Increase Your Writing Success and Passive Income By Producing High Quality Evergreen Content

Evergreen content helps maintain and increase your audience and earnings

You’ve probably heard the statistic that more than two million blog posts go live every day. And that’s not even considering the other online content such website material, social media posts, podcasts, reviews, e-classes, e-books and promotional email. Making your online writing stand out today is harder than ever, even for established writers. For new folks, hoping to make a career out of writing, it’s a nightmare.

When writers discover that it generally takes years of writing great content to even begin to gain a regular following, they often become impatient. When we hear this kind of statement most of us think that while it may apply to other writers, it doesn’t apply to us.

So right off the bat, most new writers think they’ll be able to succeed in a matter of months, not years. Some even expect to experience a degree of success within only a month or too. When this doesn’t happen they become impatient and try to figure out tricks and shortcuts. When success still doesn’t happen, they become discouraged and many give up.

There are different ways of increasing the likelihood of seeing success from your writing. One of the best ways is by producing evergreen content.

What is Evergreen Content?

The idea of evergreen content has been around for several years and has become a buzz word in the industry. Evergreen content covers topics that remain relevant over time. It doesn’t become outdated and real evergreen content doesn’t need to be updated in later months or years. Examples or this type of content would be articles that provide “Tips” and “How-to” posts that retain their value, unlike news stories which are timely.

Signal vs. Noise

The term “signal vs. noise” is another one that has caught on with content writers regarding getting readers attention. The signal is your content that you hope readers will notice and engage with. The noise is everything else out there that can distract from your content.

One of the big problems with signal vs. noise is that, with so much content being produced, there’s a sense of urgency to publish as much as you possibly can. The intention her would be brute-forcing your content’s way through the sheer volume of noise that’s around every day. This can cause you to put out content that is mediocre, inaccurately believing that quantity matters over quality.

Other Pressures Writers Experience

Freelance writing may have started as an enjoyable, creative enterprise, but it has become a high pressure world. There are two main problems that bloggers and other freelance content writers who write for themselves tend to have. These are the pressure to produce new content frequently, and the problem with content overload and the need to compete with the huge amount of other content posted daily.

If you frequent writing forums where freelance writers gather, you will hear a refrain about how hard it is to keep coming up with new ideas to write about day in and day out. This is one of the most common reasons that new writers burn out and stop pursuing a writing career.

Trying to maintain a regular publishing schedule of high quality, novel posts every day can seem like an impossibility after a while. To come up with new topics, writers often scan the news for high profile stories to regurgitate, while despairing when they never seem to get a leg up on the competition.

Then there’s the problem of content overload. No matter what you write about, someone else has already been publishing content on that subject for some time. This means that they have cornered a certain percentage of the audience interested in that area. Attempting to woo these readers away and keep them interested in your work requires not just good content, but incredible content.

There has never been such intense competition for readers’ attention even with large audiences. The sheer number of posts published each day tends to water down the collection of content with only the very best, most engaging and most useful articles rising to the top while the rest are mostly ignored.

These two problems end up compounding one another. As competition continues to grow you will feel the need to produce better content more frequently. The outcome of this across the industry is the figurative arms race that we already see happening. Success has become about who can produce the highest quality content most frequently.

Plus, as competition intensifies, your audience’s expectations become higher. In order to maintain their engagement you must consistently deliver not just good content, but absolutely exceptional content.

How Passive Income Fits In

Passive income is earnings that come from an enterprise that has little or no ongoing effort involved. For writers, this means that some proportion of their writing portfolio consistently earns money month after month without the need to update and rewrite it. The problems that career writers experience with the unrelenting need to create new content to earn a living can only be realistically resolved with some form of passive income.

A lot of what is described online as passive income for writers isn’t really passive, because it takes continued activity to ensure that it provides earnings monthly. If you write content that is monetized, however, you can turn some or all of it into a passive income stream. The most effective way of doing this is by generating evergreen content.

