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Inbound Internet Marketing Feed
Why Every Business Blog Needs Evergreen Content
When it comes to the different types of content you can publish on a business blog, there is a world of possibilities. But among all those variations of blog content is a very important one that often gets overlooked. That, my friend, is evergreen content, and every blog could use some. In this article, we'll dive into what evergreen content is (and isn't), why it's so important to the success of a blog, and how you can effectively leverage it for your business.
Just like the name indicates, evergreen blog content stays useful season to season, year to year with little or no need for upkeep. It can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it's still valuable to the reader. If you're wondering what makes blog content 'evergreen,' it typically encompasses the following three characteristics:
But we're talking about the web here, right? Where things change lightning fast? Depending on the speed at which your industry changes, it may be more or less difficult to create evergreen content. The important thing to remember is that, on the web, content that lasts even a year or two could be considered fairly evergreen for your particular industry.
Okay, so now you have a better sense of what makes certain blog content 'evergreen,' but you're probably still wondering what all the fuss is about. Why is evergreen content so valuable to a business? There are three main benefits that evergreen content can provide for a blog:
In other words, the reason evergreen content is so valuable is because it continues to work for you long after you publish it. That's why a blog that incorporates evergreen content into its strategy is at an advantage. If you took a news-centric approach to your content creation and only published content about breaking industry news, your blog content would become outdated and irrelevant quickly, and it wouldn't generate long-lasting traffic.
Evergreen content, on the other hand, guarantees SEO, traffic, and leads over time. And in today's marketing world where regular and consistent content creation is a marketer's job, who wouldn't appreciate the timeless benefits of content that's evergreen?
Still confused about what types of blog content you can consider evergreen? Considering the three characteristics we discussed above, here are some examples of blog content with evergreen potential:
With that in mind, here are some examples of content that wouldn't be considered evergreen:
In general, topics that don't change (or change very little) over time are a good indication they'll have evergreen potential. The ultimate question to ask yourself when trying to decide: Will people still read this and think it's interesting a year from now?
While content that is truly evergreen won't need very much maintenance over time, it's a good call to audit your evergreen content every once in a while (say, every 6 months) to look for opportunities for improvement. Because your evergreen content will continue to generate traffic and leads, you'll want it to stay as fresh as possible.
Step 1: Identify Your Evergreen Content
The first thing to do is identify your existing evergreen content. For this, you'll need to consult your blog analytics. First, sort your articles by top views. This will help to eliminate the content that isn't evergreen. To narrow your list down even further, eliminate articles in that top views category whose topics aren't evergreen (e.g. news, event-specific, etc.). Now take a look at which of your remaining posts are still generating leads for your business. You can also look at your keyword metrics to determine if any of these top posts rank highly for specific keywords you're trying to rank for. From this exercise, you should be able to come up with a list of evergreen blog content that you should audit -- and add to -- over time.
Step 2: Update Content
Your next step should be to update the content you've identified as evergreen. Have there been any recent developments on the topic that would make a great addition to the post? Do any examples or statistics (maybe you have more compelling ones now) need updating since you last visited the post? Does anything that no longer applies need to be deleted from it? Make the appropriate adjustments. The important thing to remember is that you want to update the existing post rather than create a completely new one. This is because you want to keep leveraging the SEO benefits the post has already built up, not start from scratch. If it's been a while since the post was originally published and you'd like to give it more attention than what it gets from search alone, consider republishing the post as new -- just use this tactic sparingly.
Step 3: Keep CTAs Fresh
When conducting your evergreen content audit, pay attention to each post's call-to-action (Each post does have one, right?). Is that CTA the best CTA for this particular post? If the post is already generating a lot of traffic, you want to serve people with the best possible CTA. Select your high-performing offers for the CTAs of these posts to get the most bang for that post's lead generation.
