You Might Be Sitting on a Blogging Goldmine – Here’s How to Make Sure It Doesn’t Go to Waste

Imagine, for a minute, a world without reruns.

No DVRs, no streaming, nothing – a TV show airs exactly once, and whether you missed it by an hour or by ten years, you’ll never get a chance to see it after that.

(Have mercy! Spare us from this vision of our darkest timeline!)

Mercifully, that’s not how things work, and if you missed a great show that went off the air a long time ago, you can still go back and watch – and it’ll be just as good now as it would’ve been then.

So why not treat the content you write online the same way?

If you wrote a great blog post a year ago, or recorded a webinar you’re really proud of the year before that, why not share it again now for the people who might’ve missed it?

This is where evergreen content comes in

Every time you publish evergreen content (as in, content that stays relevant over time), you get to keep it in your pocket to be shared another day. Bit by bit, you build yourself a little blogging goldmine of posts you can share again and again.

You’ll never have to start from square one, because you have posts that don’t lose their relevance – and the more you have, the bigger your stockpile, and the better off you’ll be!

But only if you actively prevent it from going to waste.

Here’s a perfect example:

Career Contessa’s website is stuffed to the gills with fantastic, evergreen content – cheat sheets, actionable advice, business philosophy, case studies, and even the occasional recipe, all adding up to multiple posts per week.

Because they publish so much, though, posts get buried quickly, and you’d have to do a lot of scrolling to make your way back to content that’s only a few months old.

Preventing that content from getting buried forever isn’t a passive act – it’s something you have to do yourself.

When a site like this one is a goldmine of content that’s as relevant to readers now as it was the day it was published, why let it stay buried, where new readers might not easily find it?

Career Contessa leverages their massive library of content to attract new readers, and to direct their newer ones to posts from the past they’ve probably missed. Take a look at this Tweet, for example:

How to stop procrastinating and start your resume. https://t.co/8nwriBXQtG

— Career Contessa (@CareerContessa) June 28, 2018

The post it’s promoting was written more than a year before they shared this Tweet, but the info in it is still perfectly relevant – so instead of allowing it to gather dust in their archives, Career Contessa shares and re-shares the link over time, so they can use it to continue driving traffic to the content they spent time creating.

(It’s also worth noting that they aren’t the only ones sharing it, either – every time you promote your evergreen content, you’re opening the door for others to share/retweet, just like several people did for the Tweet above!)

We do the same thing every day.

For example, here’s a Tweet promoting a blog post that had been published about four months earlier:

Which Team Edgar work-from-home desk space speaks to you the most? Take a virtual tour: https://t.co/ZclVLk8fC8

— MeetEdgar ???? (@MeetEdgar) June 20, 2018

Would that blog post from so long ago gotten much attention that day without us promoting it? Probably not – but because we did promote it, we got new retweets and readers for something we’d published a long time ago!

So how do you know what to share and when?

After all, the more evergreen posts you write, the bigger your stockpile becomes – so how do you keep track of everything, and make sure it all stays fresh?

Keeping track of your evergreen content (and sharing it!)

If you’re already using Edgar, you probably don’t really struggle with keeping track of your evergreen content, because Edgar allows you to categorize and save it all in an online library.

(And if you’re not already using Edgar, you can learn more about how all that works right here.)

Let’s go ahead and assume that you don’t already have a system in place, though, because otherwise the blog post would just end right here and it’d be kind of anticlimactic.

Where would you start with your back catalog of blog posts and articles?

First, identify your evergreen blog posts.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, this could be a time-consuming process – but you only have to do it once, and you’ll be glad you did when you’re suddenly racking up new readers on older posts that otherwise would’ve been going to waste!

Identify the posts that are still relevant, and can still be shared. Save them in a spreadsheet or a doc, so you can easily find them and add more evergreen posts as you publish them!

(Tip: sometimes a blog post that’s a little outdated only needs a few quick edits to become relevant and accurate again! Taking 15 minutes to tweak something is a LOT faster than writing a whole new blog post. You can learn more about that here: How to Bring Your Content Back to Life with a Quick Audit)

Then, write a few updates for each blog post you want to promote.

Even if you want to use the same status updates again and again over time on a network like Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s still a good idea to cycle through a few different versions.

Edgar has a built-in feature for creating variations on your status updates, but if you’re looking for more inspiration, check out this blog post: 5 Easy Ways to Whip Up Quick Variations On Your Tweets

(Tip: Don’t forget to take advantage of all the options different social networks have to offer, like adding @-mentions, hashtags, custom graphics, and more!)

Finally, save those updates somewhere before you share them on social.

Again, this is something you won’t have to do manually if you use Edgar – but if you don’t use Edgar, you can save your updates in a spreadsheet or a doc.

You can then copy/paste them from that doc directly into your social media, so you can share them again and again without having to write fresh updates every single time you want to promote something.

That takes care of networks that allow you to repeat your content, like Facebook and LinkedIn, but still leaves Twitter, which doesn’t allow you to post the same exact Tweet more than once. (More on that here.)

Every time you promote a blog post on Twitter, you need to write a fresh Tweet.

This is why we recommended keeping track of all your evergreen blog posts in a list – when you need to schedule some promotional Tweets, just choose a handful of blog posts from that list and crank out some updates!

(And ICYMI earlier, here’s a blog post with some tips for writing multiple updates promoting a single piece of content.)

Whatever your method, what matters most is that you’re not letting your evergreen content go to waste.

All that older content you spent time and energy creating doesn’t have to be forgotten, and the audience you’ve gained since you first promoted it will be happy to check it out and share it!