How To Turn Your FAQ Into Evergreen Content
The best time to answer questions is before people ask them
It’s a mystery to me why business content has become so elusive. Everyone is either looking for that special spin or just doing what someone else does. The only thing that’s truly unique to your business is your business. Why not dig into it and expand on what your clients really want to know?
The key to future business content success is right under your nose. It’s sitting in your outdated, under-answered, oft-overlooked Frequently Asked Questions section. Do you even remember what’s in that section? Most of us don’t.
Turning Your FAQ Evergreen
Ask yourself: What are the ten questions I get asked the most in my business?
Write them down.
Not in a Frequently Asked Questions section. Those are for rookies, and no one can ever find them on your website anyway. But if I’m being honest, I go to the FAQ page on a lot of sites. And truth be told, they aren’t good. The answers are too short. They don’t explain the why behind the question we’re asking. So…
Answer each of your ten most-asked questions in one sentence, then:
- Write each question at the top of a blog post.
- Paste your one-sentence answer into the post. Expand it.
- Ask yourself: What are the most common follow-up questions to my first answer?
- Add photos and videos. Add diagrams. Basically, play Medium for your business.
- Add an audio snippet.
- Add humor (or find someone with a sense of humor to do it for you).
Wouldn’t it be great if each bullet point in your FAQ served as everlasting evergreen content for your business?
They can.
But you have to dig into them.
Answer Your Customer’s Questions, In-Depth, in Advance
Your FAQ just went rogue. It now has a mind of its own. Now it’s time to move your FAQ off of the outdated page and into the blogosphere.
Would your customers rather read about incomprehensible market data or the answer to the most frequently asked question of your company?
By blogging the answers to your most asked questions, you’re engaging in passive customer acquisition.
Consumers go to your website for the first time looking for answers (or validation). If you answer their first and second questions before they even inquire, you’ve taken two steps forward. Then why isn’t every question answered in the form of a blog instead of a sentence?
The less time you spend answering the easy questions via email or customer service, the more time (and money) your prospects can spend on you.
Blogging each FAQ also gives you the opportunity to showcase your company branding, style, and personality over and over again.
Expanding the Evergreen
Once you take the time to answer these questions in-depth, the content will become evergreen. It will always be relevant because it’s what your customers are most concerned about.
You can send one of these posts a month out to your email list. It will get more opens than a regurgitated monthly update. All you have to do is keep up with changes and adjust along the way. Expand your FAQ by explaining why these 10 blogs are coming out.
We want you, the customer, to know we are thinking way ahead of you. We don’t think our product is perfect, and here is a round-up of what people ask us the most. But instead of a one-line answer, we dedicated a whole blog post to each question to help you dig a bit deeper.
Help Your Audience Before They Have to Ask
This is what you want to do. Help them before they have to ask you. You provide a plus for them with easy-to-find answers, in long-form, to all of their questions, and you provide a win to you because it’s one less email or query you have to deal with.
It’s not efficient to just have a template email response to the ten most asked questions because that’s less personal and still requires someone to send the email. If you keep up with blogging the answers to the most-asked questions, you’ll end up with quicker decision-making on behalf of your clients and increased efficiency in-house.
It’s time to upgrade your FAQ and make it evergreen.