If it's been months since you updated the post, it's possible you've created a new ebook, webinar, or another relevant offer that is fresher that the CTA you used originally. Or perhaps you've just updated your CTA design since then, and you need to replace the stale one with your new design. For HubSpot customers, the CTA Module makes it very easy to update CTAs, allowing you to automatically replace an old CTA design with the new one for every blog post for which it was used.
Step 4: Make Sure Posts are Search Engine Optimized
If you're a regular and consistent content creator, chances are you probably aren't nitpicking every single blog post you publish for the best possible SEO. Search engine optimization takes time and careful consideration, so it's understandable that you might get lazy here. But when it comes to evergreen content, making these posts search engine optimized as best as possible is very valuable. If a post is already generating a high level of traffic, you'll benefit from spending the time to help it rank for some other keywords that you also want to rank for. Read through your post and identify opportunities to include these keywords and link that anchor text to the pages you want to rank for that particular keyword.
Step 5: Create New Evergreen Content
Always look for new opportunities to create evergreen content. Is there a niche topic in your industry that has been written about very little which offers an opportunity for you to create a canonical, evergreen piece of blog content? Jump on it! Evergreen content is a powerful asset for your business, and being able to create more will only add to the everlasting benefits of your blog.
Okay, so you've identified your existing evergreen content and you know how to start creating even more if it. But there are still a couple of other things you can do to maximize the benefits of your evergreen content.
Of course not all blog content you publish has to be evergreen. There are definitely benefits to having a healthy mix of both evergreen and newsworthy or timely content. Are you mixing evergreen content into your blogging strategy?
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The Pros and Cons of Form-Free Content (And Which to Choose)
There's one thing that absolutely all excellent inbound marketers have in common. Can you guess what it is?
It's that they are all remarkable content creators. That means they create and publish high quality content -- webinars, ebooks, blog posts, case studies, etc. -- and they do it on a consistent basis.
But where some inbound marketers start to diverge is in their decision to deploy that content behind a form, or keep it form-free for all the world to see with no exchange of information. There are pros and cons to each method, and inbound marketers are still discussing which method is best -- just watch this video debate between HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe and HubSpot Marketer in Residence David Meerman Scott on the subject. Let's outline the pros and cons of form-free content, and delineate when exactly it makes sense to choose one method over the other.
When your content isn't gated behind a form -- like this blog post, for example -- it is going to be consumed by more people. Why is that a good thing? Let's break down the benefits of more eyes on your content.
More site traffic, better SEO, constant social sharing? Sounds great; let's do the form-free content, right? Well if the title of this section wasn't a dead giveaway, there are some drawbacks to the form-free marketing lifestyle. Consider these reasons why gated content may be the way to go.
One takeaway marketers could walk away with from this debate is that there are simply some content assets that lend themselves better to being form-free than others. And the rationale behind determining which assets to gate and which ones to leave ungated boils down to establishing a purpose behind each content asset. When you publish something -- a blog post, a case study, a whitepaper, an ebook, a webinar, a video -- what are you hoping to achieve with it? What's the point? Let's break down how to decide whether to keep your content assets form-free.
The clearest example of a content asset that should remain form-free is blog content. Unless your end goal for blogging is something other than site traffic, more indexed content, establishing a thought leadership position, and better SEO, blog content should remain ungated. Your blog is one of the most powerful tools you have for organic search success, and putting that content behind a form is seriously compromising your website's success. That being said, you don't need to sacrifice lead generation from your blog entirely. Just be sure to add relevant calls-to-action for your form gated, lead gen content to each blog post you publish -- as well as to the top and/or sidebar of your blog (for an example, just scroll to the bottom of this post).
There may be a few instances of businesses gating some of their product or service information -- and there might be a good reason (leave it in the comments!) for that decision. But content assets centered around your product or service like data sheets, FAQs, and case studies are more examples of content that should be available for everyone to read without a form. Do you really want to hinder someone's access to information about your company's solutions? Inbound marketers almost never get to talk about themselves -- this is your chance to do it guilt free, and to someone who actually wants to hear it! Don't make it harder for interested prospects to learn why they should become a customer of yours.
