Looking to upgrade your content marketing? To help inspire you, we've found evergreen content examples that get promoted in really smart ways. If you haven't been creating evergreen content (or if you have been creating it but you haven't been promoting it well) these examples will show you how to do better.
Creating content is hard work. You might as well get the most amount of traffic, email subscribers, and conversions it from it that you possibly can. Evergreen content can do just that.
Here's what we're covering in this post:
- What is evergreen content?
- Evergreen content examples
- How to promote your evergreen content
- How to update your evergreen content
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content is a piece of content that is relevant for a long period of time. The topic can be relevant to your audience indefinitely, as long as you keep the content up-to-date.
Evergreen content can be a blog post, a video (although it's tough to make significant edits to YouTube videos), a downloadable guide, an email course, or a host of other content formats.
Trendy content has a much shorter shelf-life. Here's what evergreen content is NOT:
- News articles
- Newsjacking
- Seasonal content
- Content on trending topics
- Product reviews
You may know that creating evergreen content is a smart way to make the most of your content efforts. Instead of creating content and seeing a temporary traffic uplift from it, you can generate traffic again and again with the same piece of content. If you're not yet aware of this benefit, the following evergreen content examples will help you see just how useful this type of content is.
Evergreen content examples
As with any type of content, you need to promote it. Evergreen content is no different. You need to actively promote it, and build-in virality and search engine optimization so that your content has the chance to take on a traffic-generating life of its own.
That's why, with these evergreen content examples, we're not only showing you what evergreen content is, we're also showing you how it gets promoted.
Hubspot's templates for agencies
In their "5 Templates to Help You Win, Retain, and Delight Your Clients," Hubspot includes:
- Business proposal
- Statement of work
- Client onboarding
- Preventing scope creep
- Quarterly business review
This is a high value group of resources that helps Hubspot generate leads. While its easier to create evergreen content in the form of blog posts, it's important to note that downloadable resources can count as evergreen content too. There are some downloadable assets that won't be evergreen (such as industry reports, investment opportunities, or anything to do with a specific month or year).
How this content gets promoted
Tweet variations
Hubspot promotes their downloadable asset using multiple tweet variations on different days. As you can see, they reuse the same image in both tweets. Because the image isn't a standard Twitter size, it takes up more room in the feed and grabs your attention.
Same image, different headline:
Facebook ads
Hubspot also uses sponsored Facebook posts to get more downloads for their asset. Hubspot knows that organic reach on Facebook is tough, so on their main page, they only post short videos about interesting topics with broad reach. For any other type of content, or anything more niche, they use Facebook ads.
Again, Hubspot is using the same image for the post variation. With organic Twitter, the strategy is likely to share the same post but in a different way. However, with their Facebook ads, they're probably testing different intro text to see what performs better.
If you haven't been creating different variations of your posts in order to share your evergreen content, now's the time to do it! Make sure that you're also sharing your content over multiple days, not just once.
Backlinko's "Improve Your SEO" post
In Backlinko's post "17 Ways to Improve SEO Ranking in 2019," he shares how to get backlinks from content creators, how to increase your chances of getting featured in a Google snippet, how to form content partnerships, how to choose keywords and more.
How this content gets promoted
Tweeting
Interestingly, despite having over 88,000 followers, Brian Dean (the founder of Backlinko) is not super active on Twitter. He tweets maybe 10 times per month, and he does not use the strategy of creating multiple variations to tweet out his content, the way that Hubspot does.
However, there is plenty that Brian is doing to get more traction with Evergreen content.
Strategic naming
Backlinko's content never features the year in the URL. Even though the title for this post is "17 Ways to Improve SEO Rankings in 2019," the URL of the post is /improve-your-seo. This means that the content can get continually updated with no need to create a new URL and new post every year.
This is something to take note of: put the URL in the title (and change it later), but not in the URL.
Viral sharing
Backlinko's content inspires a lot of shares. The post on improving SEO has 1066 shares at the time of writing.
