For a successful affiliate marketing strategy, you need to develop content with high search rankings and a consistent flow of organic traffic. You can optimize your strategy by keeping every piece relevant with an evergreen content writing technique.
The trick behind creating evergreen content is maintaining the reader’s interest without the crutch of using what’s popular at the moment. By writing with the long-term in mind, you’ll increase the quality of your content and get more results with less work.
In this article, we’ll list the essentials for creating evergreen content to give you a good sense of what to look for and how to start writing like an affiliate marketing professional:
- Researching the topic
- Picking the angle
- Language use
- SEO and link building
- Maintaining consistent traffic
What is Evergreen Content?
Like most things, the concept of being evergreen comes from nature. Evergreen plants maintain their leaves throughout the year, regardless of season. The same principle applies to writing – evergreen content is not time-sensitive.
The soul of creating successful blogs, articles, or media posts is by publishing consistently and writing with a confident and unique voice. Still, the only way to get traffic is if your topic is relevant.
Creating evergreen content relies on an evergreen topic:
Evergreen topic – a subject that stays relevant and receives searches without a significantly decreasing public interest, e.g., “how to start a blog”, or “avoiding copyright claims”.
Evergreen content – a text about an evergreen topic that doesn’t go out of date over time e.g., “tips for writing a blog”, “what are the three elements of copyright law”.
Evergreen topics retain consistent search results throughout the year, and while some spikes might occur in certain months, organic traffic remains reliable. There are a couple of aspects that make writing evergreen content useful and practical for your affiliate marketing strategy:
Continued interest:
Evergreen content is always relevant to the public and generates consistent organic traffic. Case studies, product reviews, and guides are always sought out and rarely go out of date.
If you publish a trendy blog on recent political elections or new product releases, it will give you an initial boost in traffic. Still, once public interest has shifted, it can decrease almost completely.
When your only reliable traffic comes from that initial boost, you can experience a repetitive flatline in your growth and lose on the investment of months of publication work.
Higher returns with lower effort:
Evergreen content lasts longer and produces better results. Puff pieces, tabloids, and click-bait articles can generate an initial boost in traffic, but once interest disappears, the article is as good as dead. Search engines can track and devalue your ranking if users click once and don’t return.
Evergreen publications will eventually tally up more traffic. You can produce fewer new pieces due to the passive flow of visitors from old ones. Add the more periodic updates you’ll need to edit, and your effort massively decreases.
Perceived authority:
People seek out evergreen topics for a reason. They want to depend on the information and develop personal knowledge, skills, or insights.
A lot of marketing is subject to ad blocks or is generally ignored, but guides, tutorials, and reviews have a perceived authority that is often exempt from spam filters.
What Topics are Evergreen?
Before you start writing, you’ll need to analyze whether your topic has staying power. Evergreen content falls into many categories, but they all share similar characteristics.
Evergreen topics can be guides and rankings:
- How-to guides
- Buying guides
- Checklists
- Top tips
- Listicles
Primary and secondary source research:
- Interviews
- Research studies
- Pillar pages
- Case studies
- Testimonials
Useful and interactive pages:
- Tools and calculators
- Maps and schematics
- Health and wellness challenges
Remember that these are just some of the possible outlines – every industry relies on its own effective use of content. Evergreen content can exist both in written, video, and audio formats.
Content that is not evergreen still has its place in media, but it needs more maintenance and has a dwindling interest over time. Let’s take a look at the types of topics that aren’t evergreen to see what they have in common:
Media trends:
These articles receive a lot of interest quickly and focus on topics like product announcements or widespread intrigue.
While new media trends get a lot of clicks, they have a quick expiration date, come with competition, and need consistent updates in response to new and emerging information.
Statistics that change over time:
Facts and figures are necessary for quality marketing, but five-year-old statistics won’t hold up to this year’s readers. New demographic shifts, prices, and sales fluctuations have a limited window of relevance.
New data becomes more accessible every decade, and information can become outdated even a year after publishing.
News articles:
Creating consistent news articles requires a full team of dedicated researchers and analysts that manage consistent journalism.
The way news is framed is always subject to change in response to audience reactions or existing and developing opinions.
Seasonal content:
As the name suggests, seasonal content is relevant only at specific parts of the year.
Seasonal content has some long-lasting potential if you apply a yearly formula, but once traffic and SEO rankings dwindle, it’s unlikely they’ll produce the same results.
These examples establish a clear and common problem for many affiliate marketing bloggers. Older pieces will net you zero traffic without the manpower to update years of content after the initial interest has waned. You can run the risk of non-stop content creation only to keep your results leveled.
5 Tips for Creating Evergreen Content
Pinpointing whether a topic is evergreen can get you started, but your content needs a planned substance for an optimized evergreen writing technique. These five tips will outline a repeatable process that you can use to maintain a consistent affiliate marketing content strategy.
1. Researching the Topic
Finding a successful topic starts with a great subject and the keyword research to back it up. Generating idea after idea can get tiring, but it doesn’t have to be as extensive as you might thing.
Remember, when looking for evergreen content, try to stay away from trendy topics and focus on the potential of consistent traffic.
Keyword research:
You can rely on a slew of keyword research tools to get you started. For a cursory look into keyword timelines, you can use Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs, which all have dedicated insights on our affiliate marketing tools list.
You can start with a free trial option or pay a small sum for a sample package to experiment with different search queries. Professional and mid-level business tools can rack up a monthly sum, so make sure they are essential before making a subscription.