So when would you use a form? If you look at the content assets most often associated with the first and last stage of the buying cycle -- 'Awareness' and 'Purchase' -- they generally seem to align with the instances in which marketers should gate their content if they're in the business of generating a consistent volume of leads.
In the 'Awareness' stage, the content assets are purely educational, and not promotional of the company's product or service. Not everyone will want to provide their information in exchange for reading an ebook or watching a webinar, but the fact is, you're providing free education. Those that are invested enough in learning more about the solutions your company helps solve are going to be willing to fill out a form to retrieve that information. And that's what helps you distinguish who is a qualified lead, and who is still in the low-commitment phase of browsing your website, reading your blog, and checking out your social media accounts to get information.
In the 'Purchase' stage of the buying cycle, there's a little less gray area. You're offering high-commitment content that frankly requires the exchange of information. It's pretty hard to give a free estimate to someone, for example, without a form being filled out. Prospects understand that, and are more often than not willing to comply.
All this being said, inbound marketers know that this isn't an exact science. We wouldn't be debating it if it was. That's because some businesses sell a product or service that is more complex than others. In the video debate on this subject, Volpe and Scott discuss Dropbox as an example of a company successfully generating customers without using gated content. Leads simply sign up for a free trial, download Dropbox, and then decide whether to purchase after the trial expires. If you have a less complex product or service like Dropbox, this approach of largely form-free content may work. For companies whose products and services require more education and explanation -- often those with a longer buying cycle -- a mix of form-free and gated content is most appropriate. Form-free content drives the traffic, and gated content converts that traffic, multiple times, so Marketing and Sales can properly nurture and prioritize those leads.
Finally, keep in mind that using forms means your content should have a reputation for being consistently remarkable. Leads will be less and less willing to part with their personal information to redeem your content assets if there's not sufficient return in content quality.
On which side of the form-free content debate do you fall? Share your reasoning in the comments!
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How to Use Internal Linking to Improve Your Website's SEO
Great content and attracting inbound links are major elements of your SEO strategy. If you’ve created an exciting blog post or ebook, you’ll naturally want to work on making sure that you are driving as much traffic to it as possible. Part of that strategy should always include internal linking, and understanding how the other pages of your website can contribute value toward your new page.
If you are working on any important campaign, it’s absolutely critical to figure out which of your already great, high-authority pages should be linking to your new page, or what ongoing efforts can continue to build link authority for your site over time. And with great internal linking, ranking for very difficult keyword phrases is made much easier as you share the authority of your other best content with your new efforts.
Remember that a search engine’s ultimate goal is to surface the very best few pages about a topic on the web. With the focus that most linkbuilders and SEO specialists have on inbound links and developing links from other sites, it is easy to overlook how internal linking is important. If you’ve heard that inbound links are like other sites voting for your content and telling search engines what your content is about, internal links are like voting for yourself and also letting the search engine know about your vote.
While it’s obviously better to have more people than just yourself voting for your content, if you don’t start by voting for yourself, the search engines will have a difficult time considering your page as one of the best on the web. Internal links are valuable not just because they are a direct signal that your content is important, but also because those links themselves pass on their own link authority.
When you consider that the link authority of each page is being shared into your website from these internal links, the value of your blog and other linked pages is more obvious to search engines. While these pages are ranking well and bringing traffic into your website on their own, there is a second layer of SEO benefit that they can bring to your website if you properly apply them to your internal linking strategy.
If there’s a page on your website that you care about a lot and that has a lot of value to you, you should be thinking about how you can explain that value to a search engine. Start by considering how a search engine understands the value of an internal link; it’s looking at how many pages on your website link to that page, and how they link to it. If every page of your website links to something, it must be important to you -- like your homepage, or your blog’s homepage. If the only links in to your blog are from your 'About Us' section and nothing from your homepage or your website’s main navigation, you have already sent a strong signal to search engines that your blog is not very strong. On the other hand, if your blog is in the main navigation on your website, Google and Bing will treat it like one of your top pages.
