As we all know, a content site needs content in order to survive. And what’s more, it needs a constant flow of content if it’s to grow. There are people who just build a site with a set number of pages and leave it at that. Then they go to the next site. That kind of business model can work if you stay in very niche markets where there is very little competition. However, I prefer the build a site and keep adding to it approach. This creates a problem of how you keep supplying the site with content? I’m going to list a bunch of ways. This is not an exhaustive list. I’m doing this off the top of my head.
1 – Write It Yourself
This is the hardest way to create content. It’s also the most time consuming, yet it brings the most rewards. If you know the topic you’re covering, then you should be the one to write about it. I try to write at least one article or review each week for The TechZone, which really isn’t asking a lot since that leaves six days of doing whatever I want. The advantages of writing the article yourself are the article is unique and you are in control of the quality. The disadvantage is it can be very time consuming. And then there is always the “I can’t write!†problem. If that’s you, then read on.
2 – Hire Someone To Write
If you can’t write yourself, then you can always hire someone. How you pay them is up to you. Some sites employ full time writers who are on salary and some pay per article. Many tech sites don’t pay anything. Instead the writer gets to keep the item being reviewed. However you do it, just make sure there is a contract between you and your writers stating that the articles belong to you once they’re done. I have dealt with tech sites where a writer leaves to start their own tech site and then post the old articles they wrote on their new site. This becomes a very sticky situation and you want to avoid that.
Another thing I do is hired writers of other tech sites to re-write an article or review for me. This way I already know the quality of the writer. Reviewing hardware takes time and a lot of testing. By comparison, writing the review itself takes only a few hours. This is a good way for the writer to leverage the testing he has already done. I know how much I can make on a review so as long as I don’t pay more than that, I’m in the money. It’s a good deal around. However, I recommend you only do this with the approval of the other site owner. Some sites don’t like their writers whoring themselves out.
3 – Ask Readers To Write
A good source of articles can come from your readership. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of frame and having an article on their favorite site is one way of doing it. The main problem with reader submitted articles is quality. The TechZone gets many articles from readers but most of them can’t be published because it’s no good. If you accept reader articles then make sure to add “All submissions becomes the property of†to your TOS.
4 – Trade Articles
To keep content flowing, I sometimes will trade an article with a another site. We each choose an older article from each other to be posted. To our readers, the old article is new. The advantage of this setup over using a free article service is you don’t run into the duplication penalty. However, because the article is older, we may do a little rewrite to bring the article up-to-date, but that will only be a minimum amount of work.
5 – Republish Old Articles
This is a little trick I used to get content on Laptop Gamer and Digital Grabber when they started – I used related articles that were already published on The TechZone and posted those to the new sites. Likewise, I have turn old blog posts into articles for The TechZone. Republishing of older articles is a nice and easy way to create new content. Again, we may do a bit of rewriting to bring the articles up-to-date.
6 – Use RSS
When trying to fill up content for a whore site, many would be Google Whores take the easy way out by using RSS. They would pull in a bunch of feeds from a number of sites and create a new site with nothing but RSS feeds. There are even qet rich quick schemes that will sell you an entire system based around RSS feeds. You enter different categories, like technology or automobile, and it’s suppose to pull in a bunch of feeds based on your search parameters and create a site for you. Now you just add in the Google ads and watch the money roll in! At least that’s what these companies will tell you.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t use RSS feeds to add to your site content. It just means that RSS shouldn’t be your site content. RSS is good for filler. It should never be the main content.
7 – Private Label Articles
Known as Private Label Rights, PLR articles are a new twist on content building. Design for whore sites, PLR articles gives users a quick and dirty way to get up a content site really quick and cheap. Private label articles are special type of right or license which you purchase where you are legally allowed to edit and publish the article as your own. You may even include your own name as the author and your own resource box at the end of each article. You can get 200 private label articles for as little as 15 cents per piece.
The main problem with PLR is quality – most of the articles are pieces of junk. They are design to take advantage of Google AdSense, so they’re rich with keywords but low on actual useful content. Another problem is article duplication – you’re not the only one using those PLR. The more people use them, the more diluted it becomes. It also creates a lot of confusion because people see the same article but with many different authors. If you go with PLR, then you should rewrite the articles to avoid this problem. However, if you’re going to re-write them, then you might as well not use them. I may do a case study on PLR in the future.
8 – Free Article Services
Free article services are the favorite playground for many Google whores because it’s free and there are limitless articles for the taking. There are two main problems with using free articles. The first is quality – most are just junk. The second is content duplication. Google frowns on duplicate content and will penalize a site for it. And then there are the new breeds of scammers going around submitting PLR articles into free articles services. Now you have duplicate free articles with different authors and resource boxes!
Free articles should be used as filler only because it’s not unique. In the end it will be unique content that drive traffic to your site. And it’s for this reason that you should stick to the top five ways of producing content and use the bottom three for filler (or whore sites).