Is Your Marketing Content Evergreen or Floral?

When you are creating content for your Internet marketing it is helpful to strike a balance between solid information that will be relevant well into the future, and news that is exciting and highly relevant now, but whose value may fade over time.

Evergreen lasts, but floral stands out in front of it – if but for a short while.

2011.3.28 Evergreen Formal Garden

 

Respect Your Three Audiences

To find that balance with your content marketing you should always remember to keep three audiences in mind – you, your community, and the search engines.  

You

If you enjoy creating solid evergreen content that has a long shelf life, then that is what you should do. Personally, I enjoy blending some colorful content in with it that may be inspirational or entertaining. 

This keeps it interesting for me, and I hope for my diverse small business audiences from different industries that nonetheless share many of the same challenges and opportunities.  

Your Community

I also mix it up each week for my community, with special emphasis on those days early in the week when readership is high.

I began this week with  How to Increase the Value of a LinkedIn Group - which should  be relevant for some time to come.  Whereas, How to Save Time with Facebook HotKeys that was published yesterday is less likely to be relevant next year for a number of reasons, such as the likeliness for Facebook to change.

The Search Engines

And we all know the search engines are continuously changing how they index information.  Most recently Google placed more emphasis on social and real-time content, while also favoring high value content – which of course is more likely to be evergreen.

It seems to me Google is also suggesting it's wise to have a balance of high value content and interesting content that is relevant for its social, real-time, and location qualities.  Are we having fun yet?

It's Your Garden

You can create whatever type of content you wish in your garden.  Copyblogger has been highly successful with predominantly evergreen content.  Whereas Tim Ferris clearly creates content that is mostly in the floral category – vibrant and intense.  You won't see a lot of tutorials or how-to lists from Tim unless maybe the topic is something like bungee jumping.

The point is both Copyblogger and Tim Ferris have been successful by honoring what works for them. You should do the same.  

As a small business owner for over twenty years, I consider myself to be representative of my community – which is exactly why I willingly take a hit with Google to keep things interesting for my audience.

Evergreen is from Mars – Floral from Venus

Evergreen content is strong – its like a rock that solidly occupies a given space. If you want to be relevant to you community, a reliable strategy is creating evergreen content that delivers lasting value for the majority of your community.

Just keep in mind that looking at evergreens all day can get boring. You need more.

Flowers appeal to our feminine nature – and yes, regardless of your gender you have this quality. Creativity is feminine – and you will go crazy if you don't express yourself once in a while.

You may be surprised to learn that one of my most successful posts (measured by the speaking revenue it generated) – was a freewheeling piece that commenced with a bit of poetry – hardly high content stuff. 

Somehow it resonated with a particular small business group – and so did my three presentations that followed. There may even be a lesson here about being your authentic self and letting the community decide.

So, there you go. You can knock yourself out finding the right formula through extensive research.  Or you can just enjoy the creative process, take care of your core audience, and respect the search engines.

That's the only way I know of to find the right balance with blogging and content marketing.

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And please consider subscribing to JeffKorhan.com to learn more ways to profitably grow your small business.

Until tomorrow,  Jeff    

Photo Credit:  jmenard48

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