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!

Rules and Categories Front and Center

From the front page, you can go directly to the About, Rules, and Categories pages, which will put the information you want to know right there for the clicking. Learn about the history of the Awards, and new rules and categories for this year (by the way, we will be asking for input on categories soon!).

Connect With Us Online

On every page are links to our Facebook and Twitter profiles. Coming soon, we will have an RSS feed of all the Black Weblog Award winners blogs! You can keep up with updates from all the winners from 2005 to now with just one click!

Spiffy New Contact Form

It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t give you a little something jazzy — enter our contact form. Just click the “Contact Us” link in the navigation and voilá! Just don’t send us any nominations through the contact form — they just get trashed anyway.

Revamped E-mail Newsletter

Many of you who voted last year also opted into our e-mail newsletter. Our new newsletter will debut in March and will be sent out every two weeks, including latest news about the Awards, our winners, and our partners! If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter already, now is the perfect time. Click here to sign up!

That’s about all for now; be on the lookout for our newsletter and for information about new categories for this year’s Awards!

You can also catch us online at Twitter and Facebook (we have a fan page and a group) for more information or to talk about the Awards.

Here are a few of the changes with this new site:

- Better integrated blog: The blog has always been available, but it’s been tucked off in the navigation. And if we’re the Black Weblog Awards, why not go ahead and put our blog front and center? The Black Weblog Awards blog is now better integrated on the front page of the site so you can easily check out what’s going on with the Awards as well as other news. We plan to have guest authors from time to time from some of the leading voices in the Black blogosphere.

- New nominating/voting system: We finally decided to lift that “you can’t nominate yourself” restriction from the rules. Blog owners can now nominate themselves in any of our categories through our new process. They are given a unique nomination link they can use to get their readers to vote for them in their nominated categories up until July 24. Then, we’ll take the top five nominated blogs in each category and those will be the finalists. Beginning August 1, you’ll be able to vote for finalists in those categories, and finalist voting will wrap up on August 31. (Yep, you get the whole month to vote for the finalists.) Winners will be announced on September 4.

As we keep building and growing out the Black Weblog Awards, we’ll keep you informed of what’s going on via the blog, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, you can check out the other project we’re involved with which will prove to be a great success — the “*Blogging While Brown Conference*”:http://www.bloggingwhilebrown.com.

For those of you who are involved in our Google Group, continue to give us your suggestions for future involvement. Thanks!