The 3 Types of Content You Need for a Simplified Content Strategy

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When it comes to positioning yourself as an authority in your niche, having a clear content strategy to guide you is invaluable. 

By outlining what it is you want to achieve with your content – and how – a content strategy helps you to stay focused on your goals and move towards achieving them without the extra distractions. 

It can be tempting to draw up complicated strategies that are intimidating and hard to stick to, but by breaking down what you need to include in your content strategy to only a few core components, you can start to uncover a clear starting point that simplifies the overall process. 

Let’s take content itself as the first component to look at. To help simplify your own content strategy, there are just three types of content you need to create for a simple, but effective strategy. 

1. Evergreen content 

The first (and most important) type of content in your content strategy is evergreen content. This is content that continues to serve you over time – months or even years after you’ve created it. 

Evergreen content could be a blog post that’s optimized for search, a binge-worthy podcast, or a long-form video that’s tailored to YouTube’s algorithm. The best part about evergreen content is that although it may take time to create, it forms the foundation of the next two types of content we’re going to cover in just a few moments. 

Often evergreen content is seen as content that’s “undated” – for example not referring to particular events, years, or seasons. But as the seasons shift, so does the search volume. If you write a post about summer trends in the year X, you can always revisit that post the following year, freshen it up, and reshare it. 

Don’t think that just because you’ve posted something already, you can’t use that piece of content again. It’s just the opposite! Your existing audience may need reminding and it will be fresh to those that are new to you. 

Think of your evergreen content as the spokesperson for your business or brand. Once it’s up and running, it’ll continue to promote your message in the background to the people that are searching for the value you offer. 

2. Nurture content 

Next up is nurture content. This is the content that builds stronger connections with your audience – namely through your email list.

Emails are often seen as being more personal than evergreen or visibility content as they’re sent straight into the inbox of your audience: a sacred place to be these days. 

The goal of sending emails is to spark a little jolt of serotonin into the minds of your audience. Receiving an email from you should be something they look forward to. 

In order to do this, you’ll need to show up regularly with valuable and timely content. This value comes straight from your evergreen content. 

Instead of creating more content, you can use your foundational evergreen content as the base for your nurture content. 

Just posted a valuable blog post? Let your audience know by sending them a conversational email that hints at the value you shared and has them wanting to learn more from you. 

An added tip here is to include an encouraging call to action like “hit reply” to start engaging more 1:1 with your audience. 

As the digital landscape evolves, other platforms like Discord servers or Slack channels could potentially fall under the nurture content umbrella as they encourage conversation and relationship building. 

3. Visibility content 

Visibility content is one we’re all too familiar with (and often overwhelmed by) – it’s social media content. 

Whatever social media platform you choose to focus on, the content you post there needs to make you more visible to your potential audience. 

But that doesn’t mean creating hundreds of posts a day to try and keep up with the demands of unruly algorithms, it means working smarter and utilizing what you’ve already created. 

Visibility content can be seen as the way to amplify your evergreen and nurture content. We can’t always rely on search engine optimization to do all the heavy lifting for us, we need to put ourselves out there manually too. 

Can you see the relationship begin to reveal itself? 

Evergreen content → nurture content → visibility content 

Although evergreen content is your spokesperson, and nurture content is your client relationship manager, visibility content is your outgoing brand ambassador. 

4. Putting them together

Now that we’ve broken down what each type of content is, we can start to look at how they work together to simplify your content strategy. 

A content strategy can have many different pieces, although each piece may vary depending on your goals. Content, of course, is the unifying factor regardless of your goals. 

To simplify this part of your strategy, the relationship between evergreen content, nurture content, and visibility content becomes essential. 

Evergreen content is the pillar or core content piece that forms the foundation of your content workflow. By creating a killer piece of evergreen content, you’ve pretty much done the work for the nurture and visibility content that follows. This workflow, in itself, can craft many pieces of your content strategy. 

For example, your evergreen content can determine your messaging or how you want to communicate with your audience, nurture content can guide your mission to connect with or impact your audience, and visibility content can advise your goals – maybe you want to make a certain number of sales or build an audience of a certain size. 

As with any strategy, it’s important to test it out for a few months before making any adjustments. Tentatively plot out a few months of concepts and ideas to help you on your way to perfecting your content strategy. 

If your evergreen content platform of choice is your blog, determine how often you want to post blog posts and in turn how often you’d need to post nurture and visibility content too in order to expand your reach. 

By looking at the bigger picture as to where these three types of content fit in, you’ll be able to see that creating plenty of consistent and quality content is not as difficult as it seems.

Dive Deeper:

• Free blogger post template: copy and paste to make blogging easy!
• Creating Evergreen Content That Continues to Serve You
• Using Content Repurposing To Expand Your Magnetic Authority Online

Hi, I’m Sandy Norman. I help entrepreneurs make an impact and grow their creative businesses by creating time-saving + authentic content strategies using repeatable systems that attract their dream clients and build magnetic authority online. Visit me at sandynormanconcepts.com