🌲 Evergreen is the new viral [SAF #152]

Hey Reader,

I don’t know about you, but none of my viral posts brought me any revenue — at least not directly. Yes, they helped me increase my audience, and part of my new followers turned out to be great-fit clients — but they were definitely in the minority.

On the other hand, a few of my evergreen pieces of content generated direct revenue, shares, and keep bringing in subscribers and clients months (even years) after they were published.

The most recent example is my manifesto, The Resonance Principle. I can attribute at least $3K of revenue and some ±100 subscribers directly to it. The numbers are probably double that but, you know, marketing attribution is far from perfect.

Throughout the almost three years since I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve had dozens of issues shared in other newsletters, on social media, and on Slack channels.

I never pushed for these shares and they were always a great surprise (thank you for that!).

Almost always, they were on evergreen topics.

📣 Brought to you by 📣

The 2026 Solo Business Barometer

In less than a month, I'm releasing the results of the Solo Business Barometer survey. We'll all learn:

The average revenue for solo operators
What kind of products and services drive the most sales
Which social media platforms solo operators use
How do people use AI and is it worth it
Which channels drive the best results and which are time sucks

...and many other insights to fuel our 2026 strategy.

But here's the thing: the more people fill out this survey, the better and more reliable the insights are.

So if you haven't already, please fill it out — I think this will be the most important thing I've ever released.

And please share it with your peers, clients, friends — anyone who has a solo business.

Thank you!

Fill out the survey and be the first to get the results!

Want your name up here? Reserve your slot!

Here’s where it gets interesting, though.

Hot topics, like my recent issue about what’s working on LinkedIn right now, get far more opens and curious eyes on them. But they die out in a month or so.

Evergreen issues keep compounding.

This is one of the reasons why I like to bet on evergreen content. The other main reason:

Social media is rigged for low-yield virality

A couple of years ago, you could go viral and see a steady growth in relevant followers from it. Today, feeds are increasingly built for recommendations—not the people you chose to follow—so even if a viral post floods you with new followers, the feed moves on and they never get to see your next post.

This is the interest graph in action: people see posts that the algorithm deems interesting for them at a certain point in time.

On Facebook, a growing chunk of the feed is now algorithmically suggested content (read: strangers, not your subscribers), and Instagram openly explains how its AI ranks what shows up for you.

This is why a follower count ≠ reliable reach anymore.

Of course, a big audience still matters. But how you build it is more important than ever.

Virality is the one-night stand of marketing: exhilarating, high-arousal, and gone before breakfast.

Evergreen content is the compounding interest account: unsexy paperwork today, long-term equity tomorrow.

Here’s why.

Why virality rarely pays the bills (even when it pays in likes)

Algorithms reward spikes, not stakes. They amplify what provokes an immediate reaction, especially high-arousal emotion.

Decades of research show that content evoking amusement or anger spreads faster; political posts laced with moral-emotional language travel farther; outrage outpaces accuracy.

(Source 1, source 2, source 3).

That cocktail is fantastic for attention and terrible for qualifying buyers.

What tends to go viral?

Contrarian zingers
Culture-war chum
Memes
“You won’t believe this” novelty.

Studies on moral-emotional language, negative affect, and humor all point to the same pattern: the internet shares what moves them right now—often the spicy, the funny, or the infuriating. None of that guarantees people will remember (or pay for) your actual work next week.

Meanwhile, overall engagement on major platforms has trended down, making each spike shorter-lived. Even Instagram benchmarkers are documenting a steady sag (over 24% YoY!) in engagement through 2025.

If you bet on virality, you’re playing slot machines with colder reels.

Evergreen > viral (and not just because it’s calmer)

Unlike virality, evergreen is a wood-burning stove: slow to start, then steady heat all winter.

It compounds. One great tutorial, teardown, or framework keeps earning attention through search, shares, and citations long after the feed forgets you. Like dividend reinvestment, the curve looks flat…until it doesn’t.
It centers your actual work. People discover you through problem-solving assets—not your spiciest opinion—so the leads that show up are already pre-qualified.
It’s re-usable fuel. A pillar essay becomes a talk, a podcast outline, a YouTube script, a carousel series, and six months of newsletter riffs. Read more about repurposing your greatest hits.
It survives algorithm mood swings. Search, direct, referral, and email traffic don’t vanish because a platform changes its personality again this quarter. (And yes, every social media platform will eventually screw you over.)
It scales your reputation, not just your reach. Buyers trust proof and process. Case studies, walkthroughs, and research are reputation assets, not content “posts.”

Evergreen is slow cuisine. Viral is an energy drink. You can only live on one of those.

