On Blog Consulting we are currently bringing you a series of articles on the big three of blogging musts; time, links, and content.  All three are necessary for your blog to be a success.  Today we will spend a little time talking about content.

You need to be able to write a steady stream of interesting, informative articles on your site if you want to generate traffic.  The articles should be 200 – 400 words long.  Whenever possible include a picture or short video of related content.

Oops, that’s a BLT not TLC.  You get the idea, however, and I bet now you would really like a BLT, especially if it is late at night.  Anyway….

Does that mean that people who can’t write very well won’t have successful blogs?  No.  There are some other ways to add content.  You could hire someone to write articles for you.  We offer an article writing service on Blog Consulting for that very reason.  You can also get free articles that you can reprint on your site.  To utilize one of the reprint services you will usually need to give the writer two or three links which are included in the article.  It can be a good trade off if you just can’t keep up with a reasonable article flow.

The problem with using reprints is that it isn’t original content.  There is a lot of debate about how Google deals with duplicate content.  Some believe that it doesn’t have much of an impact.  Others believe that duplicate content will ruin your site.   I write my own content.  Sometimes I do a rewrite and put it on one of my other sites or I market it to reprint websites so I can get the links back to my site.  The one thing you should never do is take other people’s content without giving them credit or links or both.