Here are three exercises you should go through to ensure you are effectively using the authority of your internal pages.
1) Sketch out a map of your website. Make a list of each page in your main navigation and what links are on each of those major pages. This will help you understand the links that you already have between each section of your site, and how you’ve linked it together in the past. Sometimes, laying out your whole website visually is the only way to understand what you’ve overlooked and what’s working. You might just uncover that the reason some of your best pages are ranking well is because you subconsciously did a great job building your own links into them from your other content.
2) Next, look at the topics that you frequently write about. If you’re writing regularly about something, you should have another dedicated page on your website about that topic -- like a landing page with an offer, for example. Each of those posts should be linking to that authoritative page on the subject, and it should be optimized for conversions. If your landing page has a prominent call-to-action, your effective use of internal linking will help drive more new leads through the offer.
Also consider where that page lies in your navigation, and if it’s worth linking to from your homepage or products page. Depending on your business, you might even find that linking to a specific blog post or page from your website’s main navigation might suit you well. For example, if your company often needs to explain your business to people who discover you, that would make a good blog post that deserves major promotion across your site.
3) Think about every other page that could link to your ranking page. If it is a page related to a topic you frequently blog about, make sure each of your new blog posts about that topic reference that page and link into it. You can see this in how HubSpot ranks for the term 'how to use facebook for business.'
One of the major factors behind its rank is that we regularly write about how to use Facebook for business, we have a lot of very powerful links from our blog posts about using Facebook for business, and we have at least one link in each of those entries to our Facebook for Business landing page. Those blog posts we wrote over the last five years about this topic all have great authority of their own because people have linked to them, and each of them links to our landing page to further build that value.
How have you used internal linking, or seen it used, to help a website expand their SEO footprint?
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How to Use Content to Drive Referrals and Upsell Customers
Marketers are often hyper-focused on lead generation. And rightfully so -- it's our responsibility to make sure the business has a pipeline fat with juicy, qualified leads. But when Marketing leaves upselling and driving referrals to Sales and Account Management, as it so often does, it eliminates the possibility of using the inbound content it's constantly creating to drive more revenue from its existing customer base.
Your customers are an untapped vein of new revenue. Consider these tactics to help you leverage your already cranking inbound marketing efforts to drive referrals and sell more to your existing customers.
You're already creating segmented email lists to ensure you're targeting leads correctly. But have you considered how tweaked messaging could make your content relevant to your existing customer base? Consider a piece of content designed to create build value for one of your products or services -- a case study you just finished, your latest best practices guide, or a solutions manual. Sure, you'll use it for lead generation, but what about sending it to a segment of your existing customer base? These documents can help existing customers use what they have better, or see the need for additional or more premium product or service purchases.
Current customers know your company well, presumably like you, and if they have the need, will welcome the opportunity to buy additional products or services from a brand they trust. If you haven't already, create a customer list segmented by product or service and set a schedule to start sharing this type of content with them.
Encourage your customers to meet each other on social media so they can learn how others are using your products and services. If nothing else, they will get more value out of your brand as they become a better-informed customer. But ideally they learn of other products and services you offer that they should be using.
Your Twitter lists and LinkedIn Groups can turn into referral machines, as well. If these conversations are happening on public social media accounts, other can listen in. Consider facilitating a hashtag conversation or moderating a LinkedIn group on your different products so newbies can learn from power users, and power users can learn how other products or upgrade enhancements could help them be even more successful.
If you sell more than one service or product, do some research into which folks have bought multiple things from your company. What did they buy? What do those purchases have in common? Use answers to these questions to feature other, similar products or services in the side navigation of your product pages. Let people know what problems your products solve and the value they bring through content that showcases successful use, making it easy for them to see all the pieces of the puzzle. You can use your knowledge of their past purchase history to more appropriately target your email sends, too, helping to move them through the post-purchase stage of the sales funnel that is so often ignored.
