Regularly sharing new, high quality content on your website or blog is an effective way to increase your web traffic and create opportunities for your business.

But, creating all that new content takes a lot of time, right?

Well, actually… it doesn’t have to, not always!

The Australian Open Tennis Championships are currently on in Melbourne.  As a huge tennis fan I’ve been reading as many tennis related blogs and websites as I can find, as well as sourcing content for my own tennis blog, Grand Slam Gal.

The savvy-ness of some tennis bloggers reminded me that there are many different way to generate blog content, without having to create each new article yourself from scratch.

3 Time Saving Ways to Generate Content for your Website or Blog

1. News articles and posts by other blogs in your niche

One of the aims of sharing high quality content is to encourage other people to link to you. So, by sharing articles written by other bloggers on your own blog, you’re doing the author a favour.  Provided you link to them and use their content appropriately, you’re giving their article additional exposure, and helping their SEO.

When you find an article interesting or useful, share it with your readers.  As long as it’s relevant, it’s like they’ll find it interesting too!  Ideally write your own unique headline and introduction to the article and then add a link to the source of the full article.

Following on the tennis example, a tennis blogger might get their readers engaged by describing the interesting parts of a player interview, and then add a link to the full interview.  Or they might share an interesting photo (giving the correct photo credit where credit is due) and add their own caption or explanation of the pic.

That makes for great content that your readers love. With less work!

You could even consider regularly dedicating a whole blog post to sharing links to articles you’ve read, that you know your readers will find valuable.

Raholics is a blog for fans of Rafael Nadal, here’s an example of an article summarising the latest Australian Open headlines about Rafa. Perfect for people who want a quick and easy way to find all the latest Rafa news, in one place.

2. YouTube videos

Tens of thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, on pretty much any topic that you can think of.

There are funny videos, educational videos, promotional videos and videos types that shall remain nameless.

Sure you can make your own videos and put them on your blog. That’s an excellent way to market your business online. As another option, you can also share videos made by other people.

Because YouTube is all about video sharing, if you have access to the html code of your website (like you do with WordPress) it’s really easy to add a video from YouTube to your blog.

Here is the YouTube information on how to share a video on your blog. It mentions Blogger, but the same principles apply for WordPress.

Marketers that use YouTube effectively will have their logo, website address and/or a Call to Action included in their videos, so that they get maximum value from their videos being shared by others.

For example, if you scroll to the bottom of this article about the Rally for Relief you’ll see an Australian Open video that I added at the end of the article.  The video cleverly contains a link to “Subscribe to the Australian Open TV YouTube Channel”. This gives the Australian Open the opportunity to obtain new YouTube subscribers when their videos are shared.

In my book that’s savvy! Very savvy!

And on that note, if you particularly like the videos that are shared by a particular person or organisation, subscribe so that you get notified when they add new videos. More ideas for more new content!

3. Guest bloggers

If you have a blog of your own, writing a guest article for a blog that has a similar target audience to yours gives you exposure to a new group of the right type of people. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to promote your own blog via the guest blogger bio, and build a quality link.

For the blog owner, the benefits of sourcing guest blogs include:

• having a break from having to create all your own articles
• the opportunity to cover new topics that you might not have specialist knowledge about
• potentially freeing up your time to guest blog for others.

Find guest bloggers through your network on Twitter and Facebook, via your business contacts or even advertise in a publication with a wide reach like Source Bottle.

Web content comes in many shapes and forms; articles, videos, interviews, images and audio files, just to name a few.

Keep your blog interesting by using different types of content from different sources.  And save yourself some time while you’re at it!

What time saving ways do you use to generate content for your website or blog? Leave a comment and let us know.

Until next time

Search-Mel