Dive into the profits of food blogging as we look at the choice between evergreen vs seasonal content. Which works best? Find out and boost your earnings with our invaluable insights!
In This Post You’ll Learn
What are Seasonal and Evergreen Posts?
Seasonal Posts
Seasonal posts are those that gain a spike in traffic over one or multiple holidays throughout the year, then relatively low to no traffic at any other time.
Seasonal recipes are known to usually have higher RPMs and earn more over their holiday periods than evergreen recipes.
Evergreen Posts
An evergreen post on the other hand, usually has consistent traffic throughout the year and will almost appear as a straight line on a graph, without any spikes.
The Golden Goose
The Golden Goose is what we call an outlier post. It’s the needle in a haystack that receives both evergreen traffic AND seasonal spikes. If you find you have a recipe like this, make sure you look after it and get that ranking in top spot – it will be invaluable to your blog.
Related: Mastering GA4 – 5 Things You Need To Know / Unscramble Your Stats: GA for Food Bloggers
How to See Single Post Data in GA4
Get ready to deep dive into your own content and see single post data where you can look at the traffic graph and identify if your post is seasonal, evergreen – or – a golden goose!
- In GA4 head to Reports -> Life cycle -> Engagement -> Pages and screens: Page path + query string and screen class
- Underneath the title click on “Add filter +“
- The Build Filter menu will pop up on the left hand side.
- Under Conditions select:
– Dimension: Page path and screen class
– Match Type: exactly matches
– Value: type or select your post URL
- Click the blue Apply button.
- Your graph in Pages and screens should now be showing the graph for that single post only!
Just starting with GA4? Make sure you learn the top 5 key features you need to know in GA4.
What Earns More – Seasonal or Evergreen?
We’ve been curious – is chasing higher seasonal content RPMs all it’s cracked up to be? Let’s take a look at some important questions and see what the data tells us.
While it’s good to have a combination of seasonal and evergreen posts on your food blog, does one out earn the other? Is it better to have an even balance or more lean into one more than the other?
Our overarching question is: While seasonal posts get a boost of traffic with high RPMs – what do they earn on average over the year in comparison to an evergreen post?
In order to fairly compare the two, we need to keep some things constant. So the seasonal and evergreen posts compared will have:
- Similar traffic over a 12 month period
- Similar geo location of readers (eg same or similar percentage of the majority traffic source such as US or AU traffic). This is because RPMs are heavily affected by location.
We’ll then look up earnings for each post for the year and divide the amount by 365 to get our daily earnings as well.
Let’s see what the results were:
Case Study 1 – Posts with Average 15,000 Yearly Views and Australian Traffic
Our first two posts are recipes receiving close to 15,000 views per year. They both have majority Australian traffic, and one is a Christmas dessert recipe, while the other is an evergreen sweet baking recipe that does not increase over holiday periods.
- Seasonal Earnings: $192US / year, ~$0.54 / day
- Evergreen Earnings: $168US / year, ~$0.47 / day
So in Case Study 1 – the seasonal post out earned the evergreen post by an extra $24US / year.
Case Study 2 – Posts with Average 25,000 Yearly Views and Australian Traffic
Our second two posts are recipes receiving around 25,000 views per year. They are also majority Australian traffic, and one is an Easter recipe, while the other is an evergreen dinner recipe that does not increase over holiday periods.
- Seasonal Earnings: $325US / year, ~$0.92 / day
- Evergreen Earnings: $283US / year, ~$0.80 / day
We have the same results in Case Study 2 – the seasonal post out earned the evergreen post again. This time by an extra $42US / year.
Case Study 3 – Posts with Average 10,000 Yearly Views and Different Country Traffic
Our first two case studies kept the traffic to the same majority geo location. Let’s see what happens if we change that. Our third case studies are receiving an average of 10,000 views a year. The seasonal post is a Christmas dessert with majority Australian traffic, and the evergreen recipe is a Japanese dinner recipe with majority US traffic.
- Seasonal Earnings: $107US / year, ~$0.30 / day
- Evergreen Earnings: $134US / year, ~$0.38 / day
In this instance, when geo location is taken into consideration, evergreen posts can outperform seasonal posts at the same traffic level. One takeaway from this could be that standard US RPMs are still higher than high RPM seasonal traffic from Australia.
The Results
The case studies speak for themselves:
- Seasonal will usually earn more than evergreen posts at the same traffic level and traffic geo location.
- Evergreen can outperform seasonal when geo location is taken into consideration. For example, US traffic will usually have higher RPMs and earnings than Australian traffic, even when taking higher seasonal RPMs into consideration.
Are Seasonal or Evergreen Posts Better for a Food Blogger?
At the end of the day, it’s about finding a balance.
Different posts fill a void at different times. Evergreen works most of the year for steady traffic (and a steady paycheck month to month!), but you may see a dip over holidays such as Christmas and Easter when people aren’t cooking as normal.
Vice Versa, going after seasonal posts will only do well over their holiday periods before dropping off. This could mean great earnings during that time, but lulls in money during the off season.
One extra note – remember that revenue earned depends heavily on your audience location. Are you mostly US traffic? Or is it Australian, UK, Canadian or somewhere else? Factor in the average RPM’s for these countries and how you can come up with a good ratio of content to suit different times of year AND your particular audiences.
Finally, if you do happen to post a Golden Goose, look after that post extremely well. If there’s any related content to that – jump on it!
Learn more about food blogging:
★ What’s your experience? Have you found evergreen or seasonal posts to be your best earners? Tell us below!
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