How to create evergreen content that works and compounds

First off, you need a BIG idea — that bold statement that fuels everything you create and builds a solid foundation for your business. The full guide on how to come up with your BIG idea is here.

Then you can start creating the content that fuels your business for years to come — around the BIG idea and the pillars you derive from it.

These are a few examples of formats that earn you quotes, shares, and revenue.

Frameworks and named methods

Give your thinking a handle. “Minimum Viable Content Calendar,” “The Resonance Principle,” “The Content Exchange Rate.”

Named systems travel farther than generic advice—and they’re easier to cite (and buy).

Pillar tutorials and reference guides

The kinds of pieces clients bookmark and forward internally: pricing primers, positioning teardown checklists, onboarding playbooks, “how to brief a freelancer” templates.

These age well and make your sales calls shorter. Plus, you can always reference them in future pieces of content.

See how this piece is peppered with tons of links? It’s because by now I have a large library of content, and I can simply link to a piece rather than spend precious space re-explaining my core ideas and frameworks.

Case studies that read like mini-documentaries

Write about what changed, why it worked, what you’d do differently — for your own business or for a client project.

Show thinking, not just results. Prospective buyers want to see your brain work before they rent it.

Proprietary research

This is why I keep nagging you with the Solo Business Barometer survey. One more chance to fill it out if you haven’t already.

I believe that, in the era of AI, basic information is commoditized. Proprietary research, however, is not.

It’s damn hard to collect data and put it together — that’s why it works! Doing the hard thing no one else wants to do is how you stand out in the best possible way.

Here’s what you can do:

Pricing benchmarks for your industry.
Quality indexes — great for travel, hospitality, even some types of consulting.
Time from onboarding to results — again, great in almost any industry.
Literature reviews and mega-guides — think buyer psychology (like Katelyn Bourgoin), what works in your industry, how the industry has evolved, and so on.

The real challenge with research is to make sure that it opens doors for new clients, not just peers.

Your peers will inevitably be the ones who consume it and love it first. That’s not worthless, either — this is how you build a network that trusts you and refers you clients. Still, you also need it to resonate with potential buyers and position you as the solution owner they've been looking for.

Evergreen long-form (podcasts/YouTube).

Design episodes around timeless problems: “Find your first 10 clients,” “Rescope a dying project,” “Diagnose a no-response pipeline.” These keep getting discovered for years, especially via search and embedded links.

✋ Limitations

Virality is like gasoline for discoverability. It works. It opens doors you didn’t know existed. Political and moral-emotional posts travel quickly; humor and high-arousal emotion spread by design. That can pull new people into your orbit.

I’m not saying avoid virality, just don’t overwork yourself trying to engineer it. Ideally, strive for visibility, whether it’s viral or not.

More importantly, evergreen takes time. You measure it in quarters, not afternoons.

After building three brands for myself (and dozens for my clients) mostly on evergreen content, I know one thing for sure: the biggest challenge is staying in the game long enough.

Most people give up too soon. They get annoyed that their content is good, dammit, not vaporware like most influencers peddle. And still, they don’t generate the buzz and the revenue — at least not as fast as they’d like.

In the long game, the compounding curve is boring until it isn’t.

However, the world’s best evergreen content is irrelevant if no one sees it. So next week, we’ll talk about discoverability — how to get found without feeding the outrage machine.

TL;DR: dignity and respect for your craft

Speed gives you exposure. Slowness gives you evidence. Viral moments put you in more rooms; evergreen assets make people stay, take notes, and introduce you to their CFO.

There’s also a dignity to it. Slow growth respects the craft—your craft—and your audience’s cognition.

Instead of jolting them awake with outrage and novelty, you build a body of work that teaches, clarifies, and compounds. In an attention market optimized for stimulation, patience itself becomes a moat.

I don’t know if any of this matters to you and I don’t mean to get pedantic. This is not a soapbox for me; I found that, whenever I lost respect for my craft, my craft became crap and my business suffered.

Need help with building an evergreen content strategy?

If you’re done playing algorithm roulette, The Profitable Content Engine masterclass gives you a repeatable system to turn ideas revenue-generating content—fast.

You’ll get:

A stripped-down framework for endless, high-converting ideas pulled from real audience pains.
How to write less, sell more (structures that convert without sounding salesy).
Distribution that drives revenue, not vanity metrics—so your best work keeps working.
Lifetime access to Convertly Lab, my custom GPT sidekick trained on my best strategy assets (and rooted in buyer psychology). It:
- surfaces pain points from your audience,
- turns them into strategic, sellable angles,
- drafts clean copy fast,
- and suggests repurposing & distribution—so one asset becomes many.