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Go Green – Evergreen, that is! You can greatly increase the life expectancy of your online content by remembering to write in a “timeless” manner.

Writing a regular stream of fresh articles is critical to your article marketing (or blogging) success. However, it’s also important to make your articles as “evergreen” as possible, with content that stays fresh and useful long after you publish it. Being sensitive to how your articles could be read in the upcoming years will help keep them from eventually becoming stale, irrelevant pieces of text.

Most publishers that you are trying to attract with your articles prefer evergreen content as well, for a very clear reason. Evergreen content makes your articles (or postings) more useful to their readers for a longer period, and they can spend less of their own time pulling out stale content. So if done correctly, your articles might live on for years and years on a publisher’s website.

So How to Increase Your Evergreen Factor?

Remove the Time Element – Notice how the evergreen title below drops the year reference? Be sure to remove any time-specific references in the body copy, too.

Stale: “Hot Summer Fashion Trends in 2010”
Evergreen: “Hot Summer Footwear Trends: Flip-Flops vs. Sandals”

Find Long-Lasting Angles on Time-Sensitive Topics – This allows you to take even topical news items or recent events and make them virtually timeless.

Stale: Writing about this week’s top-ranked golfers in the world.
Evergreen: Writing about the characteristics and traits of top-ranked golfers, and how you can incorporate some of their success into your own game.

Use the One-Year Test – After you write your next article, read it again and imagine it’s one year later. Is your article still relevant? You should rewrite anything that would be outdated.

Stale: “10 Things You Need to Know Before Investing $499 on Apple’s Hot New iPad”
Evergreen: “10 Things You Should Know Before Purchasing an iPad”

The concept of evergreen content can of course be in mind when you begin writing any fresh, new article, and you can also apply the concept when you older content you have previously created and re-work it to become “evergreen”!