Ice bucket challenge.

Beans on Weetabix.

Is this dress black & blue or gold & white?

The Colin the caterpillar debate.

The laughing Chewbacca lady.

Remember those?

They were fads, trends, viral moments - all things that were forgotten about after a couple of weeks. But at the time, there were hundreds of posts about them.

Those posts are pretty much useless now. They were relevant at the time, but they wouldn’t really interest anyone today. We’ve moved on.

But evergreen content is different. It can be shared over and over.

Think of it like your favourite pair of jeans - reliable, versatile and something you can get a lot of wear out of.

In the simplest terms, evergreen content is content based around topics that will remain relevant for a long time.

For example, I made this video back in 2021, and the content is still relevant. And in it, we talk about how evergreen content can continue generating leads years after you’ve made it.

If you only ever talk about what’s topical right now, you constantly have to come up with new content. But if you choose topics that are timeless (or at least have some degree of longevity), you can reuse them for years.

And that doesn’t just apply to value-adding content such as tips or guides. I have sales posts that I’ve shared multiple times over.

In fact, a week or so before writing this article, I reshared a social media post I’d originally written five years earlier, and it landed me a new client. Someone who had been following me for years on LinkedIn saw it and got in touch. He told me in his message that he liked my posts, but that one in particular had struck a chord.

And that’s why I’m a huge fan of evergreen content. If you put time and effort into creating good-quality posts, they can keep generating engagement, enquiries and sales for years to come.

So if time and money are limited when it comes to your marketing, don’t waste those limited resources on disposable content. Spend your time creating stuff that can be shared multiple times. It’s a far better investment.

Disposable content has a place, and I’m not for one minute saying you should never talk about anything topical.

In fact, back in 2018 when I published my first book, A-Z of Blogging, I dedicated a whole chapter to ‘news ’, and this is one of the things I wrote:

The term newsjacking isn’t as mainstream as many other marketing terms, but the practice of it is still very much alive.

And if there is something happening right now that is relevant to your industry, then absolutely share a post about it or make a quick video. Just be aware that it might not be topical for very long, so don’t invest huge amounts of time or money in it.

While it’s a great idea to have sales posts that can be used over and over (like the one I mentioned earlier), there will be times when evergreen posts aren’t possible.

For example, if you are launching something new or running a one-time-only offer, then you might end up with posts that can’t be reused.

But that doesn’t mean you should get rid of them once you’ve used them. Well-written posts can be recycled. Sometimes it might be as simple as changing dates or prices in a post so you can reuse it. Sometimes you might be able to salvage one or two great sentences from a sales post to use elsewhere.

But the more marketing content and sales copy you have that can be reused, recycled or repurposed, the better. You can significantly cut down the amount of time you spend on your marketing if you have a bank of reusable content.

Of course, you should still keep adding new content to the mix to keep it fresh. But it’s much easier to come up with a few new pieces of content each month than it is having to come up with new stuff every day. And the quality will be better too.

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