Quality Web Content Is Easy to Obtain. Web content management is one of the tasks every webmaster has to deal with. Quality web content is one of the prerequisites for the success of a site and that is why cheap is certainly not better.
On the other hand, a site is like a content monster – no matter how much a webmaster feeds it, there is a constant need for new content. This is more than natural and a webmaster just has to accept it and adapt to it. There are many ways to get web content and the three most important ones are to produce it in-house, to outsource it, or to get it for free.
Generally large sites have staff content producers and this way the constant supply of fresh, quality web content is more or less guaranteed. However, producing content in-house is not cheap and if the demand for content drops, this leads to increased costs without increase in revenue.
One of the solutions is to employ part-time content producers but it also has its downsides. As a result, webmasters are looking for more flexible ways to employ content producers – for instance to outsource web content development to third parties.
Outsourcing to freelancers and other third parties is the most popular way for small and midsized websites to get constant supply of fresh content. Outsourcing web content development is generally cheaper and depending on what providers a webmaster selects, it could also be the way to quality web content.
There are special sites, such as the paid freelance bidding sites Guru and Elance, where a webmaster can find many professionals to outsource to. Craigslist is another place where a webmaster can place an ad and find good pros to outsource to.
The third alternative to get web content is to get it for free. Well, as far as web content is concerned, it is not always true that the best things in life are free but when the budget doesn’t allow to hire pros, not to mention to have an in-house content development team, free web content might be the only option.
One of the channels to get free web content is from the specialized sites, such as article directories. Article directories offer tons of stuff (generally) for free but they demand a backlink in return. Additionally, free web content from article directories is rarely of outstanding quality and what is worse – it is not unique.
Crowdsourcing is another alternative to get web content for free. However, quality is even more of a concern with it. When a webmaster leaves it to the crowd to create website content, he or she should be prepared for surprises such as plagiarism, foul language, or simply low quality. Of course, this doesn’t mean that crowdsourcing is not a way to get free web content. On the contrary, for many sites it works perfectly – one just needs to be prepared for the challenges.
There is no best way in which to get web content. Depending on the current needs, a webmaster will go one way or the other. Also, he or she can combine inhouse content production with outsourcing to freelancers and/or crowdsourcing. Every site is unique and that is why it is necessary to test what works for a particular site and what doesn’t.