As you create your website, you may wonder if you are going to have to work as much for the rest of your life to bring traffic to your website. The answer depends on the type of content you are creating.
There are two major types of content that can be created for a website: Evergreen content and Ephemeral content.
Now, to make sure we are on the same page here, let me explain each type quickly. Evergreen content is content that stays relevant to your audience as time passes by, like “How to” guides.
Ephemeral content is content that has an expiration date, like the news and everything trendy, like Spinners, remember these?
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Evergreen Content VS Ephemeral content
Unless you want to keep creating new articles for your website 2-3 times per week for the rest of your life and expect monetization from it, evergreen content is the way to go to create a somewhat passive income.
Is it never totally passive since you still have to put in the work. You have to research your topics, find good keywords, create your article, put images, etc.
But once your evergreen article is published, it will bring visitors to your website for years to come and all you will have to do is to make sure to update your article when needed.
The great thing about creating evergreen content is that you don’t have to create as many articles once you have established your website’s authority and once you are getting good traffic.
What happens with ephemeral content is that you get spikes in your traffic. You need to create content on a regular basis, forever, to get that traffic coming to your website.
If blogging is your full time job and you just love creating content on whatever you like that is related to your niche, then don’t bother trying to figure out what kind of content you want to create.
The thing with ephemeral content is, if your website doesn’t have an established authority, your articles won’t rank fast enough in Google to bring you the kind of traffic you need to monetize your website.
I think creating ephemeral content is good for big websites with big teams that are working together to achieve their goal. Just think about the news websites. Even those sites have some evergreen content published on their website once in a while (or maybe everyday, I don’t really read the news).
Why? Because they know those articles will bring them a regular flow of traffic. So the key here is diversification.
You may be interested in reading my article on How to create content.
Even if you have a website on trendy things, stats or latest news in X, you want to write evergreen posts so that you know some articles will always bring traffic to your website.
Ephemeral content is good when you have a product launch and you create ads copy for social media. If you create that on your website, make sure to take the article down once the offer is available or gone so you stay relevant and you keep your credibility.
It will require more effort to keep your traffic if you get it mostly because of your buzz of the moment content.
Let’s imagine this for a moment: you have created blog A 2 years ago in which you have mostly created evergreen content, around one article per week so now you have about one hundred articles on your website.
Unless you really want to create articles when you are on vacation, let’s just imagine here that you wrote 50 posts per year, since you took 2 weeks off to relax.
Your friend has also created a blog, blog B where 98% of its articles are ephemeral content. That friend is a hockey fan and the blog is all about statistics, players and game scores.
Since that friend created the same amount of articles in the same amount of time, which blogger will have to keep working hard to keep its monthly earnings coming in?
Blogger B.
Since it could be relevant to some people to know which player scored the highest back in 2010, the vast majority of people won’t be searching for that.
You want to have something on your website that will keep attracting visitors for years to come without having you slaving around to create new content 3 times per week or more.
In Conclusion
Since most people want to create another source of income from an online business to get more money, you want to be able to profit from it and enjoy your life.
The best way to create a somewhat passive income from your blog, is to create evergreen content. Good content that will last for years to come. You will only have to update it to make sure you still rank well in Google and that you still get good traffic from it.
Creating ephemeral content should be considered when your website has established its authority. Then you can start to create both types of content.
If you want to be successful and enjoy some kind of freedom since you own a business, you want the content you have created to be working for you so you don’t have to.
Creating ephemeral content can be a great hobby for retirees who also want to earn a little bit of money online. The best way to monetize your website then would be with ads.
Always create good content. Always give value to your visitors. That will pay off, even if you are creating content with expiration dates.
Cynthia