Sales managers run demos for prospects. But what if an existing customer wants a demo of another product you make, or wants to talk about needs in a new or growing part of their business? Think about running customer demos for new product releases and updates, as well as all your other products if you sell multiple items. Invite Product Managers and senior leadership onto these calls to articulate how important you think these tangential opportunities and functionalities are for your existing customers. Similar to the customer blog, use what you know about the audience to highlight why upgrades and enhanced feature sets may be especially beneficial to those on the phone. Be sure to have on-demand recordings available on a customer resource page, too, for those who can't attend these events live.
Customer blogs are ideal places to house product updates and company news. Whether you keep your PR in-house or outsource it to an agency, you can easily syphon off content from their press releases for update posts. Likewise, you can create 'Week in Review' posts in which you group all your marketing blog posts and premium content offers into one place. This type of content was relevant when your customers came onboard, and it remains so -- you just need to phrase it differently.
Communicate each new product release or service enhancement in the language of people who already know your products and services well. Explain how a new update or release enhances the functionality of another product they might own. Or show them creative ways other customers are using your product or service successfully. You can even write short tip posts in which you highlight an underused or relatively unknown product or service feature that would make their lives easier. Be sure to include calls-to-action in every post for upgrades, and encourage them to share the post via email or social media to drive referrals.
Your customers are, in a lot of way, smarter than your prospects. Using a customer blog to communicate best practices and highlight effective uses of your product or service will drive more usage among existing customers, and encourage upgrades and additional product purchases among your existing customer set.
What other ways do you use content to upsell to your current customers and drive more referrals?
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How to Master Pinterest for B2B Marketing
Let's face it. Pinterest is a slam dunk for companies who sell jewelry, fabrics, bags, and other cool "visual" items -- but it's pretty tricky for B2B. However, with the rapid growth of the Pinterest user base, many companies are seeing that referral traffic from Pinterest is lapping the traffic they're generating from Google+ and YouTube. It may be time for B2B to step into the game, take advantage of Pinterest's popularity, and use it as a new traffic and lead generator. But how can you come up with a Pinterest strategy that fits B2B? Let's take a look ...
The biggest challenge for many B2B companies that want to use Pinterest as a marketing channel is a lack of visual content. By nature, many B2B companies are selling a product or service in an industry that most likely isn't visual. The first step is to think outside the box to find images that align with your company's image, fit nicely on Pinterest, and are fun to share.
Here are some ideas of content you can post:
1. Visual Content You Already Have: For example, someone at your last company mixer must have grabbed a few photos, right? If so, create a board to showcase your company's culture, and pin those photos. Only have executive headshots? Create an "executive management" board, and include a bio for each person.
2. Strong Visuals From Your Blog Articles: Pin visuals that best highlight your written content. Don't have any yet? Start using clear, beautiful images in your blog articles with the point of pinning them to your pinboards moving forward. You should be using images in your blog articles anyway!
3. Infographics: Infographics are all the rage right now, and they are doing very well on Pinterest. Have any company or industry data that you can visualize? It'd be a hit!
4. Data Charts. Similar to the above suggestion, you can also pin simple yet compelling data charts that you can build in Excel. Whether you're highlighting industry data in a visual way or own original research, just make sure you have a clear headline in the image so people know what they're looking at!
5. Ebook and Book Covers: Have you created a whitepaper or ebook recently? Take a screenshot of the cover and add it to a board that's a collection of ebooks for people to read. If the covers of your ebooks aren't normally very visual, make a point of giving them a better design from now on to make them pin-friendly.
6. Photos of Your Customers. Promoting your happy customers and clients is a great way to get more happy customers. Encourage your customers to send you photos (or take photos of them at your next event). Create a board of their smiling faces – perhaps while using your product or service!
In the B2B world, using Pinterest as a tool solely to "enhance your brand" isn't going to cut it. When leads and customers are your bottom line, it's really important that you're driving quality traffic to your website with the goal of conversion.
