What is Content?

Content is King

burger and salad in bun

burger and salad

chocolate with cherry filling

Chocolate

People keep talking about “content” and saying “content is king”, but what exactly is content? Content is the chocolate that people gobble up, it’s the meat in the sandwich, the burger in the bun, the nut in the middle of the shell. It’s what people want, it’s nutritious information in the area that they need to find out something. Content can be:

  1. pictures, videos, photographs, cartoons or any kind of graphics, including the latest infographics.
  2.  words, a story, a cautionary tale, a “how to” set of instructions, a biography, a review of a book or an item, a recipe for a meal, a funny tale from everyday life, a series of health tips, exercise plans, inspirational or motivational quotes and many other items.
  3. Music
  4. Anything else that people might be interested in.

Where Do I Get Content?

infographic illustrating sources of content

Infographic sources of content

Content can be found anywhere in your everyday life, inspiration and information is waiting around every corner. And there is always someone who wants the information you are able to provide. Getting the information TO the person who wants it is a whole other set of articles: this one concentrates solely on where to get your information.

I want to write about something I don’t know about

OK, so writing about everyday life is fine and so is writing stories but you want to be able to write about things from which you will earn money? You have an idea for a website or blog (or several) on a topic you know very little about and you need content for it?

Research

Yes, the same work you had to do in school. Read books, surf the internet or watch films on a subject then create your own material about it. Takes a long time but it can be very worthwhile and  provides a LOT of value to your readers.

Buy It!

Yes, you can get someone else to do the work and you get the content to use as you wish. There are a GREAT many ways of purchasing content.

PLR – Private Label Rights

PLR is one of the cheapest ways of purchasing content. It is material (words, pictures, videos, graphics) covering a particular niche, such as dieting, weight loss, fitness, body building, health issues, relationships and many other subjects. The content may have been produced specifically for selling as PLR or it may be content that someone has used and now wants to sell on, while they create new content for themselves. With PLR material, you will need to rewrite the content because more than one person will have bought it.The seller will be trying to sell the material to as many people as they can, so make it your own by changing it round, writing it in your own style, etc. Quite often you may get an ebook that you can label as your own or you could divide it up into sections and use each section as a blog post. The seller will provide you with a list of your rights – what you can or cannot do with the material. Make sure you read it carefully and comply with the requirements.

Specify your Own Unique Articles

You can buy articles written on any subject (except for hate, gambling, porn, etc type articles) from ineedarticles. These articles can be written to your own specifications, you can even get an ebook written for you! Then you get the credit for the article – it is yours. I suppose you could say it is “Ghost-written”. This service can also rewrite articles for you, so if you have written your own article but aren’t sure of your English or if you want your PLR rewritten, then this service can provide you with rewrites of your own material. There is also a free linked service called Unique Article Poster that will post these specially written articles to your own blog.

Research Tools

If you want to create your own content, especially in specialised areas where there is no PLR available, there are some tools you can use to help with your research and Instant Article Wizard is one of them. Instant Article Wizard (IAW) will build material from different websites based on the keywords you ask it to search for. Say, for instance, you want to write an article on breadsticks. You may not find any PLR available on this and doing a great deal of research is going to take a LOT of your time. A tool like IAW can be set going and you can come back later and pick up the research. NOTE: this tool scrapes content from the web, so you will get some content from one web site and some from others. You MUST rewrite it. IAW includes parts of a special tool called a spinner that helps you with rewriting. IAW finds it easier to get content in some areas than in others. Firstly, there must be content already on the web for it to pick up. So there is no point in using it to try to get the latest information on the newest product. No one will have written about it, so no information will be available for IAW to curate. Secondly, IAW picks up words. If your subject or the sites that cover it use lots of pictures and few words, eg auto sales or real estate, you may not get any content. For concrete items that have been around a while, such as information on illnesses or common tech machines, you can get a LOT done by using IAW.  Here is a typical paragraph picked up by IAW on “breadsticks”:

You can find breadsticks in most supermarkets and specialty food stores. They are relatively easy to make, but many people prefer to buy them from bakeries and supermarkets. My favourites include garlic breadsticks and DiGiorno pizza and breadsticks. Breadsticks with marinara sauce, is even nicer than pizza!

Please note that this paragraph is NOT copied from anywhere, as I rewrote it before publishing it here, as you will need to do, if you use Instant Article Wizard. If you find an identical copy of the sentence in italics on the web, then it has been copied from here! When using Instant Article Wizard, you may find it useful to purchase deathbycapcha as Google MAY slow down your other surfing if you use IAW a lot. Purchasing Deathbycapcha helps to keep your content searches flowing along nicely. You add the link into IAW in the settings.

Content Machines

pizza

pizza

There are some tools you can purchase that will provide very large numbers of articles on a restricted though large range of subjects. and Article Builder (AB) is an excellent example of these. You will not need to rewrite content you get from AB. Article Builder covers many topics, such as health, acne, weight loss, automobiles, real estate, business, finance, recreation and sport, as well as others, all the most popular subjects. The material in it was provided to the program by a great many writers on the subjects included and the material they wrote is spun to provide a new article every time. The material is 75% unique and this is more than sufficient to avoid any suggestion of duplicate content. The articles you get from Article Builder are what is known as “tip based” and you can get 400 articles a day if you purchase Article Builder. The articles can range in length from 300 to 1,000 words. Here is a short example of an article from AB:

Remember to speak to your potential customers as people. You may run a business or corporation; however, this does not mean you need to speak like one. Trust is built from personal relationships. If your potentials see you as a person who cares about their needs and how your product meets them, it will go a long way in establishing this trust. Update your blog with new and interesting information frequently. If you’re having a promotion or a sale, make sure to post it to your blog. Important news should also be kept in your blogs. be sure to include that information in your blog.