And here's another share:
In fact, Brian Dean has even created a guide on how to create content that goes viral. Here are just some of the tips included in that guide on how to get more social media shares:
- Include odd numbers in the headline
- Include lots of images, which prompts more sharing as people will resonate with certain images over others
- Include a header image
- Make your URLs short
- Include an infographic
So, even though Brian has tons of Twitter followers, he doesn't rely on his audience alone for traffic. He builds virality into his posts, which typically get shared thousands of times each.
Organic search
Did you guess? The majority of Backlinko's traffic for evergreen content comes from organic search. For the keyphrase "improve SEO" which has an average monthly search volume of 2,900, this article ranks number 7 in Google.
Email marketing
Brian reports that for getting traffic to evergreen content, email marketing is second to search traffic, and that it greatly trumps social media marketing. He uses his newsletter to introduce new subscribers to top pieces of older content, and every time he publishes a new post, he emails it to his list.
Relaunching the content
Brian also relaunches content, meaning that when he updates something, he also updates the publish date inside of WordPress, so that it goes to the top of blog feed instead of staying at the end.
What about YouTube?
You might have seen some Backlinko videos on YouTube. Interestingly, there are no links back to related blog posts in Brian Dean's videos. Instead, the CTAs are simply to subscribe to his channel.
The Intercom on Sales ebook
The Intercom on Sales ebook offers practical, data-driven advice for salespeople. It covers everything from hiring to sales techniques and methodology to collaboration.
As a piece of high-value, evergreen content, the Intercom on Sales book is worth sharing and promoting multiple times.
How this content gets promoted
Tweet variations
Intercom's marketing team has turned this one evergreen ebook into several different tweets. Let's take a look.
One tweet includes a statistic from the ebook:
Another tweet includes a statistic in the text and a quote in the image:
Another tweet includes a 2-minute video from an account executive sharing tips related to the ebook.
Employee advocacy
Intercom's employees also engage in employee advocacy, meaning that they post company content from their personal Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
StoryChief has a great way of sharing your content with your colleagues or friends so they can re-share your content to their personal networks. Find out more about it here!
Here's an example video of a sales manager discussing how the ebook can help scale sales at billion dollar companies.
Blog feed
Intercom's blog is one of the most popular in B2B. On their main blog feed, they feature the ebook in between other blog cards. This is a smart way to get more eyes on the ebook.
How to promote your own evergreen content
Promoting your evergreen content is a little different than promoting regular content, because you don't just do it once and call it quits. Take the lead of these evergreen content examples and prioritize promotion.
Here are all of the ways that smart marketers promote evergreen content:
- SEO optimize your post (include a relevant keyphrase and do outreach to get more backlinks)
- Create multiple variations of your social media posts: use different images, statistics, quotes, and infographics when sharing online
- Involve employees in sharing content
- Relaunch your content by re-positioning it at the top of your blog feed and sharing it with email subscribers
- Build virality into your content with great subject lines and high quality images
- Drive targeted paid traffic to your evergreen resources
How to update your own evergreen content
Even though evergreen content should stay relevant for a year or longer, you should still update your evergreen blog posts and ebooks every 1-2 years to ensure that the content is still accurate and useful.
Keep your content updated
- Remove old images and screenshots that look outdated
- Add new images
- Revise content that is no longer accurate
- Update years in titles
- Add one or more additional sections, or bonus tips
- Add additional secondary keyphrases
Work on improving conversions from your content
- Move CTAs higher up in the content
- Update your CTAs to include new signup links
In this example, from Backlinko, we can see that in October of 2018, the post included an "about the author" section right below the hero headline. Now, the second section is a CTA for a PDF version. The email optin has been moved up higher in the post to capture more email subscribers.
In 2018, the author's bio is the second section:
In 2019, the CTA is the second section:
Creating evergreen content might take a tad longer than normal content, because you're creating something that is authoritative and highly valuable (not just catching the wave of top news or trends). However, the effort is worth it, because you then have something you can promote again and again.