Evergreen content is one of the easiest and most consistent ways to drive traffic to your site. It is reliable, can help you fill social media posting gaps, and lighten your staff’s load during busy times. Coming up with evergreen content ideas is also complicated.

Updating existing content

One of the fastest ways to build your evergreen bank is to repurpose existing high-performing content. There are many things to consider when you’re thinking about evergreen content. Not everything can simply be posted again. If you’re trying to use an existing piece of content as evergreen content, here are questions you should ask:

• Is this a news article that only had a short shelf life?
• Is this piece of content still relevant?
  • Does it involve a particular date/time?
• Does it include outdated information that cannot be updated?
• Could I make a minor update to make this relevant, i.e., remove a timely reference to make it evergreen? 
  • Can I identify what elements can easily be updated?
• Can I update the image?
• Would this make sense if I published it live today?
  • Is the information up to date?
  • Has the story progressed?
  • Is the information still relevant today?

Once you’ve done this, you can use the batch tagging function in WordPress to tag everything at once.

Where to find evergreen content ideas

Choosing the perfect evergreen content ideas for your audience starts with understanding your audience. As difficult as this can be, there are more tools than ever to gain insight into your audience.

Free analytics tools

• True Anthem: True Anthem can do a deep dive analysis of your digital audience and provide customized insights to help you select and create the best content for your audience. Reach out for a demo if we can help you move forward.

• Facebook Insights: Facebook Audience Insights gives you aggregate information about two groups of people—people connected to your Page and people on Facebook—so you can create content that resonates and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience. See age and gender breakdowns, education levels, job titles, relationship statuses, and more.

• Instagram Analytics: You’ll need a (free) business account to use this functionality. You can utilize Instagram Insights to learn more about your account’s followers and performance. You can also view insights on your audience’s engagement with specific posts, Stories, videos, Reels, and Live videos. If applicable, insights and metrics about your account include paid activity as well.

•  Tweet Activity Dashboard: For each Tweet you send, you’ll be able to track the number of impressions, engagements, and earned engagement rate. You can track retention, view rates, and completion rates for every video you post to Twitter. Once you learn what resonates with your audience, you can start Tweeting similar content. This dashboard is a helpful place to visit for content planning.

• Google Analytics: This is by far the most robust of the tools, as it covers a lot of ground. You can look at web traffic from all sources with a complete picture of bounce rates, session duration, referrals, and much more.

Using these tools, you can assemble a clear picture of who you’re reaching. You should know what they care about, their motivations, consumer habits, location, and demographic breakdown.

Personas

Creating personas can help put faces to the people who are engaging with you. This practice involves attaching names and traits to different audience segments and using your knowledge to package your content. If you are creating content for Emily, a 27-year-old low-income white female from Chicago, but your audience is Michael, a high-income 55-year-old black man from Washington, DC, you will likely miss the mark.

In short, speak to your audience.

AI social media tools

Maybe you don’t have time to scroll through all these different insights to see what your audience likes. We get it. Most publishers and teams have little time to go back and sift through old content. We can help.

True Anthem’s tool has a pretty killer feature that will highlight possible evergreen content on your dashboard. It takes the guesswork out of the process and uses real-time data and analytics to highlight high-performing content you have already published that shows evergreen potential.

How to create evergreen content

Once you have effectively looked at old content and learned your audience, you’re probably ready to execute some of your evergreen content ideas. But where do you start?

At this point, you probably have a good idea of certain themes that work for your audience. You know what they care about. You know what drives them and what angers them. So, build on what you know!

Explainers are a great place to start, especially if you’re a local news organization. For example, if you’re a South Florida station, some hurricane safety checklists and explainer videos would be usable year after year. Some cold-weather preparation checklists may make a lot of sense if you’re in a cold-weather state.

Holiday, seasonal, and content surrounding annual or historical events may also be a great place to start.

Evergreen content examples

What sets evergreen content apart from the rest of your content is that it’s relevant long after it’s posted. How long relevance lasts is dictated by your niche and type of industry. However, here are a few examples of this type of content that tend to make excellent evergreen options:

• Question and Answer posts about your brand/niche.
• Lessons learned, common mistakes, or myths.
• Checklists or ‘ultimate guides’
• Resources (as long as you are updating the backlinks with updated information)
• Case studies in your niche (again, updated with current information)
• Common terms or glossary of niche-related terms.
• History of your industry.

There are so many ways to spin these ideas in different formats for each platform you participate in. How you choose to present the information will go back to what your audience is looking for and are most likely to engage in.

What next?

Let us do the heavy lifting. Social media automation doesn’t have to be scary, and evergreen content can be automated to fill any gaps in your workflow. Are nights and weekends rough? Traffic doesn’t have to slow down just because your staff is minimal.

True Anthem can identify evergreen content, lock in scheduling slots, and automatically queue up content. We’ve got your back. Reach out today for a customized demo.