Content Development: What Is The Best Method For Getting Content?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

When it comes to content development, there are several ways you can develop content for your website. You’ll be surprised at which one I’m about to tell you is the best way. Here’s a list of possibilities for you the next time you decide you need content for a website:

Purchase original, ghostwritten content
PLR articles
Write it yourself
Steal or scrape content from another website
Use free article from article directories
Use a revenue sharing model and pay writers who contribute content to your site
Invite other webmasters and freelancers a link back to their websites in exchange for their original content

There may be more ways to obtain content for your website beyond these, but these are some of the most popular ways webmasters have done so. Let’s take a look at the benefits and the drawbacks of these methods:

Hire a ghostwriter – Ghostwriters, if you get a good one, are trained professional capable of producing great content, but this option could get costly for you.
PLR articles – Low cost, but you could end up with rehashed duplicate content or spend a lot of time reworking and rewriting articles to suit your purposes.
Write it yourself - Free, but time consuming.
Scrape content from other websites – Generally considered unethical and frowned upon by a large number of webmasters. While the content is free it is also duplicate content and if your website ends up ranking higher than the website on which the content originally was made available then you are stealing more than just content. You are also stealing search engine positioning. You’ll get a bad reputation fast for this practice.
Free articles from directories – Very acceptable and widely done. The benefits are good, but they only go so far. You get free content, but you’ll have to provide a link back to every author’s website, which serve as exits from your website to theirs. Free articles work best as supplementary to your original content.
Revenue sharing - Not a bad plan. You get content and the authors, if they stick around, get a little pay as well. If you don’t do a good job at marketing your website to get the traffic numbers up then you won’t make a lot of money and neither will your writers. If they don’t make any money they’ll give up on you and your content will dry up.
Exchange links for exclusive and original content – This is a highly valuable practice and I recommend it, but you’ll need to be selective in the articles, and the authors, you choose. Since these authors are agreeing to provide you with original content not available anywhere else, you don’t have the drawback that you have with free articles from directories, namely, that your content may also appear in several high profiles places on the Internet, rendering it less valuable as content.

Each of these methods of content development, as you can see, provide some benefit and some drawbacks. Depending on the method you choose, there could be more drawbacks than benefits. But the method that is best for most websites is for you to write your own content. Who knows your product better than you do? Only you can write in your own voice and convince people that you are worthy of their business. A ghostwriter can write well, but they can’t be as personal and intimate in their approach as you can. That’s why I recommend you write your own content. But if you can’t write, have difficulty spelling, or don’t have the time, then hiring a ghostwriter is a good option.