Blogging Tips and Tricks April – June 2016
- There was a lot of discussion about "evergreen content" at this year's Blogger Day. How should I best use it? For instance, would you suggest I:
- do nothing with the old post but link to it in a new one
- do nothing with the old post but alert TPL's blog team about it in case they decide to use on social
- copy and paste it into a new post and publish it as is (assuming info still accurate, relevant)
- review and republish, with a note indicating post has been revised
There are basically two types of evergreen content: 1) content that is always relevant regardless of passing time 2) content that loses relevance if it's not updated to reflect the changing trends and technology. Some examples of evergreen content include Bill V.'s vintage postcard posts and tutorials from The Innovation Hubs Blog. The vintage postcard posts will remain timely for a long period of time so they probably won't need to be updated. However, the tutorials are different and will only stay evergreen if they are updated to include changes in technology. This is similar to a recommended reading list from a couple of years ago, which may need to be updated to reflect some of the newest and popular titles in a genre – but maybe not, if the list was about popular classic books.
All this to say is that it depends on the content of your old post and the new content that you'd like to add. But other factors such as staff time and how much new content you have to add also impacts what you do with the post. If you have the time, and enough fresh content to add to a topic you've written about before, then by all means write a new post and link to your old post. But if you're short on time and you have a timely topic that you want to write about then you may want to re-purpose an older blog post and add a bit of new content, such as this in memoriam post about Prince from April, which was updated from a 2014 blog post. You should also keep in mind that evergreen content and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand in hand so your post may occupy a valuable position in search rankings. In this case, you may want to consider updating the post and add a note letting your readers know that the post has been revised.
If you have an evergreen blog post that you'd like to add to TPL's online editorial calendar so that it gets repinned on the homepage or shared on social media in the future, please email blogs@torontopubliclibrary.ca.
- How do I edit a post after it's been published? You can edit any post by clicking to the Posts tab, then click on the title of the post you'd like to edit. This will open the post in the Compose editor, where you can make any changes. Click the Publish button to save your changes. Do not change the status of the post to Draft as it will result in a broken link for anyone who may have shared or bookmarked your post, including the library's social media promotion.
Comments