How to make more out of your evergreen content.
You invest a lot of time and energy into creating excellent blog content. It’s insightful, helpful, maybe even a bit humorous. If you’ve done your work right, your best blogs should stick around long after you’ve hit the “publish” button, drawing in organic traffic and resurfacing every now and then as you link back to them from newer, relevant content. But after everything you’ve done to make your blog posts the best that they can be, isn’t there a way you could get a bit more life out of them?
The answer is yes. One of the beauties of a well-run blog is that it creates a great store of versatile content that you can repurpose in any number of ways. We refer to these kinds of blogs as evergreen content, because they don’t expire quickly. But how can your business repurpose content to make it go farther and draw in more leads? Let me elaborate.
1. Use blog posts to create videos, podcasts, and presentations.
Think of your blog as the script for other content. If you know what you’re writing about well enough to do a blog post on it, it’s not much more difficult to set up a camera and record yourself talking about it in a quick video. Or if you’re camera shy, pull out a microphone and record a podcast. Or if you have a presentation coming up, use some of your best blog posts to create speaking points.
This can also go in the opposite direction. You may have a video that gets a lot of traction: create a blog post to go with it. You have a great conversation with a guest on your podcast: turn it into a blog interview. An audience member asks you a great question during your talk: remember it and write a blog about it later. These moments of inspiration are golden: keep track of them and use them to feed more blog content.
2. Pull your best posts together into prime downloadable content.
One of the best ways to repurpose content from your blog is to assemble some of your best posts into an ebook. You may need to edit them a bit, or expand on a few sections to provide extra value to those who have already read your posts. But it saves you the time it would take to write everything all over again from scratch.
And like before, this can go the opposite direction as well: repurpose content from your ebooks by splitting chapters into separate blog posts. That way they’ll be searchable and can draw more traffic to your site.
3. Create a “best of” blog of your top posts.
These types of posts can take several forms: you could write a list of the top posts from a given year, or you could pull together a list of ones on a certain topic. You could also create a permanent list in a sidebar on your blog page directing your readers to top posts they may want to read before they tackle the rest of your archives. However you handle this, you’ll be sure to find great ways of bringing more attention to your evergreen content to help give it new life and not get lost in your archives.
For the record: this is also why you should use categories religiously on your blog. It’s a quick and easy way to make sure your posts get in front of people who are looking for more information on a given topic.
4. Compile an FAQ page.
When we work with companies to launch their blog, we often begin with an FAQ list. We talk with clients about questions they field for customers and prospects alike, and then assemble those into blog posts. The thinking is, if customers and prospects are asking these questions, they’re probably googling them to. And if they’re googling them, we want to be in on that potential traffic stream.
But a convenient side-effect of this strategy is that it leaves you with all the material you need for an FAQ page. You can either edit together you posts to provide concise answers, or link directly to the posts from the FAQ page itself (or a combination of the two). Either way, when you repurpose this content you know you’re making your most relevant posts accessible to your target audience.
5. Build an e-newsletter and social media following.
If you’re already running a blog, it doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to create an email list and send out your posts in a newsletter. You’ve probably seen those “don’t miss a post” forms on other sites, and you may even have filled one out yourself. E-newsletters are a great way to update anyone who doesn’t want to have to check in to your blog every week but still wants to see posts when they come out. They also give you another point of contact with your most interested followers, giving you more data and insights into the kind of content they’re interested in.
And obviously, you should be sharing your blog posts on your social media channels. Like e-newsletters, they help people keep up with what you’re writing, and you can monitor your likes and shares to see what your audience connects with. All of this data should help you provide more informative and helpful content, which is just another way of creating a good user experience for your audience.
When you repurpose content, you make it more accessible.
Evergreen content has a lot of value to you, in that it gives you a chance to stretch your content marketing budget a little further. But it also has value to your audience—if it didn’t, we wouldn’t recommend it as a strategy.
People access content in any number of ways. Some of them want a downloadable PDF that they can easily access for reference purposes in the future. Some want an infographic that they can print out and pin to their desk as a friendly reminder of best practices. They may prefer to listen to your podcast while they drive to work, or watch your video during a coffee break. Or they may enjoy hearing you present live at a conference.
The point is, we all have different preferences, and when you restrict your content to only one platform, you restrict your audience to those who are happy to access it via that platform. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: many people prefer to do podcasts because they aren’t confident in their writing skills. Others prefer blogs for their greater reach. But why limit yourself—and your audience—when with only a little extra effort you can make your content available in any number of forms?
So take a look at your blog and think about how you could best repurpose content for target audience.