To increase the likelihood of driving more traffic to your website, be sure to add a link back to the page on your website where that image lives for every pin. If you are uploading a photo instead of pinning something live on your website, choose a link that makes sense, and include that in the pin's description.
With this strategy, each link becomes a micro traffic source. Once in a while, one of your pins might be wildly successful. More often, your pins may only receive a modest number of re-pins each. However, the combined impact from each pin's clicks and re-pins will give you the biggest advantage.
For example, when reviewing two weeks of HubSpot's traffic data, we found a single pin only sent a handful of visitors to HubSpot.com. However, all pins combined sent a substantial number of visitors to HubSpot.com in that same time period. This phenomenon gives you good reason to have boards with many pins. Also consider adding more and more pins to your boards over time as you promote new visual content from your company.
Now that you're starting to send traffic to your website, it's important to make sure you are converting a percentage of that traffic into leads. There are two ways you can make sure your Pinterest traffic is converting for your business to support your lead generation efforts.
1. Include landing pages in your pins' descriptions. Brainstorm images you could pin that represent something that is normally gated behind a form, like an ebook cover perhaps. In the description of the ebook, include a link to the landing page to download it. You could also do this with slides from webinar decks or other presentations that have landing pages.
2. Add more calls-to-action (CTAs) around the visual content on your website. Sometimes it might not make sense to include a landing page link in a pin's description (for example, if you're pinning an image from a blog post). In cases like that, add more calls-to-action to your blog to increase the likelihood of conversion from there. And remember, it's always a best practice to give visitors a next step to further engage with your business on all pages of your website -- visual or not!
Just like any social network, building reach via a follower base is key to long-term sustainability for that network as a traffic and lead source. However, Pinterest functions a little differently than the typical "follow process" we know from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
For example, on Pinterest, there are two "follower options" users can take when they like a piece of content they find. A person can follow either an individual board from a Pinterest user or the user's account as a whole. What's the difference? When following a specific board, you only will be notified (via the Pinterest homepage/stream) when a user pins a new piece of content to that board. When following a user, you will be notified every time that user pins content to any of his or her boards.
Because of these differences in follow methods, it's possible for a Pinterest user's board to have more followers than the user himself! So how can you create a strategy to increase followers at both the account and board levels?
1. Commit to creating the BEST boards on a specific topic. With this vision in mind, you will add the best content to your board, as well as start imagining new content you can create that fits that board's need.
2. Be ready to promote other people's content to enhance your collection. Committing to having the best board also means being ready to promote other users' pins too. Who cares if 
you didn't make the piece of content that convinced a new user to follow you? The next time you post something that is yours, that new follower may see it and click it!
3. Like and comment on other people's pins. Sharing is caring. When someone sees you interacting with his or her content, that person might check out yours and choose to follow you, too!
4. Promote your account in your other channels. Maybe a handful of your Twitter followers are using Pinterest. Give them a chance to follow you by sharing your account via Twitter, too! One great way to do that is to connect your company Twitter account with your Pinterest account so you automatically tweet all your new pins (you can turn on this integration in your Pinterest settings). To connect with the right Twitter account, the email address you used to sign up for Pinterest will need to match the email address associated with your corporate Twitter account.
Show me the money! At the end of the day, what's going to matter most is how much traffic, leads, and customers you generate via a specific source.
As you start pinning images to Pinterest and adding more images over time, how is your traffic changing? Is there a specific image type or topic that sends more traffic than others? Use your analytics tools to understand what images work and what don't.
From there, monitor your lead conversion. As you tweak your strategy to meet your B2B needs, you may learn you need to send people to more internal pages of your website.
Through these steps, you will begin generating Pinterest reach, traffic, leads, and customers. Monitor your growth, and tweak your strategy over time! As you pin more and more content to Pinterest, your metrics should improve.
What challenges have you had for using Pinterest for B2B marketing? What has been most successful for you?
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