If you have been blogging for a while like we have here at SEOe, you probably have a stock pile of content that your readers may find interesting and valuable.
Saying your content is “old” however can be a bit misleading…if your blog has tips, insights and other general observations about your niche, readers will find it useful long after you initially write it. Content like this can be referred to as “evergreen” content.
Our friends over at HubSpot recently conducted an experiment with their evergreen content – using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to get the word out about the rich content that’s on their blog, not just what visitors see on the main page.
At SEOe, we publish 3 feature posts/articles each week so it’s likely visitors and subscribers have not read every one of them. But considering the structure of our blog and what we write about, something from 6 months ago is likely relevant today.
Continue reading to see how over the course of two months, HubSpot promoted carefully selected “evergreen” blog posts, podcasts and other things to promote on social media sites. Their goal was to generate additional traffic without spending time creating new content.
1. Content Selection
To narrow down what they chose to promote, the team found prior articles that received the most comments, traffic and links. Timely content like breaking news events was excluded as were articles they felt were no longer relevant.
2. Promotion
Over the course of two months, the team promoted 57 items on Facebook and Twitter. Considering differences between the two, the team promoted 3 content items per workday on Twitter and 1 per workday on Facebook.
Another factor they considered was positioning the content…which was important since they didn’t want to interfere with promoting their new stuff. And they didn’t want to make people think they were clicking on something old so they promoted items in a conversational tone rather than listing the title like they do for new articles.
Here’s an example of one of their “tweets,” which they posed as a question:
Stuck in a lead generation rut? Learn some new tips & tricks in our comprehensive Lead Gen Marketing Hub! http://bit.ly/LeadGenHub
To see the effectiveness of this experiment, the HubSpot team tracked the change in social media traffic to the blog. They also created unique “bit.ly” links to each of the content items and tracked clicks to those. On average, evergreen content received 198 clicks along with more traffic from Facebook/Twitter to their main blog.
Here’s one easy way to drive more traffic to your blog that doesn’t require much effort to research and implement. If you have a blog that serves as a “knowledge” resource for your readers, consider particular posts that are still relevant and promote them through Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets.