But please don’t take this to simply be a rant because my real goal is to actually help anyone who has struggled with creating their own content.

Here’s the back story…

For the past couple of weeks, I have been chasing a woman who has relentlessly taken it upon herself to publish the content of others, while making it appear as though she wrote it. She does this on a daily basis, across 4-5 websites and perhaps plenty more. One website is her own and the rest are blogging networks, so it’s actually a little difficult to track down all the copying and pasting she’s been doing.

Anyway, I have made some headway with the help of a few other people and got (most of??) my content removed, but it appears she is putting her focus into other victims for now. She continues to use her same method of copying content and making it look like she wrote it with a little link at the bottom that links to the original source. She’s just doing it with other people’s content now and that still makes me angry because it’s absolutely and undeniably wrong particularly because she is trying to position herself as some type of blogging / content expert.

Even when confronted by a concerned online publisher, she indicated she felt she is doing nothing wrong because she gave credit to the original source of the content. After all, the content wouldn’t be on the Internet if the creators didn’t want it republished everywhere, right? Of course not…that’s the lamest excuse for copying content ever.

I have spent way too much time chasing this woman around for two reasons:

1. I want to protect my other fellow online publishers from copyright infringement.
2. I don’t want her to spread the misinformation that what she is doing is okay. It is simply NOT okay.

With that in mind, I’d prefer to stop complaining about someone who is eventually going to burn herself out and turn this into a positive message for our readers instead. If you struggle to create fresh content for your site on a regular basis, there is no need to resort to such tactics.

Of course, I realize that I am probably preaching to the choir because I know that when many of our readers struggle with content creation, they go through legitimate means to get things done. However, I also know that many others feel paralyzed to do anything because they’re not sure how to get around the obstacles they face in regard to publishing content.

First, a Refresher on What’s Not Okay:

• Never copy articles or blog posts from another website if you don’t have permission. It doesn’t matter if you credit the original source or not.

• Never take articles from an article directory like ezinearticles.com or freeaffiliatearticles.com without including the full and clickable byline and following ALL of the directory’s terms of use.

• Never take somebody else’s and rewrite it paragraph by paragraph. It is OKAY to do research from various sources (and credit them in your work) and create your own content, but it is NOT okay to simply say what someone else has in a single blog post and reword it.

Now, What to Do if Writing Regularly (or at all) is a Struggle for You:

• Blogging is not a race and it’s not a matter of “he who has the most [blog posts] when he dies wins”. Volume helps for growing traffic, but if you don’t have an idea for every day of the week, realize there are so many other more important things you can be doing for your business.

• If you don’t fancy yourself a writer, hire a ghostwriter. Sure, this costs money, but this IS your business after all. You can use a writer to do all your content, some of it or just fill in the gaps here and there.

• If you don’t have the budget for a ghostwriter or are looking for more volume, use PLR (we have some here and here). You can publish it as is, edit it for your purposes or use it to supplement your own original content. It IS content that you can purchase the rights to and there is no need to credit the original author. It’s yours to use within the guidelines set out by the PLR publisher.

• Use articles from directories like ezinearticles.com or freeaffiliatearticles.com, but remember you must include the full clickable byline and follow all the terms of use.

• If you want original content for free or cheap, enlist guest writers who will publish content in return for a byline and/or a small fee. Publishing the content of others shows you as a great source of information from a wide variety of sources.

If You Still Don’t Want to Spend Money or Publish Other People’s Content with Full Credit

I get it, not everyone has the budget to pay for content and they may also be weary of using guest writers or free reprint articles because the focus goes to someone else’s business. If that’s the case, here are a few tips for you.

• Stick to markets where you are at least knowledgeable. It’s one thing if you struggle with writing, but you actually know what you’re talking about. It’s entirely another if you can’t write well AND you don’t know what you’re talking about either. People can overlook grammatical issues if they are getting great advice.

• Publish in other mediums including video and audio. If you speak better than you write, SPEAK. If you want to create written content from your video and audio recordings, transcribe the content.

• Photography and other images. If you’ve got photography skills or an artistic flair, use this to your advantage to help yourself stand out in your niche.

• Take courses to improve your writing skills. If English is your second language, basic grammar and writing courses will help you immensely. If you struggle with writing compelling content, learn about copywriting and effective content marketing. You can start with our free course here.

