This week on DevEducate, Jason Alba joins me to discuss evergreen content – what it is, what it's good for, how it applies to different formats, and why it's not really the panacea you'd expect it to be.

Talking Points

• What is evergreen content?
• How evergreen impacts content maintenance
• Keeping track of content over time
• How issues in content can affect your brand unexpectedly
• What kinds of content make sense to be evergreen

<Blockquotes>

Lightly edited for context

“Evergreen content is something that you can put out and hopefully it stays relevant for a long period of time.” – Jason

“I don't think I could have 37 courses if my content wasn't evergreen. There comes a point where you have so many courses that you're updating every year that you can't put out new content.” – Jason

“It was very frustrating to create something that I knew that my very smart audience would come back and be like, this isn't relevant anymore.“ – Jason

“I wrote this book and by the time it came out I was flipping through it and I was like, oh, this is outdated. Like, there's things that need to change in here.” – Jason

“If you are talking about an economy of scale here, like yes, your team can churn out 3000 articles on all these different topics, but now you're also creating 3000 articles worth of debt that you're gonna need to pay.” – Kamran

“Let's say I reference a company and then the CEO does something horrific. And now everybody hates the company and it looks like I've endorsed it, right?” – Jason

“Even though everything is relevant, like the how-to and the concepts and all that stuff is relevant, the video doesn't match what their current experience is on my system. And they're immediately gonna say, oh, well this isn't the same system. Do you have anything that's up to date?” – Jason

“We're all lazy. We don't wanna put in the effort to actually go find the content that you're trying to [get me to] look at.” – Kamran

“I cannot emphasize how much [scripting] made my courses magnitudes better, like multiples better, because I could spend time working on my script.” – Jason

“You could have a regular kind of a standard operating procedure where you do an audit to go through content again every so often, once a quarter or something to make sure that it's still accurate.” – Kamran

“There are certain things that people just need to know without you telling them every single step.” – Jason’s former boss

Links

• Jason’s Pluralsight Courses
• JibberJobber – Jason’s job tracker and CRM