RSS Feeds10 ways to get regular content for your website or blog
Sep 12, 2008
To be successful on the Internet you constantly need to communicate with written words. Written words – the content on your website or blog – constantly convey your thoughts to your visitors. They attract new visitors and keep the old visitors hooked to your writing. But this also involves writing regularly. The more regular you are, the greater is the level of interaction and communication. Agreed, networking and interacting on other blogs and online forums do play a vital part, eventually it is your content that wins you the day.
Unless you have ideas of encyclopedic dimensions it is very difficult to come up with new ideas and new matter on a daily basis. You can do this without external help if this is the only thing you do: thinking about and generating content for your blog or website. But if you have only got, say between half-an-hour to one hour, to think about what to write, collect your thoughts and plan them and then write them down, it becomes an uphill task and often gets assigned to the back burner. Here are a few things that can help you get regular content for your website or blog:
- Hire a content writer or a team of writers: You can hire writing services according to your budget but this is the best option if you have no time to research and write content for your blog or website. The person that you hire most probably has experience researching online and coming up with fresh and relevant content. This doesn’t mean that you assign the entire responsibility of creating content for your blog a website to your content writer, you will need to constantly keep a vigil and make sure that the content tallies with the fundamental philosophy of your blog or website.
- Subscribe to RSS feeds: There can be an information overload when you are subscribed to too many RSS feeds but your RSS feeds subscriptions can prove to be the best resource to get fresh writing ideas. You just need to stick to the most important blogs and content websites while tracking your RSS feeds. Don’t rush while subscribing because this will eventually lead you to around 1000+ subscriptions and the mere number will dissuade you from even opening your RSS reader. Subscribe to RSS feeds judiciously and follow them closely in order to get fresh updates.
- Use blog search: Many search engines, including the good old Google let you conduct searches on various blogs. You can use your favorite search term to check what all people are writing on it and then come up with your own content accordingly.
- Read about your topic: Reading gives you lots of writing ideas as it fills your mind with your thoughts and wisdom. Whether you agree with what you are reading or not you have something to say, either pro or against. Reading also expands your knowledge-base and the more you know the more comfortable you get writing on your topic. Read books relevant to your field, read blogs and websites that talk about your topic, and interact on online forums. Of course you will need to keep a tab on your time in case you don’t have much time to spare.
- Visit content aggregation websites: Content aggregation websites such as popurl.com, alltop.com, digg.com, etc. publish lots of highly relevant and contextual links with great regularity. Make it a point to visit these content and aggregation websites routinely. It is better if you can go to them at least once a day but you can decide your schedule according to your work schedule.
- Interact as much as you can: Regular interaction exposes you to newer opinions and varying ideas. Interact with people who are already doing great things in your field. For instance if you want to write about blogging then you should try to regularly interact with people who are successful bloggers. You can use social media networking websites like Twitter and FaceBook to keep track of the ongoing conversations. For these social media networking websites there are many online tools that help you track conversations according to topics and keywords. Actively participate in these forums. But be sure of what you are communicating.
- Use your existing content for new ideas: Many of your existing blog posts and articles may carry further topics and subtopics. Sometimes an entire article can be created out of one subheading. For instance, if you wrote a blog post on the benefits of regular blogging you might have written about using blogging as a great blogging tool and you might have written just one paragraph on the topic. Why not write a complete blog post or an article on that?
- Invite your visitors to give you ideas: Lots of bloggers ask their visitors what they would like to read on the blog. I think this is a great way of getting new writing ideas because after all the most difficult part of writing regularly is getting writing ideas. Once you have a topic it is much easier to come up with the content. You can ask your visitors to give ideas regarding what they would like to read on your blog or website through the comments section.
- Maintain an ideas file: Ideas are like the sparkling fireflies; they happen randomly and unless you have reached Nirvana, you can hardly control them. It is always better to devise a mechanism to preserve them whenever they grace you. You should maintain an ideas file and keep storing ideas whenever they occur so that you can refer to it whenever you need to get some new writing ideas.
- Be passionate about your topic: Your mind brims with new and exciting ideas when you are passionate about the theme of your blog or website. Your passion helps you focus and work harder towards collecting your thoughts and expressing them; people can feel the passion in your words and expressions. But can you be passionate about something you are not comfortable with? This dilemma is often faced by professional writers because they have to write on myriad topics with unwavering interest. How do they keep the flame of passion burning all the time? They derive their passion from the fact that they have to write well no matter on what they are writing. In a similar manner you can seek passion in your topic too.
Aside from these activities you can also syndicate content from various organizations that provide regular content to blogs, online magazines, online newspapers and websites.
When you regularly update your website or blog it shows that you are serious about talking to your visitors. It doesn’t always have to be prim and proper and you can be especially yourself on your blog provided you are not discussing your pyjama parties and doggy excursions all the time on your Internet marketing blog; the content should always be relevant to your theme and must always have a target audience.
Posted by Amrit | Tags: Content Writing, Online Content
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September 12th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
[...] 10 ways to get regular content for your website or blog is an excellent article with practical tips on getting content for your website or blog. This is an excellent article to read if you are stuck for ideas and need to trigger some more. [...]
September 18th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
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November 17th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Great post. I particularly like point 5. Thanks Amrit.
January 23rd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
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February 23rd, 2009 at 1:09 am
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March 19th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I really like to use content writers to publish material when I am having writer’s block. There fresh content helps to re-energize my writing.
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June 11th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
This article is excellently written and provides really useful information on sustaining traffic without depending on search engines.
We all know that man is a social animal and he likes to flock around. That is the only reason why social networking websites are getting such a huge amount of traffic. Man by instinct likes to talk about his ideas and what he thinks etc etc. For the same reason the FM radio stations are making all programs interactive by using the phone in process. So if you talk people will flock. Once you get a traffic from a search engine then you dont have to depend on the search engines to sustain the traffic.
I found a very good resource for driving search engine traffic at : http://www.freelancing-on-net.com/seo.php Now once you get the traffic it is upto you to sustain it. Remember FREE still works. If you can offer free goodies to your visitors you can attract them.
If you are passionate about content writing then you can point your browser to this resource too :-
http://www.freelancing-on-net.com/content_writing.php
Search engines also give you targeted and specific traffic in your area of interest. So by all means they will stay in your website. They might even subscribe to your RSS feeds. This gains you regular traffic.