The #1 Tip for Keeping Your Blog Relevant

By Maurice | 4 comments

• evergreen content
• redesign
• timeless content

Hide the date of your entries.

OK, this tip is a bit more involved than just doing that. Keep reading to find out more.

Look at the content for your blog. Do you mostly discuss newsworthy topics of the day? Is it about celebrity shenanigans? Are you covering breaking news, the latest app or some exciting new product?

Awesome! This blog post probably isn’t for you. But keep reading – you might pick up a tip or two to help transform your trend-driven content for posterity.

For bloggers who write about things outside of the context of a particular time period, hiding (or in some cases, removing) the date from your posts can be a great way to keep your content relevant. While you may not see any spikes in traffic at first, this kind of content builds value over time as people link to it and reference it. (Of course, it’s your responsibility as the blogger to market your content to make sure this happens!)

This is an especially good tip for bloggers that discuss things people do all the time (e.g., travel, cook, read, sing, wear clothes, exercise, etc.), give tutorials, or explain concepts which might be difficult to understand.

Trend-driven content can reap great short-term benefits. You may have heard of something called the Digg effect. This is when a site is featured on Digg and voted on and visited by its large user base, eventually causing the site to shut down temporarily due to the spike in traffic. Bloggers have started to harness this effect continually by discussing celebrity content, covering current events and/or new product reviews, or producing prime numbered lists (e.g., “5 Ways to…”, “29 Types of…”, “13 Ideas for…”). Let’s look closer at two tips for producing timeless content.

Look at the Bigger Picture

Instead of giving small exact details, take a bird’s eye view of your topic and discuss it. So instead of discussing Nicki Minaj’s latest outfit, talk instead about the role of image as a reflection of women in hip-hop over time. Give your opinion, then take about 50 steps away from it.

Bend the Concept of Time

This is what we alluded to earlier when saying you should remove the date from your entries. It’s more involved than that because it’s about crafting your ideas outside of the idea of the present. Hiding or removing your date stamp from your blog entries is one way to do that. Here are some other small things you can do today:

• Change your permalinks to remove any notion of time (month, year, day). It also makes your permalinks easier to remember and type. Check it:
  • EXAMPLE: http://www.yourwebsite.com/post-name instead of http://www.yourwebsite.com/month/year/date/post-name
• Remove the calendar from your site. Some WordPress blogs suffer from this because the Calendar widget is installed by default. If you don’t update on a regular basis, a calendar only magnifies that to new readers. Ditch it.
• Group post archives by category and/or tag instead of by month and year.
• Think ahead! Chances are you’re not going to think about writing timeless content every time you sit down to blog. Take a current topic and do some research. Add a brief post excerpt in your blogging system of choice, put it draft, then let it incubate when you write it later. (For example, we have between 20-25 posts in draft here at any given time.)
• Try to remove time references from your text, such as today, yesterday, or recently. If you don’t have the date listed on your site, you can avoid this. Time is relative so long as you don’t give a date of reference.

Keep on blogging, and make sure your content isn’t left in the dust!