How Affiliates Can Leverage Evergreen Content

High quality content is the cornerstone of SEO. Regularly updated blogs and content sites tend to rank better in search engines than all-but-abandoned sites or ones that are full of duplicate content. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the time to write new content for our websites every few days. The good news is that we don’t have to.

There are two main kinds of content. Evergreen content, and news or topical content. Topical content is content that talks about the big news of the day – for example posts about the Olympics, the royal wedding, or the latest big-name celebrity gaffe. That content may generate a large number of hits for a short period of time, but within a couple of months it will be outdated and almost never searched for.

Evergreen content is content that is going to interest visitors for a long time to come. Tutorials are a good example of Evergreen content. People will always want to know how to bake a chocolate cake or how to format their hard drive. Lists, biographies, and even some product reviews can also be considered to be examples of Evergreen content, as long as the things that you are talking about have a lasting appeal.

Monetizing Evergreen Content

Affiliates can use evergreen content to create niche content sites that contain affiliate links to their favourite merchants. For example, if you run a photographer targeted website you could write some tutorials, for example:

• How to increase business this summer
• Fix your photo business finances for the New Year
• Create templates that decrease processing time

The above content is your “long tail” content. You could then write a “head piece” titled “6 Ways To Add Revenue Streams To Your Photography Business”, and link that article to the other articles.

Within those articles, you could link to presets, financial templates, legal templates and other products. Each individual long tail article will only attract traffic at certain times of the year, but throughout the year you should enjoy a steady stream of traffic.

Writing Good Evergreen Content

The secret to success with evergreen content is to write content that appeals to the layman. Experts won’t search for photography advice, so there’s no reason to use a lot of jargon or link to obscure research papers. Use clear and concise language, and make sure that your articles are accurate and easy to understand.

The most successful evergreen articles are ones that are quite narrow in scope. An article titled “Do Spreadsheets Work?” will probably have a lot of competition. An article examining one specific type of spreadsheet should have less competition and will also attract higher quality traffic because the person searching for that specific diet pill is likely to be highly interested in the topic.

It’s a good idea to link your evergreen posts to each other. Someone interested in one diet pill may be interested in others, and someone who wants diet advice so that they can get in shape for the summer may also want to read your article about useful spreadsheets that will streamline their photography business.

Write Topical Posts Too

Evergreen content is just one piece of the affiliate marketing puzzle. It’s a good idea to write news posts too. If a new product comes on the marketing, related to your original content, write about it! You can get a lot of traffic by taking advantage of big news and sudden trends. The purpose of the evergreen content is to keep those clicks coming in during otherwise quiet months.

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This post was written by Crispin Jones for Twist Digital.