• Practice. Just like with all things in life, you get better with practice. Don’t decide that because writing is struggle today that it will be a few months from now. Practice, practice, practice.

If you want to be a content publishing success, you’ve got to work at it and you’re probably going to be shelling out some cash along the way. It’s your business and it’s so worth it.

These are all valuable things. Absolutely.

But do you know what the most powerful list of all? Maybe you already know or you figured it out from the subject of this post. Yes, it’s your customers.

People who have purchased from you before:

• Have proven they are interested in your stuff
• Have shown they trust you
• Are more likely to buy again
• The more you impress them, the more likely they are to tell their friends about you

This means we need to treat these people like gold and planning content just for them can help you deepen that growing relationship.

Some Ideas for Keeping in Touch with Your Customers

• Surprise bonuses and extras: If you sell an information product, give them extra reports and tools to help them consume your product. If you sell a physical product, you can still give them extras like guides that show how to effectively or creatively use the product. For example, if you sell scrapbook supplies, give them ideas for creative layouts, tips for easy scrapbooking, etc.

• Email, email, email: Keep in touch with your customers by email regularly and give them special attention that the public doesn’t get. For example, give them priority access to products, get their input and offer special discounts.

• Other methods of communication: You can also use snail mail (remember that stuff?) to send your customers a thank you that’s sure to get attention. You can set up private groups on Facebook and Circles on Facebook to stay in touch through social media. There are so many possibilities.

Even though our customers may love our products, there are plenty of other businesses vying for their attention. Make sure YOU get that attention.

Planning Your Customer Content

Take some time (at least monthly) to plan your customer content. Ask yourself a few questions:

• What products will you be releasing?
• What special offers can you make your customers and what extra content can you provide them?
• Are their special holidays or occasions coming up? How can you tie these into the content and special offers you make?

Just like with everything else with marketing there is no set formula to planning content for your customers, but make it a conscious effort and know exactly what you’re going to do and deliver it.

Segment Your Customer Lists

Many shopping cart or ecommerce systems make it easy to separate your customers from your subscribers, but if yours doesn’t, make immediate changes so you can keep track.

You also need to go a step further than just having a customer list, you want to be email to mail customers who purchased specific products, so you can make them relevant offers. Remember when I posted about a mailing to 98 people beat a mailing to over 2500? This type of targeting works like crazy and your customers will appreciate receiving the most relevant offers.

So please, if you’re so busy growing all your prospect lists and forgetting about those who have already showed their loyalty and value to your business, you’re missing out here. Start making a customer content plan now.

While there is no right or wrong way to write in batches, here’s an approach that might work for you…

Work Batch #1: Topic Brainstorming

This is important. Each and every month (you can do it at an interval that suits you), I plan the content topics for every site that I own. I find that once one idea comes, several others follow and it’s easy to come up with 10 ideas in about 10 minutes.

This is in contrast with the common way of coming up with topics. If you don’t plan ahead and you sit down at the computer and say, okay, I’m going to write a blog post, what happens? Sometimes you come up with a topic right away, but many times you’ll be stumped. Then you’ll look around the web for inspiration, get stuck on Facebook and then get sucked into reading the ridiculous comments on a YouTube video. Before you know it, you’ve blown 20 minutes. If only you’d spent the time to brainstorm ahead of time. Then you could have avoided all that distraction.

(By the way, our 100 Topic Ideas packs might help you with brainstorming)

The key is to write down as many topics as you can think of. You can break large topics up into a series or build on stuff you’ve done previously. Write down whatever comes to mind and come up with at least as many ideas that you need for that particular month. If you have more ideas, even better. You can pick the best ones and you have done part of your brainstorming for the following month.

Work Batch #2: Content Scheduling

Now it’s time to go through your list and pick out the ideas you plan to use. If you post once per week, you need 4-5 ideas, depending on how that day of the week falls onto the calendar. If you write daily, grab 30 or so ideas and decide which you will publish and when. When you know your schedule ahead of time, you can ensure that you stay on top of things and have everything out on time.

I write my schedule on a list first, but then I input everything into my Google Calendar, so I don’t forget and I get reminders to get my butt in gear.

Work Batch #3: Write, Write, Write

Now here’s where people might start getting shy about the batch thing. The thought of writing 4, 6 or 10 emails or blog posts at once can seem pretty overwhelming. Well, you don’t have to do that your first time writing in batches, but as you get better and better at this, it will get easier for you.