Establishing a Passive Income Stream with Evergreen Content

In order to not become overwhelmed by the need to constantly produce articles that are just short term earners, you need to vary the kind of content you create and publish. That being said, no matter what type of articles you write, they have to be high quality or even those that are evergreen won’t result in successful outcomes.

While you may hear writers claim that they produce 100 percent evergreen content, this is highly unlikely. I have yet to come across a writer that actually does this.

Realistically, producing evergreen content takes much more time and effort than other types of articles. Until you have enough high quality evergreen articles so that you are earning enough to make the work worth it, writing this type of content can sometimes feel even more stressful than the need to churn out new articles daily.

Types of Content You Can Write for Different Types of Earnings

Most writers have difficulty focusing exclusively on writing evergreen content. It’s not enough for the content to be about timeless topics. This type of writing is also lengthier, edited and mistake free, formally structured, easy to understand without being overly simplistic and all substance without fluff. It also includes visuals. So while it’s important to have some evergreen material, the amount in a portfolio depends on each writer’s goals and writing preferences.

The four basic type of content that generally make up a writer’s portfolio are:

Evergreen Content

Truly evergreen content doesn’t need to be updated or rewritten since it’s timeless. This type of content produces passive income. These stories may be personal or impersonal. If you want to write evergreen content you can:

• Tell a personal story that many people can relate to
• Create a Success Case study — Explain something that many people would like to be able to do and describe how you were successful at it
• Create a What Went Wrong Case Study — Explain something many people have trouble with and describe how you did also. The key to this is explaining what you’d do differently. This is also provides the opportunity for a follow up article that tells how you tried other things and which was or were successful.
• Create “How to guides” for beginners
• Show readers how to accomplish long term goals
• Teach readers how to choose the best product

Low Effort Content

This type of content can be easily updated to keep it timely. The easiest form of these articles are statistics related. They can be about issues that are simple to update with the new numbers about or you can make them even more interesting by using both the old and new data to discuss trends.

For example, articles that report new statistics on health, crime or drug, alcohol and tobacco use can easily be updated each year, and readers may engage to see the changes you report. However, since reporting agencies often have better and longer term summaries of statistics changes, finding an interesting way to interpret these changes from your own point of view can often result in more reader engagement.

Timely Content

These stories are about trending topics that may be relevant for a period of time but not forever. They are often specific to individuals or changing circumstances, for example, how immigration is being handled in the current administration or Brexit.

Breaking Stories

These are what I refer to as flash content. These stories might get you views, maybe even a lot of them, for a day or two but after that they become old news and you aren’t likely to gain much else from them.

Additional Points

While evergreen content can help you realize your writing goals by increasing overall readership and earnings, you also have to find the best mix of writing styles for you. Deciding to write only evergreen content may result in good outcomes but if you don’t enjoy writing it, eventually your writing will fall off and you may see your numbers suffering as much as when you write only more transient content. It’s about finding what makes you feel satisfied as a writer while also meeting your more practical needs.

It’s also important to remember that just producing content won’t result in success without marketing and promotion activities, no matter how good the writing is or how evergreen the topic. There’s no kicking back by the pool with a pina-colada in one hand and the newest bestseller in the other while the money rolls in from writing you did years before and haven’t done anything further since.

Those days are past. While your writing may be evergreen, there’s no such thing as evergreen promotion. It has to be done, ideally, at least some every day to maintain your content’s visibility.

Take Away

While all of your writing does not have the be evergreen, this type of content can help you maintain a reliable audience base and steady passive income. The percentage of content you produce that is evergreen vs. other types depends on your goals.

The decision about the type of content you write should be made intentionally and not based solely on how easy it is to produce. It may seem more difficult to create enough evergreen content in the beginning making it appear not worth the effort, but over time once you build up a solid collection of high quality evergreen articles, you will see the benefits.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen, One1Infinity & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol.

If you enjoyed reading this article, you might also like these:

You can also find links to all of the articles, essays, fiction and poetry I publish on Medium here. Thanks for reading!