Earth Day Challenge: Write One ‘Evergreen’ Article
Go green (evergreen, that is!) to increase the useful life expectancy of your articles!
Writing a regular stream of fresh articles is important to your article marketing success. However, it’s important to make your articles as “evergreen” as possible with content that stays fresh, useful and informative long after you publish it. Being sensitive to how your articles will read in the coming years will help keep them from eventually becoming a stale piece of irrelevant text.
Publishers prefer evergreen content, too. Your articles might live for years on a publisher’s website. Evergreen content makes them useful to their readers longer, and they can spend less time pulling out stale content.
How to Increase the Evergreen Factor
- Remove the Time Element – Notice how the evergreen title below drops the year reference? Be sure to remove any time-specific references in the body copy, too.
- Find Long-Lasting Angles on Time-Sensitive Topics – This allows you to take even topical news items or recent events and make them virtually timeless.
- Use the One-Year Test – After you write your next article, read it again and imagine it’s one year later. Rewrite anything that would be outdated.
Stale: “Hot Summer Fashion Trends for 2010”
Evergreen: “Hot Summer Footwear Trends: Sandals vs. Flip-Flops”
Stale: Writing about this week’s top-ranked tennis players.
Evergreen: Writing about the traits and characteristics of top-ranked tennis players and how you can incorporate their success into your own game.
Stale: “5 Things You Should Know Before Dropping $499 on Apple’s Hot New iPad”
Evergreen: “5 Things You Should Know Before Investing in an iPad”
Take the Earth Day Challenge!
Unlike most of our other challenges, this one doesn’t involve writing lots and lots of articles. Nor will it win you any shwag prizes. For this challenge, simply write a fresh article, or take one you already have in the works, and revise it to make it evergreen.
Then come back and tell us about what you did by leaving a comment below.
Excellent point Leanne!
everGREEN articles deliver more GREENbacks!
I like.
:)
April 22, 2010 at 3:22 PM[Reply]