There are a few reasons you should write in batches:

• Once you’re in the writing groove, there’s no need to stop. Think of yourself as an athlete who needs to warm up before they really get going. By writing one piece at a time, you’re probably in the warm up phase each and every time you sit down to write.

• When you write multiple pieces at once, it keeps what you’ve already written fresh in your mind. This gives you better opportunity to cross-reference your content and keep your reader engaged and wanting to read all your content, rather than just one piece.

• You can relax when it’s done. Could you imagine having all your blog posts for March done by March 10? It would be awesome, right? Then you can focus on building traffic, selling products and other pertinent business stuff.

Work Batch #4: Edit, Refine and Make it Pretty

While working on your writing batch, don’t worry so much about things being perfect. The idea is to get those ideas out onto the screen and worry about fixing things, adding images and everything else later. By doing this, you’ll write much faster and when you take time to purposefully edit your content later, you’ll end up with a more polished product. Editing and perfecting always works best when you’ve taken some time away from the work and return to it with fresh eyes.

Again, the approach you take it up to you and what works for you. But I will tell you with 100% certainty that if you carve out specific time for your writing activities, instead of trying to squeeze them into your work day, you’ll be much more productive.

And hey, seriously, if you want the easiest way to get your content in batches, check out our monthly content packs at All Custom Content. We’ll do the brainstorming, the writing and the editing for you.

We know that it’s much easier to edit someone else’s content than your own, so we’re here to serve!

Still, there may be times when you’ve written your own content and you’re in a hurry to get it out there. We hear you, so here are some tips you can use when editing your own content…

Finding Errors in Your Content

1. Read the content out loud. If you read it silently, you’re likely to overlook errors and even skim words and phrases without actually reading them. When you read it out loud, you force yourself to read every word and when you can hear the mistakes, it becomes easier to correct them.

2. Do use your spelling and grammar check. While they aren’t foolproof, they often point out errors you might not have noticed otherwise.

3. Check for common writing/typing mistakes like:

- Mixing up “their,” “there” and “they’re.” Most of us know the difference, but it’s easy to make the mistake when typing.

- Same with mixing up “your” and “you’re.”

- Using “it’s” instead of “its.” “It’s” is only used when you mean “it is”.

What about Editing for Style?

- For writing on the web, keep your sentences, words and paragraphs simple. Remove jargon or other words that make your writing unnecessarily complicated.

- Pay attention to words or phrases that are repeated too often, as they can stand out like a sore thumb. For example, if you say “awesome” in an email 3 times, it may be too much. Or if you say “Also” at the beginning of 2 sentences in one paragraph, you probably want to do some tweaking.

- Can you make your writing easier to consume by adding bullet points or subheadlines? Online readers have tiny attention spans, so make it easy for them to read through your content quickly.

Before You Publish:

When you’re done editing, take a break and come back to it in a few hours or the next day. When you view something with fresh eyes, it’s much easier to see any missed errors and to see how you can improve your content’s readability.

No, I’m talking about robots who write content for you (that would be silly!), but handy tools that make the writing process a whole lot easier.

Here are 3 tools you might want to check out. And yep, they’re all free…

#1: Zemanta

This is a very useful browser plugin that helps you find related content and Creative Commons images as you write your content. It automatically inserts the links, images and provides proper accreditation, making it easy to create richer content for your readers. You can also download it as a WordPress other blog platform plugin.

Watch the video below for a 60-second demonstration.

More info: Zemanta.com

#2: Post Ideas+

This WordPress plugin helps you keep track of your post ideas as you come up with them, and saves them separately in your WordPress control panel.

You can sort your ideas by a priority you set, by title and more. Then when you’re ready to use an idea, you can click “Write” to turn the idea into a post and it will delete it from your ideas list.

More info: Post Ideas+ Plugin Download Page

#3: TouchGraph SEO Browser:

This one is pretty cool. All you do is enter a topic and the browser will show you a visual diagram of popular related sites. It also shows a list of searches, search results from Google and the top sites for that topic. You can even enter additional topics and it will show you the relationship between those ideas. It’s great for brainstorming related ideas, finding sources of information and more.

More info: TouchGraph SEO Browser

Of course, if you’re just looking for topic ideas already done for you, we have 100 ideas in a variety of niches for you. Check them out here. Use those and a tool or two from above…and you may never run out of ideas again!