I've heard tell of a place in the western U.S. where there is a grove of trees deep in the forest and miles from civilization that is filled with creepy dolls and worn out stuffed animals. You won't see this place advertised and it's extremely hard to find if you've never been there. Yet people make the trek into the wilderness just to see this grove of trees. Why are the trees filled with stuffed toys and cast away dolls? No one knows for sure.
Personally I've seen trees filled with shoes. Perhaps it starts with just one pair and grows from there. The benefit to shoes is if you tie them together by the shoestrings, you can fling a pair quite high into the air, thus eventually covering nearly the entire tree with old shoes. Stuffed toys and dollars don't weigh as much, so you've to place those by hand, filling the lower branches and leaving the higher reaches to those with climbing ability or ladders.
Then there's the bra tree south of Las Vegas, Nevada. Somehow is seems appropriate to have a bra tree outside of Vegas because contrary to their slogan, you know that not everything that happens in Vegas really stays in Vegas. And again, people trek from all over to see this tree of bras that someone told them about.
Which brings us to our topic – evergreen content. People visit these trees in the heat of summer and blistery cold of winter, last year, this year and next year. And that's exactly what you want people to do with your evergreen content, as well. The problem, however, is that evergreen content tends to be dry. Just like a description of a tree, it's content that stands the test of time but won't be attracting much in the way of Tweets, Shares, Likes and so forth. No one gets excited about an ordinary grove of trees in Oregon because there are trees everywhere – but they do get excited if those trees are filled with eerie stuffed animals and dolls.
So here's how to make your evergreen content so good, people will go out of their way to visit it and tell others about it:
1. Give your posts personality. What makes the trees with dolls, bras and shoes stand out? They are different. They're unique. And above all they have personality. Inject your own personality into your writing to breathe life into it. You might not be able to fill it with shoes and bras, but you can find unique angles and ways of presenting your info that makes it highly interesting and worthy of sharing.
2. Write with your customer in mind. In fact, write as though you are speaking directly to your customer, who happens to also be a good friend of yours. Don't write like a textbook – write like an email between friends.
3. Inject fun into your writing where ever it's appropriate. A little humor goes a long way to keeping your content fresh and memorable.
4. Illustrate with stories whenever possible. People love sharing stories with others almost as much as they love hearing or reading them.
5. Update your content. Dolls fall apart, bras and shoes fade. But because new dolls, bras and shoes are continually being placed in the trees, people keep coming. Your evergreen content works the same way. Go back every six months and update your content where ever it needs it so that it's still up to date and completely relevant to all the new changes that might have happened in the last few months. Not only will readers appreciate this, so will the search engines. Remember, Google loves fresh content, but that doesn't mean it has to be NEW content. Updating existing content can help you just as much in your rankings as writing entirely new posts and articles, and it's a lot easier to do.
6. Keep track of your content. You might create an inventory of all of your articles and blog posts. This will help you to stay organized, it will reveal the gaps in your content that you need to fill, and it will show you which content likely needs updating.
7. Do use dates. A common trick in blogging is to not display the date your content was posted. This way an article that's several years old might be mistaken as being new – which frankly could be a bad thing for you. First, if you're not using dates then some visitors will wonder how old all of your content is and whether any of it is up to date. Second, someone reading a 4 year old article on SEO that hasn't been updated might think you don't know what you're talking about, since there have been so many changes since then.
Instead of omitting dates, use the date of your last update. If you wrote an article a year ago but you've just gone through it and brought it completely up to date, there's no reason not to put today's date on it. All of the backlinks to that article will remain in place, and your readers will know that your content is current.
8. Do the unexpected. No one expects bras in trees – hence people flock to see it. Surprise your audience and they will tell others to view your content, regardless of when it was written.