I spend years writing ‘news’ story blog posts, with new exhibitions and openings in the city I was living in. I was struggling to keep readers up, so I wrote more and more – up to 5 posts a day.

Now, this isn’t the way it should be, and unfortunately, I learned this the hard way.

Now, many years later, I know that writing 3 blog posts a month is also okay.

I have more readers and I’m keeping them up, if not increase them month after month.

If you’re having a hard time keeping your blog stats consistent and stable I have a secret to share with you. One month you really go for it with 50 blog posts and a lot of visitors, the next you publish two posts and see your visitor number drop.

You focus on growing your following and visitors, but it just doesn’t work out. You’re publishing a lot of blog posts, but all you hear is crickets…

It shouldn’t be like this.

The secret? Writing evergreen content.

How to write a blog post that people love to read (and still makes money and attracts traffic years later!)

It’s very important that you create the right kind of blog posts: posts that will be interesting in the long term and that isn’t seasonal. They’re called ‘evergreen blog posts.

So what is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is considered lasting and ‘not dated’.

This doesn’t mean, just because it’s online, it’s still accessible 5 years later. It means it has the potential to be still interesting to read 5 years later. This way, you still build up traffic long after its publication.

So what I was doing, publishing up to 5 blog posts a day, writing news stories, wasn’t evergreen. So I had to build up traffic week after week by writing a lot of posts.

That’s not the way to do it.

So stop writing news articles like “tomorrow the new season of Game of Thrones begins, here’s what to expect” because that post would only be relevant for a day. A few more examples: seasonal posts like ‘Christmas trends for this year’ or latest trends blog posts like ‘summer dresses I love’.

Ideally, you’d want to write posts that will remain its value over the long-term.

To give you an idea of posts that ARE evergreen posts, here are a few ideas:

-lists like ‘top 20 thriller movies of all time’

-how to ‘do x’

-review posts like ‘a review of Disney world with 4 kids’

-top tips to ‘remove stains from clothing’

I write mostly about blogging and travel tips on my blog that will be interesting for a long time. When creating blog posts, keep the evergreen aspect always in the back of your head, as not every ‘review or tip’ article is automatically evergreen.

I sometimes did make a mistake of writing about something like ‘SEO tips for 2015’ but because that’s so dated soon, especially with something like SEO, I decided to only focus on evergreen content (unless I really want to passionately write about something occasionally of course). I’ve seen a huge spike in traffic since changing to evergreen content AND funnily enough, my most popular post to date is written and published in 2015. Even though I did keep the post up to date and removed any broken links etc., it’s funny because those posts get TONS of traffic every month while I published it so many years ago.

If you’re creative, it’s a challenge to be the first of something and come up with that piece of content that people want right now. But doing so, you’re often making the mistake of creating a post that’s only interesting now.

If you feel like you’re not coming up with creative ideas because every evergreen post is already written 100 times, try to add extra value to the post.

The most important thing you should focus on when writing an evergreen blog post is that every blog post should have a clear takeaway and add something to your reader’s life, so it should be useful in some way – depending on your niche.

If you’re not sure how you can incorporate something useful in your posts, think of it like this: When you’re writing a personal story about your life, write it in a transformational way. Where did you start? How did you go from A to B. How can the reader do the same?

An example: whenever I write a travel post about a trip I did – something that’s really personal –, I try to include addresses to the cafes I visited, I try to add links to flights etc. This way, I solve a problem they have: how often did you see someone comment on a post or photo something like: where did you get that? Where’s this? Well, there you go.

Once you have a topic in mind that solves a problem, do a keyword search to see how often people search for similar posts, so you can get started with SEO.

Especially if you’re just a small blogger, you want to get traffic from search engines because you’re still growing an audience.

I use a chrome plugin called ‘Keywords Everywhere’ that shows you exactly the number of monthly searches in Google. They also offer keyword suggestions.

Now, once you’ve your topic, type in your idea in Google and Keywords Everywhere shows you how often the words are searched for.

Then, there are two strategies you can follow: pick the long tail keyword that doesn’t have a lot of competition or the one that gets a lot of searches.

Once you’ve picked your keyword, add it to the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress as your focus word. Try to add the keywords several times to the blog post too. Don’t forget to add it to the image name too, before uploading it to WordPress (this will be your alt tag name as well).

Lastly, you can check the success rate of your article’s headline by using  CoSchedule’s free headline analyzer.

Now, here’s a little assignment you can do now: try to ‘rewrite’ your top 5 most read articles by making the post evergreen, by updating the SEO with the Yoast SEO app and popular keywords using Keywords Everywhere and by changing the headline if you’ve found a better one. Don’t change the URL of the article, or people will see an error page when they follow old links.

Now I hear you. You’re not making any money yet with increasing your traffic. Although most bloggers think that’s what it takes, it is not.

The last thing I want you to have in order before you start monetizing your blog to turn in into a business is the training you need. 

I have created a video training series to help you build a profitable blog. I have included all the knowledge I think you need to get started, so make sure you sign-up now!

You might also like to read:

• The Value Of Practical Skills
• A new chapter.. what’s on your list?
• What has the biggest impact on your traffic quality?
• Do you really understand search engine optimization or are you lacking vital knowledge?
• 6 Blog mistakes that are keeping you from making money