4.2 Writing Your Own Content

Writing your own content is often the hardest part about owning a blog. Writing your own content can be broken down into two phases: actually finding related things to write about-and then writing about them in a way that is both clear to human beings and clear to search engines.

You should begin writing your own content by finding numerous sources of information with which you can work. For instance, let's say your blog is about baseball. Before you begin writing anything, you will want to aggregate all of the best sources of information on baseball. You will want to find RSS newsfeeds about baseball. You will want to bookmark forums about baseball. And you will want to bookmark all authority sites and blogs that either talk about baseball or promote baseball products; this is one of the most important parts of writing your own content - finding sources.

Now that you have aggregated all of the information sources you will ever need, you will want to determine the average profile of one of your blog readers before you begin writing your own content. For instance, is a blog reader going to be someone who wants to purchase baseball equipment? Is the person a baseball fan? Or is the person someone who both plays and watches baseball? You will then use the answers to these questions to develop a format for your blog.

One example of a format for our blog in question is this: you will blog three times each week. On Sunday, you will use the forum as your source of information. Perhaps you will look for news-worthy discussions about the game or about equipment. On Tuesday, you will post again, but this time, you will use your feeds as a source. You will post about the latest information to hit the news about baseball. And on Friday, you will post yet again, but this time you might review baseball equipment; and relate it to a news item.

This being said, it is still important, when writing your own content, that you try to integrate important keyphrases into your posts. For instance, if your post is about baseball equipments, you may want to perform some keyword research and figure out what keywords would be best to insert in your update.