Good SEO and analytics tools stand out in their variety of metrics. It’s not enough to see if a keyword has a high search volume – evergreen content needs to have consistent traffic over time. You can look for average monthly search metrics to gauge the potential of your keyword.
Keyword analysis:
The popularity of a keyword depends on how users search for topics that interest them. Most comparison articles usually go with tried and true formulas – “top x products”, “best products for this year”, etc., while guides start out with “how to’s”, “x steps to”, etc.
Knowing how audiences think should establish a good framework for evergreen topic research. To practice this, type in different keywords that all work around the same subject, and look at the top-ranking suggestions.
If some websites appear more often than others, they are bound to have a large keyword density to many potential queries. Alternatively, some websites might have multiple external links from other content pieces, increasing their authority.
Remember to consider the element of competition. If a keyword has many well-established articles or blogs, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to top it without developing a trusted brand first.
2. Picking the Angle
The most crucial question you have to answer when writing your piece is what the audience expects to gain from your content. If it’s a guide, you have to take them through each step and possible setbacks. If it’s a listicle, you have to do enough research to gauge quality and popularity in the long term.
Defining your audience:
When we go into language and the actual substance of your text, evergreen content doesn’t have to appeal to every demographic, but it pays to know if your writing style is better for certain segments of the public.
You might already know who your audience is, and that’s great. Industries often share their demographic distribution in case studies and research articles if you’re curious about factual percentages.
Doing your own demographic research, such as joining social media groups and analyzing public testimonials, can help you recognize audience interests, but take a step back to make sure you’re not using popular trends but general traits and characteristics.
Writing with authority:
An unsure and subjective article won’t stand the test of time and will easily be overcome by marketers who use your work to extend their quality. Writing with authority doesn’t mean being confident; it means knowing the necessary information for the text to be helpful.
Your angle needs to be future-proof. Instead of using references to strengthen your point, empathize with the audience and develop a quorum that maintains their interest and adds levity to the subject.
Avoid references to recent events, media trends, anecdotes, and allusions if they don’t come from general observations and are saturated with imagery that might grow stale over time.
3. Use of Language
Many users rely on newer dates to make sure their information is as new as it can be. Unfortunately, articles with years in the title will often rank higher in search results. While evergreen content maintains longevity, it usually still needs some updates and minor tweaks.
Nevertheless, you should usually avoid language with a short lifespan as much as possible: dates, time, and references to global events. Their relevance only goes as far as conditioning users that the information is up-to-date, which is already the goal when writing evergreen content itself.
Language also accounts for readability. Keep your paragraphs short and add visual queues – images and bullet points – where they’re helpful. This will ease the reader’s attention, so they’re more likely to stick to your page.
For content writing, don’t shy away from using tools like Grammarly to limit unnecessary words and get a quick list of edits for clarity.
4. SEO and Link-building
One of the more technical aspects of creating evergreen content is managing good SEO and link-building to increase your organic click-through rate and promote your work’s visibility in search engine rankings.
You can keep your eye on one of the multiple site and keyword tracker tools to see how your website ranks in real-time, using metrics for return rates, keyword difficulty, and site clicks, but there are a few precursory techniques to ensure you have a good head start.
Use link-building to other reliable sources to extend your subject, creating cursory links of information that establish a network of related articles. Don’t forget to add backlinks to your other complementary pieces to increase the overall growth rate of past and present blogs and articles.
Add tags and optimize your metadata – description, title, and summary – to have manageable character lengths with the most crucial information visible up-front.
5. Maintaining Consistent Traffic
Finally, you’ll have to track your work once it’s finished. You might need to make some changes, but with extra hindsight, a good learning opportunity will ensure your further development.
Look at your stats, screenshots, images, links, and dates (if you have any) to ensure no information is missing, has changed over time, or is no longer necessary.
By the time you’ve published, other content creators might have already made their own, similar content, which you can use to gauge whether any improvements need to be made.
Of course, one of the more significant focus points remains – promotion. Even affiliate marketing has practical avenues for advertising, including B2B media sites like LinkedIn and your own professional career networks.
Affiliate Marketing with Printify
For potential Printify affiliates, we can’t help but add an overview of how to monetize your affiliate marketing content with additional examples and tips on writing blogs and articles.
The Printify affiliate program has a 5% commission with zero sign-up costs for 12 months. We encourage effective marketers looking for an endless ceiling of improvement and earning potential. As long as you are interested in marketing or print on demand, you have a story we want to hear.
Agencies, freelancers, and up-start marketing beginners can start their own affiliate work with no wait time. You can log in to your existing Printify profile or sign up for our affiliate program directly.
Be sure to follow up on our tips for your future success by sending an email to our Printify Affiliate Manager for any help – affiliates@printify.com
Conclusions
Evergreen content is one of the more critical ways your writing can truly grow at producing successful marketing results in any industry and field.
Not only do evergreen content pieces make a steady stream of organic traffic throughout the year, but they also require less work as long as you have a ready step-by-step plan:
- Research your topic, and analyze keyword search rankings
- Pick an angle that frames your topic objectively and with authority
- Stick to language that doesn’t go out of date
- Practice link-building and search engine site optimization
- Update your work once it’s published in response to market changes
Check out and be sure to join the Printify affiliate program to start your evergreen content machine right away.
Make It Happen Today!
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