This article is totally unchanged. You may well find articles on-line including these sentences or phrases but if you obtain a long article, the identical sentences will come from different sites and there will not be any duplicate penalty for you. You can always rewrite it a bit if you want. You also have the option of obtaining superspun articles, though these are not available in every category. Here is a superspun article on acne:

Look at your diet critically; perhaps it is a source of your acne. While eating junk food does not directly cause acne, it can prevent you from consuming other foods that are better sources of necessary nutrients, which can help prevent breakouts. So, if possible try to eat more lean meat, vegetables and fruits to ensure your body is getting all of the vitamins and minerals your skin needs to function correctly. It is essential to drink lots of water. Water is the best for you, sugar drinks and coffee only make your thirst worse. If you are bored of water, add a juicing regimen to your diet to spice things up a bit. Fresh homemade juice is full of vitamins, and in contrast to sugary store-bought beverages, is great for your skin.

Again, you will find sentences online containing these words but they are on different sites and won’t incur a penalty.

Article Builder can post directly to your self-hosted blog automatically on a schedule you choose, so your blog can be populated with articles while you sleep!. Don’t use the automatic upload on the free blog sites, they will delete your account, however, you can download the articles and post them yourself.

ferret

ferret

Another content provider is called Content Ferret, It could be considered as a half-way house between Article Builder and Instant Article Wizard. This content tool provides you with snippets of content, ranging from 100 words up to maybe 300 or 400 words. You can download your choice of snippets and work them into an article of your own. There are a great many snippets (thousands) available on some subjects. For instance, weight loss is a very popular area. Under the category of weight loss, there are 25 sub topics. You can also add in your own sub topic if you want. I clicked on weight loss and then chose the sub topic of “green tea”. there were 2,952 snippets available, all including weight loss and green tea. Another sub topic was “weight loss programs” and this had 2813 snippets. The sub topics are divided into sub-sub topics, so you can drill down very quickly to find something you need. I tried adding the sub topic “coconut” in the weight loss category and got 278 matching snippets. Here are a couple of snippets from ContentFerret:

Coconut water is a useful drink because it can help you maintain a normal body temperature and it also makes transfer of oxygen and different nutrients to the cells more efficient. Drinking coconut water can also make your metabolism more efficient which means it is a favourite drink for those who want to lose some weight.

It is a very interesting liquid, it is so similar to blood plasma, that is has been used in blood transfusions and soldiers in WWII had their lives saved by using it in place of blood plasma, because it mixes with blood easily.

Again, when you get these snippets, you need to rewrite them because they have been scraped from the net. The snippets above have been rewritten, so they are NOT scraped content. If you find these on the net, then they have been copied from THIS site! ContentFerret is a very useful tool and you can get a number of snippets of your choice downloaded very quickly, ready to rewrite quickly into an article.

fractal spinning

fractal spinning

Spinning

You were taught spinning in school whether you know it or not. Did your teacher ever ask you to write out a paragraph, “In your own words”? That’s spinning. Did your teacher ever tell you to go through your essay and replace the adjective “nice” with more descriptive and appropriate adjectives? That’s spinning. Did you ever do a précis, or a summary, of someone else’s work? That may have been spinning. Have you ever told a child your own version of a famous story or fairy tale? That’s spinning. Spinning is taking someone else’s content and rewriting it in your own words. Here is a spun version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears:

Three bears, living in a forest house, took a walk to let their morning porridge cool. A nosey girl, called Goldilocks, peeped into their empty house and wandered round, sitting on chairs, tasting the porridge and finally sleeping in the beds. When the bears arrived home, Goldilocks ran away, leaving a mess behind her.

That is recognisably “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, though it is unlikely to look the same as any other version.

There are tools you can use for spinning, to help you make content totally different from the original. And more than that, a spinner can create MULTIPLE versions of your content, so you can populate a number of blogs simultaneously with different content. Let’s look at Goldilocks again.

That first sentence could be rewritten as: “The three bears’ porridge was hot, so they left the house and went for a walk to let it cool.”  The second sentence could be rewritten in two sentences as: “A little girl called Goldilocks entered their house while they were away. She tried their porridge and ate up all of Baby bear’s, then broke a chair and fell asleep in bed.” The third sentence could be rewritten as: “Goldilocks woke up when the bears returned and ran away.” With a spinning tool, that would give you 8 different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. There are 8 possible versions because each sentence now has two alternatives, sentence 1 or sentence 2. This is repeated three times, so there are 2 X 2 X 2 possibilities = 8. The Best Spinner helps you manage spinning of both kinds. It will help you totally rewrite a piece of writing and it can help you make multiple versions of it. We currently have 8 versions of Goldilocks just by changing sentences round. What if we also changed the words and phrases in those articles multiple times? For instance, instead of “porridge” you might use “Breakfast Cereal” or “Boiled oats”. Instead of “house”, we could use “cottage”, “dwelling”, “home” etc. You would get tens and hundreds of different articles from the one seed. The Best Spinner makes it easy to do that, as it has thousands of alternative words and phrases already available for your articles.