good thing for your business efforts.
Leave a Reply