There are many advantages to keeping your blog current. After all, when people are searching for industry-related news, they don’t want to know what happened four months ago. They want to be reading fresh, current material that will make a difference today. That up-to-the moment content is a great way to earn a lot of page hits in a short span of time. It demonstrates that your organisation is current and can be trusted as an expert on what is happening within the industry on any given day. With social media, it is easy to share those pieces the moment that they are created and, with some effort, they will be picked up, shared, and discussed rapidly.
However, real time content should not be the entirety of your copywriting strategy. It is difficult and demanding to stay on top of industry news at all times. When your strategy depends wholly on doing so, one slip up can cause a blemish on your ‘expert’ reputation. After all, a person happening on a blog that is discussing real time news, but that hasn’t been updated in over a week, isn’t going to stick around for very long.
On the other hand, evergreen material is that which holds long-term appeal, continues to be meaningful months- or even years after it is written. When this content is unique and insightful, it will continue to drive traffic to your pages for a long time to come. The great part about evergreen content is that you write it today and it holds its value, whereas even the most beautifully written real-time posts will fizzle out within a week. While social media and up-to-the-moment blog posts have a close relationship, evergreen content will make your social media efforts easier over the long term, because they can be repeatedly linked to, highlighting various parts of the text to attract different audiences each time.
Not every piece has to be evergreen in nature. The key to successful content creation is to have a mix of up-to-date pieces and good-throughout-the-year posts. If you are doing so effectively, you will continue to pull a steady stream of visitors to your website, which is where the sales are made.