Milk, Grocery Stores, Expiration Dates and Evergreen Content

Using content to tell stories leads right into evergreen marketing.  You have a choice when it comes to creating content for the web. You can place a big time stamp on it or you can make your content ready for consumption for a long time into the future.  What do you think of when you think of a timestamp?  

Imagine walking into the grocery store.  You walk through the doors and you see all of the foods and snacks as you pass by the cashiers.  You already know what you want to get.  You see the shopping carts and you pick up the small plastic shopping cart with the handles. You don't grab the large shopping cart with the squeaking and shaky wheels.  Now, you have the container and you start looking around.  You head over to the frozen food section.  Isn't it really cool over there.  You see the signs hanging from the ceiling.  They say milk.  This is exactly the place that you are looking for.  

The refrigerator door is clear when you walk up to it.  You see the different sizes of milk.  You want the gallon size.  Before you make a choice you check two things.  You check the price tag at the bottom of the shelf and you check the brands.  You have a favorite brand, but you don't want to spend any extra money.  There is one more thing to do before picking the right bottle of milk.  You check the expiration date.  You scan a few bottles in the front and they all have the same date.  You are not knew at this and you know the game.  You take your hands and run them past the front bottles of milk to see the milk cartons farther in the back.  Just like you thought, the milk in the back has a later expiration date.  You grab the milk and head for the checkout counter.  

What is the big deal with the expiration date?  You know the answer to that question already.  You have a crystal clear memory of the day that you opened a bottle of milk that was long past that expiration date.  Can you smell it right now?  Close your eyes.  It will come back to you.  

You just went on a little trip with a story.  The story talked about something that we were discussing at the top of the article.  We talked about writing content without a time limit.  Some types of content online have a self imposed expiration date.  Other types of content can be delivered in an evergreen fashion.  Writing your content in a story form can be evergreen.