evergreen contentwriting content that lasts

minute read

Blogging is a great way to push your limits. Although it can sometimes seem like it's a laid back art (if an art at all), writing forces you to think critically about a topic, and (hopefully) that involves some further research to prove and disprove your theories and opinions. Writing is almost always a positive sum exercise. Even if you decide to keep your writing private, without publishing it anywhere, chances are by the time you're done you'll have some new information that you didn't before, and can better articulate your points.

A while back, I wrote one of the weakest pieces of writing I ever put forward. It was a loosely thrown together guide about setting up Chatbot UI to run your own LLMs, like Ollama, locally, while still keeping hold of an interface that allowed you to use the OpenAI's API when you needed it. Effectively helping you move away from an exclusive OpenAI dependence, but still keeping their models within arm's reach should they release anything groundbreaking.

At the time, it was a helpful guide—something that many were looking to do. And up until semi-recently, it was still pulling in quite a bit of organic traffic to my website too.

But, almost immediately after I published the post to my blog, OpenAI announced they were releasing a desktop app. The value of my guide plummeted. Why hack together a solution using third party tools when you can use an officially supported first party version?

There's an important lesson about creating content. The type of content you focus on is important.

A guide about setting up Chatbot UI got me a lot of traffic. But most of the traffic didn't stick. They came for the hype, got what they wanted, and never returned. And to be fair, I didn't have much else to offer those folks, either. Setting up the new hype isn't what I typically write about. And now that OpenAI has their own app, the number of reasons someone might search for the content in that article is close to zero.

Did I make the most of the surge in traffic? Absolutely not. I missed out because I wrote content that attracted users looking for guides about AI. When those users looked for other content on my blog, most of them didn't find much else they were interested in. I don't write about AI, so I should be selective about attracting users focused on AI.

That's why you need to ask yourself why you're publishing the article in the first place.

If the goal is to maximize the number of clicks in a short period of time, then riding the hype wave might work. But if your goal is for the content to continue earning new traffic over a long period of time (think months or years), then you'll want to focus on evergreen content instead.

But what is evergreen content?

It's content with a long shelf life, that doesn't go stale the way fads do. Content that doesn't lose its usefulness after a few months, weeks, or even days.

It's articles like this one, explaining what evergreen content is. (The irony of using fast moving examples like AI and Chatbot UI is not lost on me.)

So the next time you decide to dive deep into a topic and spend time sharing your insights, first consider what you aim to achieve by writing, and bear in mind how the topic will age, relative to your goals.