Young Entrepreneur Blog

Many experts believe that “content is king!”, so it is a shame that it is also costly and time consuming. If you are not a naturally gifted writer then it can also have a negative effect on your site.

There are numerous article and ezine sites where you can get thousands of relevant articles for your site, but these articles will also feature on numerous other websites, and from an SEO perspective this is not a good idea.

To get content for your site you need to follow one of my golden rules of business… put yourself in the other persons shoes.

I will explain…. You want content! but guess what, the writers don’t care about what you want, the only person who cares about what you want is….. YOU!

So to get anything in life you have to see things from the other perspective, and find what THEY want.

I am not going to go into social psychology, but lets just say that nobody does anything on this planet without a motive! and there is no bigger motive for most people than good old fashioned money.

Offering $5-$10 per article may get you some interest, but it is likely that the quality of the content will not be of a decent standard. So why not offer $200 as a prize for the best article?

This may sound like a more expensive option, but note that most people will put more effort into something that MAY earn them $200 than a guaranteed $5. Also, if you were to attract 50 writers who wrote two articles each then that works out at $2 per article. Bargain!

The only downside to the above technique is that you generally need a fairly popular website to get full value from this method. If you only have 50 readers then the most you can hope for is 50 writers, but in reality you are going to appeal to less than 1% of your readers.

So what if you have a popular website, but you don’t have the funds to give $200 per month?

In this instance you may consider a revenue share deal. This gives the writers a % of future profits from the site. If you don’t think this technique works then check out epinions.com

What if my site is new and I have no funds?

If you are just starting and have no budget then do not worry, simply find a way of offering exposure to your writers. Perhaps those writers also have a blog, why not promote that blog on your site in exchange for articles. Or, if you post at a popular related forum then add that writers website into your forum signature. This costs you nothing and gets his site seen by thousands of people.

Just remember the Retiredat21.com golden rule…. put yourself in the writers shoes. What would it take to get you to write for another site? find that answer and then implement it.

Dean