Keeping your blog stocked with great evergreen content will ensure that you have a steady stream of traffic generating content year round - even during those slow periods that all bloggers inevitably experience.
What is Evergreen Content?
Simply put, evergreen content is content that's always relevant to your readers. It's content that will always do well in an organic google search because it's always useful and current - no matter when it was written.
Think timeless when it comes to writing evergreen posts. Choose topics that won't change much over time. For example, restaurant reviews and city guides can quickly go out of date - unless you're continuously updating them or revisiting. Tech posts or blogging resources can change very rapidly - especially if you are talking about plug-ins or software.
Recipes can be a great source of evergreen content (and yay! Most of us have those in large quantities!) and they're easy to recycle on social media and they're very shareable by readers. Writing a recipe for an unusual ingredient can make for great search engine results!
But even recipes go through trends. Think of specific diets - it wasn't that long ago that everyone was on the Atkins or South Beach Diet trends. If you promote a specific type of diet, where do you think it will be in two years?
Evergreen Content Ideas for Food Bloggers
Coming up with ideas for evergreen content doesn't have to be hard but it does mean thinking a little differently. As Aimee from Simple Bites said at last year's FBC Conference, "provide your readers with insanely useful content.". In a nutshell that's the trick! Here are some ideas that are worth trying.
Solid, Simple Recipes
We surveyed some of our members to find out what their most consistent traffic generators have been over the course of at least the last 18 month. Here's a sampling of some of their recipe posts that have done consistently well every month, sometimes for years: Easy Barbecues Ribs, Homemade Salsa, Classic English Baked Beans, Homemade Spaghetti Sauce, Mexican Rice and Bean Casserole and Vietnamese Chicken Meatballs.
If you look at what they all have in common, they're classic family recipes that everyone wants to try and make at home. They're relatively easy to make, use pantry staple ingredients, and they have short, straightforward titles that will do well in a recipe search.
One thing to remember when you create post titles is to ask yourself what your reader will search for. It's unlikely they will search for "heirloom tomato spaghetti sauce with massaged basil and ground anchovies recipe" but very likely they will search for "homemade spaghetti sauce recipe".
Kitchen Tutorials and How To's
Another great way to create evergreen content is to post timeless tutorials and "how to" posts. These fall into the "insanely useful" category - things like how to can soup, or how to make authentic German apple strudel are a couple of examples. Our most evergreen post on FBC is "How To Ice a Cupcake With a Classic Swirl". It's a very specific tutorial that's straight forward and is useful. But the possibilities are endless:
- posts on knife skills
- how to do simple cooking, baking, grilling or kitchen techniques like poaching an egg, slicing a mango, icing a cake...
- non-seasonal entertaining how-to's like baby showers, wedding showers, first birthday party ideas, which could be extrapolated for many milestone birthdays - sweet sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, forty, sixty-five, etc
- canning and jamming tutorials
Resource Posts
Resource posts differ from tutorials in that they are more tip based rather than how-to based. They could be things like 15 Things Every (new) Chef Should Have in Their Kitchen or our second most evergreen post on FBC, 7 Tips To Instantly Make Your Blog More Reader Friendly.
Here are other suggestions for resource posts:
- tips on the types of bakeware or cookware to use
- quick and easy kitchen hacks that make life easier
- tips on storing different types of food
- kitchen organization posts (pantry organizing tips, fridge organizing tips etc)
Don't Be Afraid To Go A Little Outside the Box
Don't be afraid to write about other things besides recipes or kitchen tips if they fit with your interests and your reader's interests. For instance, one FBC member's most evergreen post is Birthday Gift Ideas for a Three Year Old Girl. Another wrote an extremely popular post on a Love/Hate Relationship: Kids in Restaurants. While neither is necessarily "food" related they are both topics that hit a chord with their readers.
On my own personal blog where I often write about my struggles (and triumphs) with food photography as well as recipes, two of my most evergreen posts are Food Photogoraphy Props on a Budget and Blueberries; A Basic Food Photography Post Processing Tuorial. No recipes or kitchen tips in sight but my readers love them and they do very well in search results because, as we all know, food photography is a topic people are always looking for info on!
Promote That Evergreen Content
The beauty with evergreen content is you can promote it any time because it's always relevant. Going on vacation? Schedule some Facebook or twitter updates with your evergreen posts. Pop links to them in your blog's sidebar. Include them in your About page as examples of some of your most popular content. Here are more great tips for maximizing old content that can help!
And finally, another great thing about "insanely useful" content is, other people tend to pick it up and share it, whether it's with their readers, on pinterest or other social media platforms on in resource guides or weekly link posts. And that helps keep it relevant to new readers and keeps it performing well in search results!
Do you have some great examples of evergreen content on your blog? Share them with us in the comments!
Evergreen Content Ideas for Food Bloggers was written by FBC co-founder and editor, Melissa Hartfiel. Melissa also owns her own web and graphic design studio, Fine Lime Designs and is the author of the blog Eyes Bigger Than My Stomach where she writes about food, photography and her creative life. She's the owner of two restless feet and a goofy yellow lab, SamTheDog. She drinks a lot of tea, eats a moderate amount of chocolate, and watches too many cheesy British mystery shows.
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Tonnes of great tips here! I actually find it really reassuring because so much of my food content isn’t complicated or too fancy. Sometimes I worry that I should be more fancy but I do enjoy posting easy and manageable recipes that my readers can relate to! P.S. thank you for the shout out!
Great post! Thanks for the helpful links.
What a great fact filled post. I didn’t know they were called Evergreen posts. Definitely adding some to my blog. Thanks Melissa
Kim
Some insanely useful content in this post, for sure! Thanks for sharing!
I started using a new app called Edgarapp which is great for evergreen content. You fill your library and it works like Buffer or Hootsuite but sends and resends your content on a continous loop until you remove that content. You set up a schedule and you can pause it if you like. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and love it.
I’ve heard good things about Edgar just recently. It keeps popping up in conversations and articles I’ve been reading. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks Lesley!
If you try it, let me know. I’d love to hear your feedback Melissa. It’s not inexpensive for an individual blogger but so far I’m seeing a lot of actions/feedback from using it.