Evergreen Franchise Content i.e. Our Most Popular Blog Post

We covered the concept of SoLoMo earlier, so I guess you can consider this another entry in the “internet buzzwords and how they apply to franchising” section of the resource center. (We should probably invent that!)

Anyway, today we’re looking at evergreen content. Here’s a good video that coversthe idea:

(And in an ironic turn of events, the video was published in 2011, so it is in fact evergreen.)

So basically, the definition of evergreen is content that will be relevant to your franchise’s audience irrespective of when they reach it. This is, of course, in contrast to news or topical content that only has relevance for your audience in a strict time period e.g. press releases, promotions, etc.

The benefits of evergreen content are numerous, but I think it all comes down to the idea that it attracts eyeballs into perpetuity rather than losing its relevance. An evergreen blog post is the prototypical “set it and forget” user acquisition vehicle.

So the question turns to how to determine which topics will be evergreen.

The basic idea here is thinking about providing utility to a reader by answering a question.

The ultimate example of this in our industry is someone who’d answer a question as simple as “What is franchising?” And…lo and behold, if you were to Google that question, you’d be met with a litany of evergreen answers.

The number one result from google is a Franchising.com article found here. I, obviously, don’t know how many people visit that page regularly, but I’m going to guess it’s thousands of people a day. And the best part is that Franchising.com doesn’t have to do anything!

Alrighty then. Let’s look at one of the ways that us here at FranchiseHelp take advantage of the evergreen content concept.

If you were to look at visits to our blog over the entire course of 2014 (1/1 – 10/23), you’d see that a single blog post has more than 2x the visitors of the second most visited and nearly 10% of all blog post visits.

And even better, the traffic is pretty awesomely distributed over the course of the entire year. (Hence, the evergreen nature.) Here’s a screenshot of the visitors over the course of the year:

So what is it? Check it out here.

Its title: "How Much Money Can My Franchise Make?"

Makes sense, right?

Wanna chat more about evergreen content for your franchise, let us know.