Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Evergreen Entries: How they can help your Blog?

Yesterday, I wrote about evergreen entries and if you have read that entry then you must know that by evergreen entries I meant that kind of topics that are always fresh and you can always read and write about them. On other words, they never lose relevance and they are not time based. I also wrote that these kinds of entries are popular among many bloggers for different reasons. In this entry, I am going to talk about the main reasons of the popularity and the good sides.

Before anything, let us talk about the problems of evergreen entries. The first problem you have to face is that you have to give a lot of time to write them and sometimes, it may take ten or fifteen hours or even more than that to write a really quality entry. In Blogging, most of the time, we can not sell out writing and in stead we have to depend on getting tragic and page views. So, spending an entire day sometimes is not economically feasible for many of the bloggers.

Especially if you live in a Western country and you have to earn a lot of money just to have a middle class life style then it can become a problem to give so many hours. The second problem is that they do not bring traffic in a very short time. In fact, you have to be very patient with evergreen entries. It takes a lot of time and some people really can not afford to have this patience. Well, I do not blame them because I am also like them in some ways and like others I want, a lot of traffic in a short time but after years of experience in Blogging I have realized that Blogging simply does not work that way.
Now, I am going to talk about how evergreen entries can help your blog and your blogging career. The first thing that can happen when you focus on writing quality evergreen entries is that they will help you to make you famous. They are very easy to bring a brand name for your blog and for you as an expert blogger. Here, I like to talk about the example of Problogger that Darren Rowse who had many blogs in the past. I remember that he had a number of blogs on different topics like digital camera review, printers, camera phone review etc. However, these days I find him focusing on two or three blogs: Problogger and Digital Photography School. These two blogs consists of mainly quality entries and because of his effort for quality, the Problogger have more than one hundred thousand Feedburner subscribers. This is quite amazing. Another shining example is Steve Pavlina.
Evergreen entries are always helpful in getting links from other blogs and websites. When you are blogging, this is a very important factor in everyway. If others link your entries then you always get some traffic but more than that your blogs become more powerful in search engines. Especially Google gives a lot of value to backlinks. In the past, I have noticed that when I wrote evergreen entries, I got links from very respectable websites and blogs. This is very helpful if you are a new blogger. When you are a new blogger then it is very difficult to get links from others. I have also noticed that if you write quality article then some bloggers and websites will happily link to you and even if you may not know about it unless you search in Google.
Evergreen entries are also attractive for social book marking sites like Digg, Reddit, Fark. I remember that once, one of my blog entries received 40,000 page views in just 24 hours when it hit the front page of Fark. Some people even get one hundred thousand page views in a day if they can make into the home page of Digg and get enough votes. When you write a good entry then its possibility of getting featured in a popular book marking site only increases.
Many people think that evergreen entries will not increase your traffic. I agree with them that these entries will not boost your traffic all of a sudden and you have to be very patient. I have already said about this matter that this is one of the draw backs of evergreen entries. However, it is not true that there will be no benefit as far as getting traffic is concerned.
In fact, when you write a long entry and quality entry which is time less it will get traffic from many key words. Sometimes you will get from key words that you even could not imagine. It happens to me and others bloggers all the time.
These types of entries are always good for getting more comments and some people would like to discuss about it. One of the entries written by my co-blogger Biplob Kishore Deb generated more than 120 comments and many of there were very annoyed with him because of his selection of animation movies. Many of them did not agree with his view and they were not shy to let their views be known.
When you are blogging then perhaps one of the dreams that you have in your heart is to get more and more comments. Evergreen entries can help you to get more comments and started discussion in your blog.
Again I like to come back to the point about traffic. Evergreen entries will help you to get regular traffic on some entries. I could successfully implement this matter in one of my blogs Techtainment in which we wrote some evergreen entries and they still bring traffic for us and although these days we do not update regularly or we don’t give so much important to it. Still, we get everyday more than 1200 page views. This is quite a good traffic if an old blog brings regularly without much effort.
In conclusion, I like to say that if you are a blogger and if you want to become successful in this field then you should always consider writing some evergreen entries on a regular basis. 

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