One of the biggest questions that come up when I speak to folks about their NEW blog is… how do you create content?
Well there are several options. Ultimately you can create it yourself, use and adapt ready-made content – or outsource it.
The one you choose will largely depend on your time, ability, budget – and what sort of blog you have.
If it’s a niche blog, you should seriously consider outsourcing your blog posts or adapting private label rights material.
If it’s a personal blog, you would probably be best writing the content yourself. After all nobody else can really “be” you.
Ok – let’s take you through each option and discuss some of the main pros and cons of each…
Autoblog Content
Autoblogs USED to be a popular solution for niche blogs and in some cases there are a few sites out there that are still doing this.
As the name suggests, an autoblog is a blog where the content is posted automatically via a plugin that sources articles from the internet and posts them to your blog on autopilot.
The beauty of this of course is that it makes everything extremely easy. It’s largely a set up and leave solution – and thus it can take away a lot of the stress usually associated with running a blog.
But while it seems like a good solution on the surface of it, autoblog content is full of problems and as such is not really recommended for most blogs.
The obvious disadvantage is that non of the content on your blog will actually be yours. It will be full of duplicate content – and some of it may not be what you actually want to appear on your blog.
Look at a typical autoblog and it’s usually pretty obvious to even the most casual user that the blog has simply been set up to make money. It’s not a “real” blog written by a real person – and as such people are unlikely to take it very seriously.
Use PLR
Another relatively easy way of filling your blog with content is to use Private Label Rights (PLR) articles.
PLR is readily available online and gives you pre-written content on a specific subject.
Again, this is a cheap and inexpensive way to fill your blog with content – and if you can find good quality PLR content it is a great way to do things.
But I wouldn’t really recommend using PLR content ‘as is.’
I’m a huge fan of PLR content – but only as a basis for blog posts. What you want to do is find some good quality PLR content and then re-write it a little. Add bits, take bits away, re-write certain sentences. Doing this will put your own stamp on the content and it will make it unique to you.
If you use PLR content ‘as is’ this will generally get penalized by the search engines. Not only that but it makes your content less valuable. People will come to your blog because they want to read what YOU have got to say and YOUR content.
So by all means use PLR content. I’m a huge fan of it – but do make sure that you make it unique to yourself. It’s not hard and the results are well worth it.
Create Unique Content
The ultimate kind of content is that which is completely unique to your blog.
As we have already discussed, people will come to your blog because they want to read YOUR content and YOUR blog posts.
So if you want new, unique content then you have two main options:
You can either write your blog posts yourself or you can outsource them to someone else.
Outsourcing
This is a good option (especially for niche blogs) but it is obviously incurs a cost, whereas if you’re writing the posts yourself it isn’t going to cost you anything to run your blog.
If you want to outsource your blog posts then the key is to find a good writer. There’s little point in outsourcing your blog posts to a cheap writer, only to find that their writing is so poor you then have to spend hours re-writing everything.
So where can you find writers? There are lots of websites for this.
Sites such as http://www.peopleperhour.com and http://www.freelancer.com list thousands of outsource workers. You can either browse through their profiles and contact them – or you can post your job on there and let suitable workers apply to you.
Another good place is the Warrior Forum (http://www.warriorforum.com) – most specifically the Warrior For Hire and Wanted – Members Looking To Hire You sections.
But finding a good writer is only half the battle.
The key to getting back the content you want is to accurately and thoroughly brief the writer so that they know EXACTLY what you want.
Show them the writing style you are looking for. Give them decent article titles and keywords to work from. Point them towards similar blog posts on the internet which they can use as a basis for their writing.
Always remember that your outsource worker isn’t a mind reader. You have to show them exactly what you want, otherwise you’ll probably get back something entirely different.
Writing blog posts yourself
If you are writing a personal blog or funds are tight, you will want to write your blog posts yourself.
Ultimately these are probably the best kind of blog posts. The content comes from you and you can really bring your blog alive with personal anecdotes and real life examples.
The downside is that it may take you a while to write good content. With practice and experience, you will get good at it! Give it a shot!
Where do you get content for your site? Leave a comment and share!
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