One of the challenges of blogging is to come up with good posts that interest readers and keep them coming back. Sometimes I do not feel like I have good original wisdom. It is presumptuous to think I can have top quality original material all the time.
A second challenge is the time to blog. I run a $1 Billion dollar company so when I decided to blog I knew I needed to figure out how to do it efficiently. My blog is mostly about efficiency and time management; these are topics I study.
These two challenges can be solved with a simple concept. Copy.
Ideas to use when copying are:
1 – attribution. Give the credit together with the link to the original author.
2 – look for something you can add to. Blogs can be synergistic. Take a concept or part of a blog post and expend on it and give your opinions, insights or views. In many cases, this can start a flow of ideas that are enriched from the original post.
3 – You can use either the whole post or most usually just part of it and point people to the original.
4 – I usually ask for permission which has never been denied. After all copying helps the original author and garners them some readership. And of course never copy copy written material without permission (and most blogs are not copy written).
5 – The simplest place to find material to use to copy is by blog surfing although this can mean a lot of irrelevant material to filter. One source of free articles sorted by topic is www.isnare.com.
6 – In many cases the person you copy from will point a link back to you since it is flattering to them. Charles Caleb Colton said “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” (one trick on quotes is to look them up on www.brainyquote.com). These links to you can increase your traffic.
In summary, copying saves time and increases the quality of material on your site. It can even lead to traffic since in many cases you will get link backs from the original site.
