Article Surfing Archive

How to go about sourcing content for your sites.

Well the most obvious but also the most time consuming way to do this is to write the content yourself, although it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. Do you realise that if you read 3 entire books on one subject you've pretty much set yourself up as an expert? By doing this chances are that you will know more than 99% of the population, of course there will be some people out there who are extremely well educated on your subject (or niche) who have spent years studying it, you can't hope to compete with them but don't let those few stop you getting started.

If you don't have the time or patience for that then there's always the internet to turn to for research. Spend several hours carefully and selectively reading up on your chosen niche, keeping bookmarks and taking notes and you'll be surprised at how much you'll know by the end of it. Remember that it is OK to use bits and pieces of other people's work as long as you don't copy large tracts of their work verbatim. You can always use a tool such as http://www.copyscape.com to check if your written work has likely infringed someone elses copywrite, if it has then just go back and make changes and keep checking until your work is sufficiently unique.

A way that many people source their content is through the free article directories. The terms of service vary for each of the article directories so you need to check them before using them to ensure you comply. Basically you are allowed to reuse the content on your own sites provided that you do not alter the articles and leave all the links intact, including the resource box for the author. This is a good and perfectly legitimate way to build good quality content, however you would do well to mix up the free articles with some content sourced from other places to help your site be unique and different to other sites. After all with the number of internet marketers around these days who knows how many people populate their sites with mostly free articles. Although nobody knows for sure how the Google duplicate content filter works you are well advised to not rely solely on the article directories as this will also provide a richer experience for your site visitors. Some of!

the better article directories are:

* GoArticles - http://www.goarticles.com/

* Ezine Articles - http://www.ezinearticles.com/

* Article City - http://www.articlecity.com/

* Isnare - http://www.isnare.com/

If you're really serious about providing a "content rich" website and don't want to do the writing yourself then there are 2 main ways that you can buy articles suitable for the niche(s) you've chosen. The first and generally less expensive way (at least on a per article basis) is to join a Private Label Rights article membership site. There are quite a few of these and there is a great deal of variation amongst them. The general principle is that you pay a monthly membership fee, usually in the vicinity of $20-$50 a month and you'll get supplied with perhaps 50-200 articles a month. You are entitled to do anything you like with these articles, from using them exactly as is to rewriting as much or as little as you want. Also these membership sites usually restrict the number of members that can be a part of it at any one time. These membership restrictions can be quite low, less than a hundred to several hundred, so you need to be careful about exactly what you're paying for!

. Usually the price is a trade-off between more-exclusive/more-expensive and less-exclusive/less-expensive. Remember the more memberships available from the site the more people are out there trying to compete with you with the same content. Of course you can rework the content either manually or with the aid of software andd thus try and keep your content unique that way.

The final way that you can source content for your site is to pay someone to write exclusively for you. This way you have more control and can guarantee that your content is unique. A common price you can expect to pay is around $5 per 500-1000 word article, however if you want quite a few articles you may be able to negotiate a lower rate with a writer. Some good sites for finding a writer are:

* guru.com - http://www.guru.com

* rent a coder - http://www.rentacoder.com

* eLance - http://www.elance.com

Be careful to check out the credentials of each writer that gives you a quote. Also be aware that guru.com and rent a coder give you the option of escrow payments giving you a greater level of safety in terms of not paying when the writer does not deliver what you wanted.

In the next article I will discuss the importance of adding dynamic content to your websites.