It’s been a good month for blogging. It feels like my fingers have barely stopped turning out content!

With the madness that was Christmas out of the way, I’ve had much more time to sit down and plan upcoming editorial content. The focus for this month has been upping the amount of evergreen content on the Harmony blog (with the exception of a news story about Darth Vader made from sex toys. I couldn’t resist.) to give us a more authoritative tone and show the world that when it comes to lingerie and sex toys, we really know what we’re talking about. Also, from a search engine point of view, the likes of Google have recently stated that they’re favouring pages with ‘How To…’ guides. Sounds reasonable to me, because pages (even ecommerce pages) should be able to offer site visitors something more than just the product they’re searching for.

From a writer’s perspective, creating evergreen content can be a good test of skill. The fact of the matter is that many of the topics covered in ‘how to’ posts will have been blogged and written about a million times before across the internet. Therefore, the challenge is to find an angle that’s new and interesting to the reader, so that they’ll still feel inclined to engage with it.

My strategy is to keep the content as simple and as clean as possible. It easy to get bogged down when writing guides that you have to include every single bit of information all on this one page. The end result is an off-putting body of copy that no one has the time to read.

Peppered with new expert comment where possible and plenty of attractive graphics and headings, it’s easy to transform an otherwise weary topic into something fresh and interesting. Magazines and the print press have been doing it for years. Add in a new bit of research info and it suddenly becomes a modern, newsworthy topic.