Timeless content for your blog

Unless you are blogging about news-related topics you should focus your writing on timeless content. Timeless content is answer to a question, solution to a problem. For example, if you write about how to develop a WordPress theme, how to convert your web cam into a surveillance camera,  or how to open blocked sites at work / school / college, these types of articles are classified as timeless content because they are answers to questions that are time independent. This means that what you write should be useful today, tomorrow, 1 year from now and possibly 5 years from now.

Advantages of timeless content

Blogs that are focused on news or current events die as soon as the articles stop coming on a consistent basis. If you write timeless content, on the other hand, people will still be reading your blog for months or years after you stop writing as long as the content has some value for them.

The main advantage of timeless blog posts is that they add value to your newer readers (especially search visitors) for a prolonged time – even months or years after publishing the content. This would also mean that, such posts will bring in continuous subscription, readership and visibility for your blog. Another major advantage of timeless posts is that it can help your blog alive even when you are taking a break from blogging. Finally, needless to say, they will also convert well for long term when you consider the monetization aspects

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Faking timeless content

There are a number of ways in which you can make your blog content look timeless. The following are some of the ideas around it as adopted by many already.

• Remove timestamps from blog posts: The idea here is to hide the fact from the reader that you actually wrote it several months/years ago
• Avoid relative time phrases: When you use terms like ‘last month’ or ‘yesterday’ in a blog post and do not see a date on the post, definitely people will get confused as to whether the content is still valid
• Remove ‘dated’ archives: This is particularly valid if you are taking a long break from blogging or totally stopped it. You could instead retain categorized or tag based archiving
• Remove outdated sidebar information: This may include notification of events that took place in the past, banners that show previous years etc
• Update your copyright text: Make sure that your copyright information reflects the current year

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