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Evergreen Content: What It Is, Why It's Important, and How to Make It Work for You

You’ve probably heard the term “evergreen content” and have a general sense of what it is. The name alone is plenty suggestive: pieces that are timeless, consistently fresh, and reliably relevant. But how do you create evergreen content and what makes it so valuable for Amazon Associates?

If you guessed we’re about to answer all these questions and more, you clearly know the deal around here. Let’s dig in!

What It Is

HubSpot defines evergreen content as “content [that] stays useful season to season, year to year … It can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it's still valuable to the reader.” The three qualities that nearly all evergreen pieces have in common are:

1. Timeless: might need occasional updates, but the bulk of the piece remains applicable over time
2. Valuable and high-quality: ultra-useful to the audience and well-executed
3. Canonical: as in definitive — in-depth, detailed coverage of the topic.

Evergreen pieces are the well-done guides, explainers, how-tos, FAQs, etc. of the internet. They’re the really meaty, exceptionally informative and useful resources that users come back to again and again. And all of that makes them invaluable for generating traffic.

Why It's Important

From an affiliate standpoint, many creators find evergreen articles to be their main drivers of referral traffic and sales – some also refer to it as commerce content. A high-quality piece of evergreen content generates traffic, builds authority for your website, generates new leads, link clicks and shares, and gives your website a serious SEO boost-- all of which leads to even more traffic, leads and link clicks!

What does this mean for you as an Associate? Earnings, of course! Evergreen articles are pretty much the "set it and forget it" of internet marketing. While you're busy building and promoting new content, your evergreen articles will continue racking up traffic and clicks, and establishing your website as a trusted authority for readers to turn to.

How to Create It

1. Identify a Topic
In terms of finding a topic, producing evergreen content is fundamentally the result of a two-step process:

- Identify the resources your industry needs but doesn’t have
- Identify which of those resources you feel well-equipped to create — and then do it!

How do you know what your industry needs? Think about the always-hot topics that regularly come up in your community. What do people always seem to be interested in or have questions about, year after year? It’s okay if these feel like big, broad topics — you’re not doing the everyday blog post here. You’re creating heavy duty content; you can and should tackle complex concepts.

2. Take a Deep Dive
Once you know your topic, decide on the format that will best help you convey your topic. Will it be an informative guide? An instructional how-to? An original piece of research? (Here are more ideas if you need them.) From there, try to approach the subject with full explanations and straightforward language. This should be an "everything you need to know"-style piece, so be sure to cover it all!

3. Optimize It for Earnings
Evergreen pieces are awesome affiliate opportunities, so don't drop the ball on adding links to your posts. Go through your post and look for good places to add product recommendations, banners, and native shopping ads. Once your article starts generating traffic, you'll already be set up to capitalize on it.

If you're part of the Influencer program, this is also a great time to make use of your Amazon storefront and Idea List URLs. You can update your storefront and Idea Lists anytime, so this makes it easy to update the products you're linking to without having to go back and edit your post or your links.

How to Promote It

Evergreen pieces, in all their extraordinary value, deserve extra promotional love. Some ideas to consider:

- Highlight them on your site: create a Resources page, Start Here page, Top Posts page, or whatever makes sense for your brand, and list a round up of links to your evergreen articles. Depending on the topic, you could even make an evergreen article a website page itself.
- Republish evergreen posts with significant updates: as mentioned above
- Build social media campaigns around them: these posts are packed with good-to-know tidbits that are excellent for sharing out on social (with a link to the full piece).

When it comes to SEO for evergreen content, you don’t need to do anything radically different than what you’d do for any other content, but if you tend to slack on SEO in general, do not slack on these posts. Remember, this is all about setting yourself up for increased traffic, so every little bit helps.

How to Audit and Update It

Schedule time to periodically audit your evergreen articles — twice a year is probably enough. HubSpot recommends starting by reviewing your site traffic from since you last audited (or the past year, if this is your first time doing it), and identify your top-performing pieces (by views, and by leads too if that’s applicable to you). Eliminate any that aren’t on evergreen topics, and review them one by one. You’re assessing:

- The content itself: as in the examples, references, and major points of the piece. Does everything still apply? Has anything new come up that you should add? Freshen it up.
- The links in the piece: Are they all still leading to the right places? Are there newer things that might be better to link to?
- Your affiliate links: Do they need an update? Are the products still relevant?

Figure out what needs a refresh, and crank through them. If you end up doing quite a bit of updating to a post, you might want to republish and repromote it.

Evergreen pieces may take a more time and effort to create than some of your other content, but the potential payoff in terms of traffic and earnings for successful evergreen articles could be substantial. With this guide, you have all the info you need to create, promote, and monetize evergreen articles — and don't worry, we’ll be sure to keep it updated.
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