How Green is Your Content?

With SEO and content development it is all a game of margins.

If you come up with killer ideas or buy a site with rocking link popularity you can leverage that, knowing that if you add content it will rank better because it is part of the powerful trusted site. Another way to do well is just to create niche sites that:

• target flawed search queries; or,

• target language ignored by the legitimate players in your market; or,
• target buyers late in the buying cycle

Either way you go (big or small) an important criteria with the content you create is how well it stands the test of time.
If the content is time sensitive is there still a viable profitable business case for the content after it has aged? Is it niched down enough that there is no competition and likely won't be much competition for a long time?

Is it profitable enough to be worth updating frequently? How frequently? How are you measuring profit? Dollars that page earns? Link citations and/ or media exposure that page earns which make you and your site more authoritative? Does it have the depth necessary to gain self reinforcing links?

A cost many people fail to evaluate is the cost of keeping something current. When you write each page are you writing in a manner that will require updating? Is the content so link rich that fixing broken links will take hours a month to fix it?

Evergreen content (like an interview) is great because it keeps bringing in green without you needing to reinvest into updating the content. I don't know a lot about normatives and narratives, but if you keep your content focused and/or narrative it is much easier to keep it current than if you create content and profitable than if it needs constant updating.

Also worth noting that opportunity cost and the value of your attention are costs that should not be ignored when expanding your publishing empire. Compare your earnings on secondary channels to how well your best channels do and focus your effort based upon how much you enjoy doing something and how profitable it is.