Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Content is king, you have to write content to get visitors, you have to write regular content… content, content, content. That’s pretty much the party line for any blogger worth his or her salt. Get more content, entertain your visitors and get more visitors.

It makes sense. Why else would someone want to visit a blog with two posts (unless of course they were the holy grail of posts.) However, generating content, especially when you have more than one blog, takes a lot of time. You eventually need to find other ways to generate content.

There are many different ways you can skin this cat. You can steal others content, which I would NOT SUGGEST, you can pull partial content via feeds, you can pay someone minimal to generate gibberish, you can pay full-time, part-time, or anytime writers, or get just freelance writers to write here and there. These are just a few.

My first of two suggestions is that you find a method that turns a positive cash flow (may be obvious but you’d be surprised.) At first you may lose a little money, but after three to six months, you should be able to generate more money from the blogs advertising that you spend to provide it with content. The more established the blog the fewer months it should take to turn positive. (Don’t forget to continue your link building)

My second suggestion is that you stay unique. Don’t hijack other content. Of course there are ways, which I’ll talk about below, to borrow other writers content but all of these can be considered illegal by someone out there. Also, in my opinion, this isn’t a good method to generate long term return. If you read my first post back from a blogging break you’ll notice that my blogs kept generating revenue. I attribute part of this to the fact that I had unique content.

How do you get that content is another thing…

Write it yourself. True, you could write yourself. But past 1 blog, this gets extremely time consuming to keep up good content. If you are going to go it alone, have a system for writing good content. Spend the weekend generating 3-5 heavy articles, articles that provide a unique stance on something. Then recap some news on your topic, maybe news from the week prior. This should give you a few articles to start the week with and have the heavy articles post one a day.

Then throughout the week you can catch the latest news, write a quick blurb with a link to some other blog posts or news articles, and start building content for the next week. With posts built from the previous weekend you should be able to take some time off and work on some other blogs.

Do this on 3-5 blogs and you should be able to sustain some quality original content by yourself. Just make sure to pick a few topics you like. Otherwise you’ll be spinning your wheels on topics that don’t matter much and you’ll loose interest writing easily.

Pay Generic Writers. When I say generic, I mean people looking to make a few quick bucks by pumping out low to medium quality posts on topics they are vaguely familiar with. A lot of times these turn out to be Wikipedia repeats with words shifted around. Although original, not the best content to bring to your audience.

You can find these writers on most forums. One great place to look is Digital Point Forums, a great webmaster resource if you haven’t been there already. They have a subforum specifically for content generation. Alot of times with these types of generation schemes you’ll need to provide ideas for content such as post titles. Your ideas will then get farmed to the cheapest group of writers. Sometimes you’ll find an individual on there but it seems that more and more are getting “outsourced.”

You’ll also need to buy multiple articles at a time to make it worth their while. This means giving a word count and you can be sure you’ll get really close to the word count you suggested. This isn’t bad but can lead to filler words and repeated ideas. Not to worry though. You can easily modify this type of content with your own ideas. You paid for it so if you don’t like it the way it use, use it as a skeleton, beef it up, cut it down, make it flow with the blogs basic content structure.

I find 300 words is a good starting point to ask for. You can easily add a few ideas to this basis and reach 500 word heavy articles or cut down a few sentences and still be above 200.

Freelance Writers. There are many many writers out there looking to get their voices heard. Or at least make money from their ability to write cohesive paragraphs. These writers put more time into their articles, usually writer on topics they are familiar with and in the process, write better content. They also charge a bit more for their content that is generated.

The are a plethora of services out there that act as job boards for writers like this. elance.com is probably the largest and most direct to freelance writers. Many people have used this service including the founder of digg to get his programmer. Guru.com also claims to be a source of thousands of for hire freelance writers from around the world, although I’ve never used that service. After those there’s always Craigslist.

This would allow you to get some great content and you may be able to find a good regular writer that may join your blogging team for a share in the profits rather than sporadic writing.

Hiring Bloggers. Finally, you can hire bloggers. You can hire bloggers to write full-time, part-time, for a salary, per post, per word, or to share in the profits. Unless they share your enthusiasm for blogging you’re most likely going to find bloggers that want to work per post. But keep searching because finding someone who wants to grow the blog as much as you and sees the potential for earnings to grow will post above and beyond any post limits you may set.

This is also a good way to find people who share a passion for your blog topics and will most likely be more interactive with the readers that leave comments on your blog.

Syndicate Content. I haven’t done much research on how legal this is and depending on which blogger you talk to it’s a practice that gets mixed reviews. Some like it because it generates more links to your blog. Others think it’s downright stealing content. I’m mixed. I need links so I guess I wouldn’t be too unhappy. But then again. I work hard on my content so I don’t want people jacking it either. This practice can also be called feed aggregation or aggregators.

Most content syndicators just pull snippets of the content but it definitely generates a lot of posts and content for your blog without you having to do anything. Since I focus on Wordpress the plugin I’ll refer you to on this is the wp-o-matic. It’s a plugin that does as it says in the title. Automatically create a Wordpress blog.

Conclusion. It really depends on your budget and what type of content you want. Each provides a little different feel for your blog and each has it’s ups and downs. I’ll stick to my main suggestions though. Write unique content, and try to turn a profit. It’ll be the best for long term sustainability of your blog, and your business model.