Last Updated on August 6, 2019
The other day I wrote what you might call an evergreen post, something I’ve made it a point to do as often as I can. You should consider doing the same thing.
Just a few days ago, I wrote up an evergreen post on the subject of faith, something I generally blog about on Fridays. I wrote the post on Wednesday and the post I intended to run last Friday wasn’t quite complete.
The temptation, naturally, was to go ahead and schedule the new post I’d just finished for the next day.
But I didn’t.
In fact, I didn’t schedule the post at all.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy with it or that I felt it wasn’t ready to publish. If I needed to, I could have posted it today or any other day.
But I decided not to publish it for a very good reason.
The beauty of an evergreen post
Let’s face it: all of us, no matter how long we blog, will suffer from an episode of Writer’s Block. It happens. It affects bloggers who’ve been blogging for three months and those like me who’ve been at it for 14 years.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t create a post that is fully “ready.” You crash together content to try to make a deadline, and as soon as you click “Publish,” you regret it.
An evergreen post is the perfect solution for that kind of day.
It’s is a post that can run tomorrow, a month from now or even a year from now and still be useful. The majority of my grammar and blogging posts are evergreen in that they are applicable for a long time. Other posts are about specific events or news stories that are more useful around the time the events being discussed happen. Those so called “topical” posts or “hot topic” posts are ones that may do well for a short period of time, but then are generally forgotten.
That faith post I wrote the other day is being held for a “rainy day.” When I need it, I’ll use it. It’ll apply then just as well as it would have applied last Friday. But I know the next time I can’t write a compelling faith post, I can always fall back on that one.
That one post gives me a little breathing room. It kills the deadline pressure I sometimes feel when I get behind on my writing schedule. It even gives me a chance to step away from the blog altogether in those moments describe with the phrase, “Life happens.”
Life does happen.
Take the evergreen post challenge.
This week, try writing an evergreen post for your blog. Look at your blog’s topic and think about a post you could run one month from today. Write it and then keep it as a draft, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
As you continue posting to your blog week after week, try to write a second post that can be on standby.
You’ll be amazed how easy it gets to be to have a post ready to go when you need it. And you’ll be grateful when you realize that on one of those days when Writer’s Block strikes, you have a post waiting. Even better, your readers won’t know you ever had a problem.
I challenge you to get in the habit.
It can really make your blog better.
