I have talked about sourcing content in a few different places on this site but how do you know when you should source content?  Maybe you aren’t even making enough money to source content, what then?  Well, if money is the issue, just write the stuff yourself.  Otherwise here are a few pointers for sourcing content for your niche websites.

Do You Know What You Are Talking About?

So you just found a great keyword, and it passed all the criteria Court and Mark tought you at The Keyword Academy, what now?  If you don’t know squat about how to remove warts how are you going to build a niche site around it?  If you are making money with your niche sites you should consider sourcing the content for some of the more obscure niches you are targeting and that’s where services like TextBroker come in handy.  It just might be that you have found a great keyword that is easy to rank for but you do not have the funds to source the content for your niche site.  If that is the case than you are going to have to buckle down, do the research and write your own content.  Stay away from scraping for content or copying and pasting unless you plan on using the site for support reasons.  If you are serious about getting a site to rank and making money with it, then you will have to either source or write decent unique content that can pass a human inspection.  I find that for topics that I am not familiar with, sourcing the text is best.

When Time is a Factor

There have been times when I have found so many good keywords to go after that I just could not write the stuff fast enough.  I like to do niche site building in stages so I tend to do heavy keyword research, pinpoint what I am going to target and buy domain names in bulk for my niches sites.  I want all of these domains to have live sites on them like YESTERDAY, so I need the content fast.  I drill down on each of keywords (using Google’s Keyword tool) that I have decided to make focused niche sites for to find out what the article topics will be, then I put in an order at TextBroker for each niche site.  Five posts for each niche site is good but it really depends on the keyword and how deep you can go with it.  If you can have ten or fifteen posts for your niche that will give your site that much more authority, why not do it?  Longtail organic search results just make money so go after them!

Example of what the hell I just said:  Say I want to go after a niche site on the Blackberry Storm (I wouldn’t by the way.)  I would plug in ‘blackberry storm’ into the keyword tool, take the five or so highest searched for related keywords and build a site around those.  And since I am building niche sites in bulk I would need to source those articles.

While I am waiting for my content to be written and submitted to me I am installing wordpress on each of the domains, using different themes for each domain, hosting domains with different hosting accounts and pretty much making it very difficult for a competitor or Google to tie any of these domains to one another.  I do this for each domain in one session.

After I have each wordpress install done I use an FTP to go in and add the few plugins that I want, All in One SEO, All in One Adsense, phpBay (for my eBay stuff, not on every niche site) and maybe RSS Footer if I plan on putting more content up in the future.  I have these plugins ready to go in a folder that I just transfer over via FTP.  Then I update any that need updating and then activate them.

After that I work on some generic monetization and tracking stuff, again doing this in bulk for all of the domains I am about to develop.  Statcounter, adsense channels with All in One Adsense, whatever it is you might use for your niche sites.  You can use Google analytics to but I generally don’t at first unless I plan on making a rather large site.  If a site starts getting decent traffic, then I consider throwing in some Analytics code.

Now I go into each site and create the posts.  For example if I am going to create five articles for my Blackberry Storm niche site I spoke of earlier, I will create 5 posts using the terms I found with Google’s Keyword tool.  I will find an image for each of those posts and optimize the names and alt tags and captions.  I know some people say image traffic sucks and doesn’t convert at all, but my analytics account tells me otherwise, so I optimize for image results.  (Don’t get me wrong, Court has tought me a ton, and I am a happy TKA member, I just don’t think he cares about $5 a month per site.  I do.)

Then I do any editing these themes might need.  I try to take out all instances of ‘Date Posted’ and ‘Author Name’ and footer links.  Sorry theme builders, I just hate footprints on my sites and really I am doing you a favor, I mean sitewide footer links?  C’mon.

After doing all that work I’m typically starting to see my articles come in and ready for me to approve and stuff the articles into the posts that I already setup.

When To Not Source Content for Your Niche Sites

Don’t source content for niche sites if you are broke.  Don’t source content for super obscure stuff that not many people are likely to know about.  Don’t source content if you have found an amazing keyword that has high traffic potential and no competition.  I might sound a bit paranoid here but I don’t want to chance giving away my great keyword to some TextBroker writer.  Don’t source content for hubpages, ezinearticles, goarticles or any other parasitic sites.  I usually use articles that I have sourced and rewrite them for these types of sites, kind of like writing a UAW article set.  In short you only want to source content for your money sites.  If you have a lot of money to spend then, by all means source the other stuff to.