Today, you’ll discover different ways of getting high-quality content on your blog in as little time as possible.
You’re going to love what you’ll learn today. This is really fun and something I really enjoy.
Just to tease you a bit more, I showed one of the following techniques to my husband, and he immediately embraced the method and is now running a blog, using that technique alone. And it takes him what … five minutes maybe to get a high-quality blog post published?
Create Blog Content Using Article Directories
It is perfectly legal to use articles from article directories on your blog. In fact, the authors love it, when you do, as long as you stick to the rules.
There are very few rules to obey to.
The most important is to use the article as it is, WITH the resource box and all.
The second rule applies to Ezine Articles only. They allow you to use 25 articles per year per domain, but max 250 articles in total.
You can see all Ezine Articles rules for publishers here: http://ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html
Let’s get started.
You want to add new content to your blog, preferable daily. This will teach the search engines that your blog is very much alive and kicking, and that they should visit it regularly.
What this means to you is fast indexing – meaning your posts will show up in Google and elsewhere really fast.
When I publish a new post on my main blog, Google already has it indexed a few minutes later. That’s what it means to train the search engines to catch your sticks. Ataboy! Here’s your biscuit!
One way to get new content fast and effordless is by taking good articles from article directories and place them on your blog.
To get the most out of them, you have to do a couple of things, though.
- You have to come up with your own headline.
- You have to write an introduction.
- And it might be a great idea to add a conclusion as well.
Here’s a list of article directories:
There are a lot more, but for now you probably only need the two at the top.
Case Story
Let’s take an example. I’m going to find an article for my Toddler Parenting blog, so I head over to http://EzineArticles.com to do a search.
You can either check the categories, or do a search. I chose the latter and wrote “toddler parenting” in the search box.
This search brought a lot of results, but if you’re getting none, then try again with some other related words.
Choose the best article for the purpose among the results.
Even though Ezine Articles (EZA) is known for being very strict, sometimes you’ll find horrible articles on their site. Skip those. You’re aiming at having great articles, people want to read, on your blog.
Things you should look for in the articles:
- Lots of space.
- Short paragraphs.
- Bullets.
- Sub-headlines.
You’ll probably have to read through a few articles, before you find a great one. I found one that I liked, even though it didn’t have any bullets or sub-headlines in it. The content was great, and the article is nicely divided into paragraphs.
When you’ve found an article, you want to post on your blog, you have to scroll down and find the button that says “EzinePublisher”.
Clicking on this button takes you to a new window, where you get two options for copying and pasting the content of the article. I will use the second option – the one that has the right HTML tags. You need to copy from one point to another, though, in order to make it fit on your blog.
You should copy from the first <p> (right after <html>, <head> and <body> and until and including the last </p>. You’ll see it right before </body> and </html>
You’ll need to copy everything to a text editor first. EZA does not allow you to select only the part you want. Just click inside the text field, and copy (Ctrl+C). Paste it in a text editor like Notepad with Ctrl+V.
To select everything in between, you can click with your mouse where you’re supposed to start (the first <p>) and hold down the Shift-key, and then click with your mouse just after the last </p>, or you can just click and drag the mouse from the first <p> to the last </p>. Use the method you normally prefer.
Now, to publish this article, you need to log into your Blogger dashboard.
Then click on the orange Create New Post button.
Now you’re inside the same area, you used yesterday to write your first blog post.
Come up with a title for your new post. The title of my chosen article was “Dealing With Toddlers – Parenting Tips in Dealing With Your Toddlers”. I’m going to keep this as a headline inside the article, and use my own title here, and I chose “How to Deal With Toddler Tantrums”, because that’s what this article is about.
Before you paste the content of your clipboard (from the article), you need to make a little change. On top, to the left, you have two buttons: “Compose” and “HTML“. I want you to click on HTML.
There will be no visible different at first.
Now you can paste the HTML-code you copied with the article content.
Then click back to Compose.
