A blogger's challenge is to keep publishing original content to his/her readers. You want quality content. Compelling content.

So how do you get it other than squeezing out more ideas from your brain?

Well, look for ways for people to give it to you.

That's what I decided to do with one of my blogs, "Orange County Memories" (OCThen.com).

OCThen publishes the memories of people who lived and worked in Orange County, CA. Before "The OC" was a trendy place, it was rural living for most people. And this was only as recently as 40 years ago.

Since I'm someone who spent 23 years living in Orange County, I had a lot of memories myself. I started by focusing on a particular memory, such as my visit to the old "Japanese Village and Deer Park" in Buena Park. At that point, visitors trickling into the new blog read the article, and posted their comments about the same park as well.

I continued doing this, writing a new post for each memory.

I also posted a "Submit A Memory" article, and linked it from the navigation bar. In this article, I asked readers to post a comment, to this article, on anything they remembered about living or working in Orange County.

It worked. I fielded tons of comments. I then republished each comment as a new blog post. In effect, I had created a perpetual content generator. All I had to do was copy each comment into a new blog post of its own. No more brain-squeezing. It was as easy as copy and paste.

Each time I republish a comment as a new blog post, I delete it from the "Submit A Memory" article to avoid content duplication, preventing search engine penalties.

Here's an example of a comment that was posted to the "Submit a Memory" article, which I then reposted as a new blog post, and then subsequently removed from the "Submit a Memory" article...

http://www.octhen.com/2007/10/tustin-in-1950s.htm

And the best part about this, is that each comment is ORIGINAL content, and FREE content. I'm not violating any copyright laws. As long as I keep posting these comments as new blog posts, I can keep building an audience.  

Labels: Content Ideas