Blogging Made Easy: Balancing Evergreen and Time-Specific Content

Khrysti Nazzaro - December 10, 2015

Ideally your blog is newsworthy and informative. After all, most people will likely read and/or subscribe to it because you are providing insights and expertise on topics that are of high importance to their daily work or lives. Developing and maintaining your blog’s content calendar can be overwhelming. With a target goal of posting 3-4 times per week and no crystal ball to predict news or time sensitive updates well in advance, how can you be expected to succeed? The key to a well-balanced blog schedule is evergreen content.

Just as the name implies, “evergreen content” is topically relevant no matter the season or time or year and regardless of what’s happening in the news. Whether you map out your blog posts one month, three months, or longer in advance you can always count on these topics to be relevant anytime you plug them into your publishing calendar.

So where should you start? Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you work forwards or backwards with your evergreen topics; for example’s sake, let’s take a backward approach.

1. Now, generate a list of evergreen topics that are always useful for your audience:
   • How to XYZ
   • Top Tips for ABC
   • Guide to 123
   • Interview with So-and-So Expert
   • List of Ideas for 567
   • Etc.
2. Starting your calendar, for the months and weeks in question, map out every time-sensitive or time-specific event or thing that’s worthy of acknowledgment to your audience given your brand’s offerings, including relevant:
   • Holidays (Mother’s Day, Administrative Professionals Day, Thanksgiving, etc.)
   • Season changes (back to school, start of summer, corporate tax season, personal tax season, etc.)
   • Awareness Campaigns (Breast Cancer Awareness, Heart Month, World Aids Day, Earth Day, etc.)
   • Company or Industry Milestones / Anniversaries (Date of founding, date of a product launch, date a new technology came online, etc.
3. Weave evergreen topics into each week around all the various time-sensitive plans. Be sure to keep a “reserve” list of evergreen topics you don’t assign specific dates to.
4. Be on the lookout for the time-sensitive events and information that you can’t plan in advance for, like:
   • A change to legislation that impacts your industry
   • World events in your region / areas of service
   • Politics or celebrity news

     Whenever such things occur, write and publish your blog posts – letting your evergreen content “carry forward” to the next empty slot, knowing that it can “go live” anytime without any disruption to your Content Marketing plans.

Blog editorial calendars are only as successful as your ability to juggle time-centric content and evergreen topics effectively. If you rely too heavily on news and don’t plan for the light news days you’ll be scrambling to write new, fresh content in a pinch. If you have a nice reserve of evergreen content to pull from – and push off to later, when needed – at any time, then you can easily navigate when there’s an abundance of news and when there’s a dry spell.