Content, especially written content, is the backbone of the web.

It drives traffic to your website or videos.

But how can you create good content for your website? Without slaving over a keyboard for hours on end only to write a handful of words.

The most obvious answer to this is to know your subject.

It’s an order of magnitude easier to write about something you know than it is to have to go off and do lots of research before you can even type a word on a page.

When I’m writing a post like this, it will almost always be about something I know a lot about. The only research I need to do is to double check any facts and figures quoted and that’s usually a simple search on somewhere like Google.

Apart from that, I just type.

And that’s the method I’d recommend that you use too.

If you’re not a fast typist then there a few options:

• Type anyway! You’ll get faster as you go along. My typing speed has improved over the years even though I’m still just using two fingers to type and my thumb to press the space bar. And liberal use of the backspace key to sort out any typos that happen. Sure, I could learn to touch type but it’s often the case that my fingers are waiting for my mind to come up with the next bunch of words so I’m not certain that would improve things.
• Become a dictator. Windows has had speech recognition built in since at least XP. Microsoft aren’t overly proud of it and it’s not switched on by default so you need to do a quick search to find out how to install it. It’s not as slick as something like Dragon Naturally Speaking but it doesn’t have the price tag either. Which means you can find out whether it will speed you up or slow you down before maybe taking the plunge with a paid program. Mac users will have a similar built-in option.
• Pay someone else. This depends on how much you care about your site. For a personal site like this one, I would only write my own content. For a site I was less concerned about, I use a service like iWriter. Prices vary according to the quality score of the writers you’re putting your project in front of. Most of the time I’ll use their basic option but sometimes (especially if I’m feeling too lazy to edit the articles that come back) I’ll use the next level of writer – Premium – and that normally works fine. Their prices go up according to the level you select and they’ve just introduced a top level – Elite Plus – that only allows their very best writers to bid. I’ve not tried it but the pricing ($30 for a 500 word article) suggests the quality should be top notch. The snag with outsourcing is that unless you edit the article quite a bit there’s a disconnect between the “voice” the outsourced article has been written in versus the “voice” your website has been written in. This will subconsciously affect your visitors so it’s worth thinking about before you decide to go down the outsourcing route.

The other thing you need is a list of topics to write about.

That again comes down to knowing your subject.

But it also comes down to knowing what other people in your market want to know about.

Beginners are a large market and they normally have the same questions.

If you’re a member of a forum in your niche then these are usually the questions that you sigh heavily when you see yet another post about the exact same topic.

If you mutter under your breath something along the lines of “use the search!” then that’s a beginners question and is a great topic for a series of articles on your site.

Pay attention to how the question is asked just slightly differently each time. That’s why the on-site search didn’t work as the search on most forums is quite primitive.

It also means that, over time, you can create a number of articles on your site and a corresponding number of videos pointing back to your site using each of those variants.

And when you seem to run out of variants, put a few searches into Google and notice the extra variations that show up as you type and that get returned in the titles and the short descriptions that show up on the first page or two of the results.

Each variation represents a slightly different way of asking the same question and each variation can be answered slightly differently to take account of that.

Personally, I find that if I write too many articles on the same topic in a very short space of time I get repetitive. So I like to have a number of topics that need to be covered and mix my writing between them. That way I have a few days break between writing on the exact same topic and almost always come at it from a fresh angle.

If you’re posting most days to your website I think it’s worth taking the same kind of approach.

For example, if you’re writing a new post every weekday, have a list of between 5 and 10 topics that you regularly cover. Then pick whichever topic grabs your attention today and write about it.

Don’t worry that you may have written about the same topic yesterday or it may have been a month since your last post on that topic.

That’s human nature.

And don’t worry that people will find your website repetitive – they’re unlikely to go through every page of your site and even if they do they’re unlikely to go through it in date order.

Just write about whatever grabs your attention today.

I use emails as a pointer on what to write about.

And I browse forums in my niche for more inspiration and to get an idea of any current topics that I know about but haven’t (yet) got much content about.

That’s because things tend to go in waves – there’s almost a flavour of the month element in most markets – and it’s always a good idea to ride along with current trends as there’s automatically more traffic for them.

If you need more help creating content, take a look at this product.

And if you’ve really convinced yourself that you’re not a writer, this one’s for you.