Content Sources

One of the bigger challenges for bloggers is generating fresh and unique content at a consistent pace. There are many reasons why it is not easy. Monotony or bloggers block can cause spirits to wane. They may not have enough content to generate. If the purpose is to make money, a lot of time may need to be spent on marketing leaving lesser time for content. If you are blogging part time, your day job might not leave you with enough time or energy to write content.

There are ways to overcome this challenge by generating content from alternate sources. Not only to take care of the issues mentioned here, but also to add more variety and depth to the content. This is where you can get content from when you are not able to provide yourself adequately:

Guest Writers: It is not uncommon to invite others to contribute to your blog if they have something relevant to add. The guest could write a one-off post, or even agree to post something at a regular frequency. Their motivation to do so may be an opportunity to be featured in what they consider a quality media outlet, to do you a favour or even to earn some money. The last mentioned can be an option if you have a budget to pay writers.

Make it a collaborative blog: While blogs are usually perceived as one-person efforts, it need not be the rule. Nor is it always the case especially when operations cross a certain level. You could partner with one or more persons on the blog giving you more contributors. Even if everyone cannot write, division of labour can ensure all necessary functions like content, marketing and technology are given their due attention by the various partners.

Pull in content from other blogs: You have to be careful here in not infringing any copyrights. It is common practice to create posts on your blog where you carry a synopsis or a few lines about a post on another blog and link to the latter for those wishing to reading more. It not only adds content to your blog, but you provide value to your readers by directing them to other relevant and quality content in the blogosphere. This can actually send increased traffic to your blog if you are perceived as someone who does a good job in directing people to the desired content saving them a lot of time and effort Googling for it. However, if you were to copy full posts from other blogs and sites and carry them on yours, you could get into serious trouble if you had not taken explicit written permission from the original authors. It is not enough to attribute and provide links to the original content. If you are bothered about the issue of time spent in visiting blogs, making synopsis and posting them on to your site, there are automatic solutions to these too. If you are working on Wordpress for example, plugins like Autoblogged and WP-o-matic allow you to subscribe to any RSS feeds and the content on these automatically become posts on your blog. Since RSS feeds are usually truncated versions of full posts, you should be safe legally. However it is always a good idea to check with the original authors if they have objection to your using their content in any way.

Mochila Syndication: There is a way to get free legal content from publications like Businessweek, CNet, Cosmopolitan and many others and even get paid for it. Services like Mochila.com have agreements with leading publishers to syndicate their content to any other blog and website, place ads in this content and share the revenues with copyright holders and the blogger. There are at least a few bloggers who have set up blogs with content only from Mochila, attracting traffic because of the popularity of the topics covered and enjoying the advertising revenues accruing from it. They have to do little except select the content they want on their site. Do no-brainers get better than this? Try this for yourself too.

How Mochila works