Five reasons why evergreen content boosts reader revenues
1. How evergreens deliver constant audience growth
With SEO services like searchmetrics.com your editorial teams will be able to predict longterm search engine traffic patterns. This is were your evergreen growth strategy starts. Choose any given topic, go to searchmetrics.com, build a set of keywords, search for related keywords, combinations and abbreviations. Understand where the competition already ranks, on what months users search more often for these keywords and whether universal search (photos, videos, shopping) might be useful, too. Then build an editorial schedule based on the keywords that have the lowest competition, the highest constant traffic, and start scheduling one longform evergreen post per week (longform is 3,000+ words). Each of these evergreens needs to be updated every 90 to 180 days with new paragraphs or photos or other embedded elements like infographics that add both keywords and shareable items to the post.
2. Creating the perfect evergreen social media schedule
Once a new evergreen post has been published, start building a social media calendar. Share every evergreen at least once every 45 days across all your social media channels. Sharing means: posting the link with relevant keywords, taking excerpts from the text for longer social posts, sharing a photo or related video, connecting with influencers that are likely to share your content, or simply leveraging your editorial team’s personal accounts (if they agree to this strategy) to spread the content even further. With this 45-day routine and the 90/180-day update schedule you already have the two most critical items of your evergreen strategy in place. Now you’ll benefit from the constant search engine traffic while adding social media audiences to the mix. At many of your 40 websites this strategy has led to more time spent on each post, a deeper overall engagement (readers tend to consume more content per visit), and better conversions to our newsletters.
3. Converting evergreen readers to newsletters
E-mail addresses are the real gold of any evergreen strategy. Those readers that have been converted to newsletters tend to be your most loyal customers and will buy more products (in many cases 50 per cent to 100 per cent more on average) than the rest of your audience. That is why every evergreen post needs to have at least three conversion elements: a floater or welcome popup that shows up after three seconds, an embedded box within the post (at roughly 50 per cent of the page length) and a large unit at the end of the text. Each element will promote your free newsletter.
4. Convert social media audiences to newsletters
When you begin to share your evergreen posts across social media you’ll see that there will be social audiences that engage with your content but don’t visit your website. They might share or discuss or like your posts. These are relevant and valuable engagements. At or our digital brands this audience share is approx. Twenty per cent to 30 per cent of all social channels. Those readers are not lost, you can convert them to newsletters, too. Use your social media evergreen schedule to add conversion posts to the content mix. Such posts focus on explaining the many benefits of your free newsletters. Vary the style and language by channel, spread them throughout the week.
5. Turning newsletters into revenue rockets
Once your newsletter audiences grow, start to offer them exclusive products or paid subscriptions. We typically convert approx. Five per cent of new email addresses to paid customers after 12 months. We promote different paid products with our newsletters, in most cases some kind of subscription package, then webinars or smaller events, and our B2C brands sell actual ecommerce products. Use 50 per cent of your website house ad units to promote your newsletter, don’t waste your energy to convert website readers to paid. Most likely you’ll not succeed. We have seen that our newsletter audiences convert to paid up to 500 per cent more often than any given website visitor.
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