Evergreen Content
If you haven’t heard of “ever green content,” then you’re probably not alone.
But, it’s actually a pretty important concept if you are interested in developing content based websites.
In fact, if you are able, you should be aiming to produce evergreen content.
So what is it?
It’s simply another name for reference material. That is factual material that people refer to that never really goes out of date.
The great thing about evergreen content is that if you can rank well in the search engines for your evergreen content, then you will have a neverending stream of visitors to your site that will probably last years.
People will probably also keep referring to your evergreen content from other websites as a reference. That brings in a nice lot of incoming links to your website and web pages (again helping with SEO).
This has quite an advantage over content that is generated around events or news as interest in those news items and events will usually only last a few weeks at most. That is nice while it lasts, but not great if you are aiming to build a passive income. In this case, you should probably look for ways to develop evergreen content.
So that’s all well and good, but what are a few examples?
The two that immediately spring to mind are Wikipedia and IMDB (The Internet Movie Database). They both have massive amounts of reference material and are both referred to by millions of people.
Of course, you don’t really need to bite off projects that big for database topics. You could start in a more humble fashion and develop a database resource around your specific interests.
If you are not sure about putting up a database website, you should put out a few feelers for getting others to do it. Over at Sitepoint, I think you’d be surprised at how cheap it could actually be.
Of course, you can also put evergreen content on a blog - most intstructional blogs consist of largley evergreen content.
Anyway, that type of information is certainly something to consider if you are looking for long term income from your writing.
Good post Rob. And great points as usual. I’m hoping to make a couple of my blogs evergreen - but probably not with the success of your examples. I’d like to have green “seedlings” at least - however much that’s possible for a small fish. Hopefully I’ll grab a bite of that “long tail” and take flight.
For example I’m building http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/artistampwhat/ which addresses the “what the heck is an artistamp?” question and hopefully will provide people with a steady stream of ideas about how they can use them offline and hopefully soon online too.
And my WebMagic blog at http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/webmagic/ provides an on-screen place to play with art/message puzzle-cards. I don’t think the bloggosphere in general is yet onto how little things like these can generate interest and buzz.
And in the case of these two projects I don’t see how they’d lose their value as reference and idea generator if nothing else. I’m at the mercy of jigzone for providing the working parts that make the puzzles possible but hopefully there’s a work-around that down the road.
May 6th, 2006 at 3:51 pmThey’re some good ideas. Make sure you follow some good SEO tips and you should get a nice little stream of visitors!
May 10th, 2006 at 12:09 amContent is the reason people visit your site in the first place. It is what makes your web site popular to your visitors and why they return. How often do you frequent sites that either don’t have the content you do like or care about?
The same is true for other searchers, and the respective search engines job is to deliver highly relevant pages to searchers. Many sites are tired, outdated, worn out and of no practical use as a resource for the information searchers are looking for.
Added to all that noise, the misuse of metatags has caused many search engines to discount them entirely. This leave the CONTENT of your page to be the KING of the hill in delivering reliable search results that matches the words being searched upon.
You can use tricks to dupe visitors to your site, but once they get there you’ll only offend then or make them upset and they’ll quickly click away.
Search engines are becoming savvier and evaluating the entire page before delivering result their results, SERP. That again leaves your Content to be King. There are many ways to get content for your site. You can create it yourself, borrow it from others or buy it. Just remember to keep it fresh and targeted to your audience.
Ntsikelelo
August 7th, 2006 at 4:04 amhttp://www.qecis.com
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