Key Assets: Blog Posts with Long Lifespans vs. Carnival Games

Tweet

Are you creating your own valuable assets?  Are you making sure that they create value for you?

My results keep reminding me of the same thing that I don't think I really "got" until I actually SAW those results.

Evergreens vs. Carnival Games: One is exciting, but the other lasts forever. What type of blog posts are you writing?

One trick that many marketers learn is to create blog posts, articles, or videos that piggyback a hot button current event topic.  I've done it a few times, and it makes sense.  You go where traffic is going, and you get in their way to lure them to come to your site, much those doggone carnival games.  (We went for the rides, but somehow we get distracted when we see those games.)  Yes, we're trying to be those carnival games when we do this.  It's sleazy marketing, and it's smart business.



However, there is another downside to this short-term hot button method.  That work we did (a blog post, an article, a press release, a video, etc.) remains REALLY good...until it's no longer any good.

Once that topic passes, people do not have much incentive to click on your distraction, because they aren't coming your way for you to distract them.

Creating Long Term Assets: The Way to Work Smarter not Harder

So while those hot button topic blog posts might be good once in a while, one of our main goals as marketers is to find ways to create interested customers WITHOUT having to keep working hard.

How do we make long term assets?

We pick evergreen topics, meaning that we find topics that people will find interesting, even next month or even possibly next year.

• Tips for Doing Things More Efficiently or Effectively
• How To Posts, explaining how to do things for beginners
• Patterns You've Noticed
• about human behavior
• about product or industry cycles
• about marketing approaches
• Predictions (even when they're outdated, you can still reference them later)
• Warnings, outlining oft-occurring pitfalls
• Reviews
• about products or services
• about events
• about books
• about movies

There might be more than that, but can you see where you can use these posts over and over?  They are evergreen, because they basically never die.  They never have those full leaves (like those alluring hot button topics), but they are never barren, either.

What types of web marketing assets do you (rightly) recycle?

Like this post?  Other recent posts are

• Networking at Marketing Events (Student Edition)
• Beginning my experiment with Hootsuite
• Use Twitter to Get Recommendations and Testimonials
• Marketing Idea: 3 Tips from a Passing Traveler
• A Marketing Idea for Thanksgiving
• 1 Overrated Email Marketing Method
• Your Blog Posts: How you might be wasting your time!

To visit The Ultimate Analyst company website click HERE.

Tweet