As a content writer, I write a lot of articles for newsletters and blogs. Most are what’s called “evergreen content”: Timeless articles that will most likely be just as true and relevant two years from now (or possibly even five or 10 years from now) as they are today. Although sometimes it’s nice to write timely articles based on what’s happening in the market or world right now, for most businesses it’s really not necessary most of the time.

Why write evergreen content instead of time-sensitive content?

Here are some of the top benefits of the evergreen content approach:

Years of traction

Well-written evergreen articles on topics of interest to your target audience can help bring people to your website and improve your site’s SEO for years to come. For example, one of the most popular articles in my newsletter archive, which I have now reposted here in my new blog, is an article that I wrote in 2008. Apparently how to deliver bad news to a client is a topic that never goes out of style!

One of my clients, an estate planning attorney, has over seven years’ worth of articles available on her website. She can do this because most of her topics are about estate planning basics, such as “what is probate” and “what you need to know about administering a trust.”

Ease of implementation

If you make your weekly blog a weekly project, chances are as soon as your business gets busy you won’t be able to keep up. With evergreen topics you can write a bunch of articles when business is slow, and then put the program on auto-pilot. One of my clients who has a monthly newsletter actually has me write an entire year’s worth of articles at once. They love getting the whole project done during their slowest time of the year.

High level of flexibility

What happens if you’ve got six months’ worth of articles written and an important, time-sensitive topic comes up? You simply write the time-sensitive post, and push everything else back one slot on the time schedule. No problem!

Ability to repurpose

Creating high-quality original content is an investment. Finding ways to increase the return on this investment just makes good business sense. Because it’s timeless, evergreen content lends itself to repurposing, recycling and reusing. Content that’s tied into last week’s news cycle does not.