Creating "Evergreen" Content in an Instant Gratification World

If you are a regular writer and creator of content on the Web, it seems likely you have pondered the question "How will I get the most out of my writing?" 

It makes sense-- few of us like to work hard, only to get little or no response, be that financial, or page views or feedback or comments.

What IS "Quality" in this World of 140-character tweets?

These days, much gets written and said about the importance of "quality content." 

And yet? The web primarily seems to accommodate short soundbites, tweets and vacuous memes. Seems rather contradictory, to me.

Still... the major search engines-- led by Google-- are increasingly focusing their algorithms on creating what they call a "positive experience" for web users; the focus on quality (rather than quantity or "SEO smoke and mirrors") has become very important for those who write online.

It still seems quite odd to me that so much effort gets put into so-called clickbait and fake news, rather than creating something of value... and that's what always brings me back to the "instant gratification world" we seem to live in.

Evergreen Content-- the Conventional Perspective

For me, an important aspect of quality content-- especially the kind that will keep generating traffic to your blog or web site over a long period of time-- is to keep it "evergreen."

Most of us know what "evergreen" means in the context of trees and plants, but what does it mean, in terms of web content?

The basic idea is to create something that is pretty much always useful, and always current. 

"News" items may get a lot of initial attention when they are first posted, but they quickly grow stale. Think about it: Who's going to read about a "current" event that happened several months ago? Similarly, some kinds of articles are very seasonal; they may (because of their focus) do well around Christmas or Easter or "summer" but otherwise "go to sleep" because they are not related to what the world is looking at, right now. 

In the broadest sense, good examples of "evergreen" content would be advice columns, psychology and science, "how to" tutorials, movie reviews, Philosophy, most finance and economics, personal essays and travel accounts and such.

Steemit is an Interesting "Hybrid"

A number of people have commented that Google really seems to "like" Steemit-- many posts here rank very highly in search results.

Aside from the fact that the site is advertising free-- yay for that!-- as a "collection," the content on Steemit tends to be of generally very good quality. There is actually a lot of "evergreen" content here.

The things that's slightly odd about "writing for the long term" here on Steemit is that the "shelf life" of most posts-- at least from a rewards perspective-- is just seven days, which is pretty much the opposite of evergreen. 

The fact that so much good stuff is still created here suggests to me that a lot of contributors really care about both the overall community's well-being and representing themselves well. That makes sense to me, too... even if I'm only going to be rewarded for what these words do for the next seven days... I know they are going to be "out there" for as long as the Steemit blockchain exists... and I'm going to be "attached" to that.

So quality and doing our best does matter!

How about YOU? What kind of content and articles do you prefer to create? Do you have a niche (or several) you pursue, or are you more of a "whatever comes into my head" contributor? Do you consider that your work is going to be on the Steemit blockchain pretty much forever, before putting it out there? Please leave comment-- share your experiences-- start the conversation!

(As per usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise mentioned. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)