March 22nd, 2008

Once you’ve run a blog for a while you may find the ideas harder and harder to come up with. You know you need to update regularly and make the stories as relevant and interesting as possible, but that may seem like too much work. An easy way out of the problem is to buy articles from a content farm, but it’s not a very good solution.

A content farm is a site with articles you can purchase, or in some cases use for free, to quickly get tons of content to put on your site.

Free content is almost universally designed to promote someone else’s business. You may search for articles about cars but end up with stories promoting a specific dealership or the interests of a particular manufacturer. Worse still is that, in trade for the use of these articles, you will be required to insert links pointing back to the place you got them from.

Unless you’re in the business of promoting other web sites for free, this is not something you should be doing.

Paid articles from content farms is even worse. Not only will you usually be required to place the links pointing to other sites, but the articles you buy may appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of other sites already. Search engines can spot identical content, so unless what you purchase is completely original and has only been sold to you for your exclusive use, the benefit to search engines will be effectively eliminated.

If you can’t create your own content, or just don’t feel like it, the best solution is to hire a professional writer with pro-blogging experience. In all my years of working in this industry I’ve never heard anyone brag about the benefits of content farms except for the people who own them, and their goal is not your success, but their own success.

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