Leveraging Evergreen Content & Content Pyramids to Maximize Output

One of my content philosophies is maximizing your impact and minimizing your time cost. In other words, getting the most out of your content efforts.

You must have a long-term focus and an efficient content creation process.

Two core elements of this are Evergreen Content and Content Pyramids.

Evergreen Content

The term comes from botany. An evergreen is a plant that has foliage that remains green and functional throughout the year, even through the winter months.

Evergreen content remains relevant over a long time, as opposed to trending content, which is a hot topic today but gone tomorrow.

While it’s tempting to try and catch lightning in a bottle to create viral content, your chances for success will be low.

Instead, focus on publishing content that will remain relevant long after it goes live.

Some examples are topic-specific glossaries, how-to guides, industry thought leadership on specific topics and step-by-step processes.

Maybe you don’t get much traffic from the start, but this content will compound over time, especially if you consistently publish it.

Think of it like a high-yield content savings account. The longer you wait and the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

This is an effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, especially if you know your audience and the keywords they use.

Inversely, this can be a tactic to discover your audience and/or keywords by seeing what content drives the most traffic.

Content Pyramids

This is one of my primary frameworks for content production. While some creators may refer to this tactic as a content flywheel, I view it in a pyramid.

The idea is to increase production capacity by efficiently using content resources and extending reach.

You start with a single topic/piece of content and repurpose that same content for different mediums and channels.

The beauty is that it works in both directions.

You can start with a high-effort task such as writing a white paper, and chop that same content into different formats for different mediums and channels such as social media posts, articles, images, etc.

Or, you can start with low-effort content such as LinkedIn posts or Twitter threads, and piece them together into a long-form piece of content such as a video, podcast or guide.

One topic can be turned into 100s of pieces of content!

Repurposing content should be in every marketing strategy. This doesn’t only go for content being created to publish it.

Chances are, your company has decks, old reports or even internal text-based communication that can be repurposed into multiple forms of content.

Every person you see consistently posting content deploys some form of this tactic, myself included.

Those of you who follow me have probably noticed pieces of my newsletter are published as LinkedIn posts. And eventually, many components of my newsletters will be published as a course/guide — coming soon! Stay tuned 😉