Let Someone Else Create Your Content and Don’t Pay Them a Penny to Do It!

Yesterday, I wrote about content and it’s place in helping to drive traffic to your site. But, many of us just don’t have enough hours in the day, not to mention the patience or skills required, to write all that content ourselves. So what do we do? Yes, you can hire a ghostwriter to churn out articles for you, but obviously there are expenses involved and you need to find a reliable writer to keep churning out the content.

There’s an even easier way to get the content you need and the best part is you don’t have to pay a dime for it. There are tons of people out there waiting to give you the content your readers need and today we’re going to cover ways you can get those people to do just that.

Message Boards

Message boards are full of people dying to give their opinions on all sorts of topics. Create a forum on your site and you’ll be amazed at the ideas that are sparked from and the discussions that occur on, them…all revolving around your market.

Reviews

Reviews are also a great way to add content to your site. If you’ve got a product or service for sale, why not allow your customers to submit their review of that product or service? Or post reviews of products through an affiliate link and allow your visitors to post their own opinions. This creates not only content, but if you’re doing your job right, it will also help boost sales because potential buyers can view the opinions of past customers and make a more informed decision on their purchase.

Comments

Allowing readers to comment on your blog or articles is another way to add content to your site. You are in giving your readers a chance to voice their opinions, while adding to the content you have given them with their own thoughts. You can then take those comments and expand on them in an article for your website.

Article Submission

Speaking of articles, adding a section for readers to submit their topic appropriate articles for placement on your site will create more targeted content to your site. For instance, if you have a health site for men, then set up an article bank on your site that allows other webmasters to add their articles upon approval. By doing this you are giving your visitors even more content to fill their need for information. Just remember to review the articles before you actually post them on your site to make sure they are in the scope of your business/site and something your readers will be interested in.

User Blogs

You can even go so far as allowing others to create their own blogs on your site. You’ll see similar things on iVillage.com and Squidoo.com. If you’re looking for a broad range of topics for a particular group, this can work very well. Squidoo is on a wide variety of topics for all kinds of groups and that can be a challenge, but iVillage has a common voice of women.

Social Networking

One final way to get people to add content to your site without paying for it is to go full blown with social networking. Of course we’ve all heard of the social networking giant, MySpace.com. By allowing their readers to create their own blogs and be “friends” on other members blogs, MySpace has set itself up with so much content that no matter what a person is searching for, they are bound to find a MySpace user with similar interests and quality information regarding that subject.

Disclaimer: It Takes Work!

Of course, it can be a challenge to get things going and getting people to participate, but I’ll be back Friday with tips to help you out with that too!