Here are some more places you can find content for your blog…
Youtube.com – This is one of the most widely used and easiest places to find blog content. Say you have a “golf swing tips” blog. Just go to Youtube, search for “golf swing tips” and pick the one you want to include in your blog. Find the embed code and copy it into the appropriate place in your blog. Make sure to accompany the video with a short commentary of your own. You can add links to your commentary, just like an ordinary blog post.
EzineArticles.com – This is the best article site on the web. Search for articles using keywords. Pick the article you want to re-publish. Copy it into your blog, making sure to publish it just as you found it. That includes retaining the author’s “resource box”, links to his or her websites, and all links within the article.
Google News/Yahoo News/Bing News – If you occasionally want to publish a current “news” story, then one of the high profile news sites will give you lots of ideas. For example I just did a search in Bing News (bing.com) for “electronic gadgets” and found:
- Third of teens use cell to cheat
- Sony CEO says restructuring steps on track
- iPhone to hit stores as Apple awaits Jobs’ return
…and many more.
Most of these stories provide good fodder for blog posts. Remember, don’t just copy the news story, and be sure to add your own comments.
Free Original Articles with reprint rights – About the only place you will find top quality free articles is in a membership site of which you are a member. For example, if you are an AgentMapIt member we provide free articles ideal for use in blogs and newsletters. These are high quality, original, “free” PLR articles (PLR stands for “Private Label Rights”). For example, see Free Green Tips.
PLR Articles – You can buy groups of articles that have been written by someone else and bundled as a package of PLR articles. PLR stands for “private label rights”, which means that you can publish the articles as they are, modify them, just use parts of them, and put your own name on them as the author. Most PLR packages are poorly written – often by non-English speakers – and often 5 or more years old. They have probably been recycled several times, so if they are any good they have probably been published elsewhere a number of times. I don’t recommend using PLR articles.
Outsource your blog post writing – There are all kinds of people out there prepared to write quality short articles for next to nothing. For example, if you are using the Categorize and Cycle approach (where you have 4 or 5 categories and try to write on article a week in each) you could have a ghost writer create 5 articles for each of 4 categories (20 short articles). Chances are you can find someone to do this for less than $150. Often they will do it for as low as $5 each. Stretch those articles out over two or three months (you can add your own stuff between outsourced articles) and you have a pretty inexpensive way to create a totally original blog.
Of course different writers will have different areas of expertise, and the writing quality will vary from writer to writer. A good place to find writers is on forums such as The Warrior Forum.
Outsource your entire blog – Finally I would be remiss not to mention our own blogging service. Our Blog and Mail service includes setting up and maintaining your blog, writing and posting unique articles at least once a week, helping you create a contact list, and sending an email to that list at least once a month. In other words, this is an entire marketing program built around having your own blog and regular email campaign. You really don’t have to do anything. We do the entire thing.
This approach is even more effective when integrated with an aggressive Twitter campaign.
As you can see, even if you have very few ideas and have limited writing skills it is not that difficult to create your own interesting and effective blog. However it is important to remember what I said at the beginning of this report: without traffic your blog might as well not exist. The very first thing
you should do is think through how you intend to get traffic to your blog.
In my estimation the traffic generation methods discussed by would-be blogging gurus usually come down to SEO and they do not work for local business blogs. The only method I have found that does actually generate traffic is the Blog and Mail method outlined elsewhere in this blog.