Your article might need to be split up a bit to make it look like it did on EZA. For some reason, Blogger doesn’t seem to interpret HTML code as well as it should.
So add some extra space if needed.
Then point your marker to the beginning of the article and make a couple of line breaks.
Write your own introduction to the article. Later on, when you learn about keywords (not on this course), you’ll want to use this place for your own keywords.
Right now, we use it to make this article unique, even though it’s copied from an article directory.
Remember to insert a Jump Break. I put mine right before the headline of the article, I got from EZA.
You might want to add some kind of conclusion. Do you fully agree with the article? If not, why not? If you do, why? Leave a few personal words at the end.
And then hit Publish.
Congratulations! You’ve just published your first syndicated article.
Curation – You’re Going to Love This
Curation is not that different from what you just went through. You get the content from different sources, but the method is the same.
The word “curation” was originally used for collecting stuff, like curation of things from the stone age for museums, or curation of paintings for art galleries.
In these cases, the curator would gather the best pieces and share them with the visitors of the museums.
Lately, it has been related to “content curation”, but it’s still the same thing.
It means that you collect the best pieces of content, and you share it with your readers.
Where do you collect from?
The best places are the blogs you follow about your topic, but you can also do a search for your topic and see what quality content your search engine will bring you.
I’ll show you an example. I don’t follow any blogs, yet, about toddlers, so I’ll do a search for “toddler activities”.
You should be looking for blog posts that you can read right there, and where you don’t have to follow any links to learn more.
The first blog post I found contained a lot of toddler activities, but you have to click away from the article to find recipies and other things to make them work. So I skipped that and went on to the next.
Here I’ve found this article:
I love it, because it’s learning and playing at the same time. Awesome!
Now, I don’t want to copy everything from the article. There are no fixed rules for curation, but I want to be careful, and I’ll always copy as little as possible.
My husband copies more of the articles, than I do, and nobody has complained. He makes his own introduction and conclusion, and copies large part from the middle of the articles.
Use your own pictures. I know that some people copy the pictures from the blog post, but I don’t recommend it. It could get you into trouble. For now, we’ll keep our blog posts without pictures at all. When we get to optimizing the blog, you’ll see how you can add pictures. But for now, use only text.
In this case, there are comments to the blog post, and I’ve read them and I want to add some of those in my own words.
Just like you did before with the Ezine Article, you need to write your own title and introduction.
Write at least 80-100 words as an introduction.
Then copy the part of the article you want to include and paste it to a text editor like Notepad first. This is to avoid copying HTML codes from the original site.
Then copy from the text editor and paste it into your blog post.
Now, this next thing is important.
Select the text you just copied, and click on the button named Quote on your toolbar.
This will indent the text and separate it from the text you’ve written. If it doesn’t show that clearly, it’s because of the template you chose. Don’t fret. We’ll look at that when we optimize the blog.
Write your additions and a conclusion to the blog post.
And the second very important thing: You have to link to the source of your text.
You can do that at the end of the article, or you can use some of the text you’ve written as an anchor text for your link.
Anchor text? Now what is THAT?
It’s the text that shows in the browser, when you have a link. You’re probably familiar with the click here anchor text. That’s a stupid one, because it doesn’t reveal anything about what sort of site you’re linking to. It’s better to use some kind of short description, like: “I found this brilliant blog post at Toddler Mother’s Blog” and then use the words “Toddler Mother’s Blog” as your anchor text.
The way you create the link is this:
- Go to the place where you found the blog post you want to curate.
- Click somewhere on the address bar (it’s where you see the URL at the top).
- Hit Ctrl+C to copy the URL.
- Go back to the blog post you’re creating.
- Select the words you want to use as an anchor text.
- Click on Link.
- And paste the URL you just copied.
- Add a checkmark to “Open this link in a new window”.
- Click OK.
That’s it. You can now publish your first curated blog post.
Your Mission Should You Accept It…
Find one article from an article directory and post it to your blog the way I showed above, and do one curated blog post.
Have fun!