Transform your Youtube channel into a long-term income stream with this strategy. Start growing your channel and reach a passive income sooner and for longer!
There are two ways to look at content creation online, as a one salary worth of work, or as an income generating asset that can keep profiting you for years. If your channel or blog follows a trend where you try to cover the most recent news and the most up-to-date information, then you’re trapping yourself in a perpetual creation loop. However, if you transform your content to contain elements that are always relevant and searchable, then your content becomes evergreen content.
And that’s what I like to look at as a digital investment that generates passive income. In this article, I want to share with you how we can transform our videos and blogs into evergreen content and how that can help you obtain traffic and generate passive income in the long run. The way of being a YouTuber or a blogger that creates the most up-to-date trendy videos on the most recent news can actually have a hidden cost.
It can be awesome to have a trendy video that generates traction, but truth is, if that’s the consistent strategy of the creator, then that traps them in a perpetual creation loop. The perpetual creation loop is when a digital creator is financially reliant on the content they produce to keep getting views. If they stop creating content, then the money stops flowing in, and then they’re forced to create yet another video or blog again and again.
This is usually what happens if the content you create quickly becomes irrelevant and people stop searching for it. Then you need to think of a more recent topic to cover so that your new video or blog starts generating income again. This way, you will have to keep creating content forever since the video you posted four weeks ago is now on old news, follows an old trend, and is losing traffic really quickly.
And it’s now considered something obsolete, so people will never search for it. And over time, people will be less and less interested to watch or read something that’s already obsolete. An example of this are channels that explicitly talked about the pandemic.
They probably blew up when they first started since that was the most relevant and popular topic to search, but now are probably having less and less traffic over the years. So what happens now is that all of that content those channels produce is becoming irrelevant, and it’s no longer being looked at. If those channels financially rely on the channel’s viewership, then they’ve probably ended up starting to produce content on other similar topics.
This method of working is directly tied to the hours of work. If you’ve produced a video or blog four weeks ago, and it was doing pretty strong but now has dropped in terms of traffic and is no longer having any views, then you can calculate how much work you’ve spent on it on an hourly basis. Since it’s no longer performing well, and it’s not generating income, you can now actually calculate your hourly rate.
You can divide all the generated income from that video or blog and divide it by the hours you spent creating it. And that’s how you get the hourly rate, the price of your labor. Don’t get me wrong, being a digital creator is an amazing feeling, because you get to decide when and how long you work for, and you’ve managed to create a business that is profitable, which is amazing.
But the full potential of content creation lies within the ability of a digital asset to age well with time. Blogs get indexed by search engines, and videos get tracked on YouTube. So if the content you’ve produced is evergreen and is forever relevant, then the income it’s generating will not drop as suddenly.
Now there’s the exception of YouTube where it doesn’t promote your content as much when you stop publishing. But the topic here is about the type of the content. If your content is evergreen, that means it will continue to generate income for longer periods of time.
This way you don’t have an hourly rate, but instead you have a passive income stream. You’ve invested your labor and time into a digital asset that’s going to perform and generate income for a long period of time. The concept of becoming rich is not about blowing up with a couple of videos and making all the money from a single source.
It’s more of an exponential curve, a snowball effect of all different pieces of content working together over time to generate more and more income. And that is the main advantage of being a digital content creator when compared to working any other job. Because creating digital content is indeed investing time, labor, and in some cases money.
And that’s why it’s better to create evergreen content so the income generation can last longer in the future. The best tactic would be to create a trendy and video in order to boost your channel’s pre-existing video base. If you have a solid amount of evergreen videos or blogs, that’s basically a portfolio of digital assets waiting to explode.
Then comes in your latest video that’s on a popular trend. It will generate lots of traffic since it’s on a popular topic and all of the viewers are going to go on a tangent to explore your existing videos on your channel. And ideally they will stick around as a subscriber which is the end goal of every content creator.
As an alternative tactic of our example pandemic focused channel would be to have lots of videos on general hygiene, explaining microorganisms in nature, how to keep safe when ill, and how to avoid catching something else. All of that is evergreen content. Things that people will always search online and that will always be relevant.
Then after having a base of videos and blogs on these topics, the actual boost from a trendy one can come in. The channel can post several very detailed videos on the pandemic which will generate traffic and those viewers will also see the pre-existing videos on hygiene microorganisms which are going to be still relevant for that viewership. And even after the pandemic passes, all of the pre-existing digital asset base you have of videos and blogs will keep the numbers up.
How search engines work is that they grade your content based on the number of people that saw your content and how long they were on it. Similarly, YouTube will see that your videos had a lot of viewers and a high watch time. Therefore, after the pandemic video or blog are no longer relevant, they’ve served their purpose because all of our other content will benefit from the boost months if not years ahead in the future.
As all your content has had boosted viewership, YouTube and search engines will consider your content to be more credible and will continue to recommend it to new people.
Let’s recap both ways of doing it and the potential outcomes:
Method 1 is to only create content that covers the most popular trends and news.
The content will probably experience high traffic and views upon publishing but after the content is no longer relevant, the viewership will drop quickly. Therefore, the digital creator will experience a drop in the income stream and will need to create yet another trendy video.
Method 2 is creating evergreen content and then boosting it with a popular trendy video.
Firstly, you need to create a good base of blogs and videos that’s evergreen content on topics that will always be relevant and searched. After the base of evergreen content has been created, the digital creator can focus on identifying a popular trendy video and creating it to boost the entire channel. The hot topic video or blog generates traffic for the entire channel.
After time, the topic is no longer relevant and that video or blog experiences a drop in viewership but all of the rest of evergreen content is now boosted and will experience good performance. Another example are gaming channels. If currently the trendy game to play is Fortnite or Minecraft, you might have good viewership if you play them.
However, if their time comes to an end because a new game has come out, then you might experience a drop in viewership. So your best option is to start playing whatever is relevant now. There is an exception for gaming channels of course, just like there’s an exception for anything in life.
When you’re a brilliant creator and you’re really good at entertaining your audience, then that audience is gonna stick to your channel not because of the particular game you’re playing but because they want to see more of you. So being great with your audience is just one of the factors that make your content evergreen. In the case of a gaming channel, people might recommend you to their friends not because of the games you play because so many YouTubers play those games but because you are the funny person.
You are the one making the content evergreen. If you are funny and enjoyable to watch, then your videos will forever be relevant because you’re in them. A solid example of this is the YouTube popular PewDiePie.
Felix has been funny ever since starting YouTube so even his oldest videos with the low resolution web cameras still generate views because his new audience goes back to watch those videos not because of the video quality because that’s awful but because Felix himself is in those videos. That’s why those videos are now evergreen even for his new audience.
All content can be transformed into evergreen content. You just need to find the right approach for your niche and for your specific channel and after starting to do things this way, no matter how much time passes, your videos will continue to have more and more views.
If you found this blog helpful then make sure to check out my Youtube channel where you can watch other helpful videos on how to do Youtube and how to grow a channel.
Goodbye!
