I am at my most popular when I go to Internet marketing meetings or conferences and let it drop that I’m a writer. The eyes of site owners get that shiny hopeful look as they inquire whether or not I’d like to write their next book on male pattern baldness or how to live on 2 hours of sleep a day (I’m not making those up–those were real inquiries).

It would be a lot more fun if these guys wanted to pay a reasonable amount of money. The conversation usually goes south as soon as they reveal that they don’t want to spend more than a couple of hundred dollars on the project.

All of this has led me to two convictions: you can’t make money writing for the Internet guys and the Internet guys are desperate for content. The first observation is treated extensively in this blog in its positive formulation, i.e., you can make money if you write for businesses or self-publish. But now let’s look at the second.

People who own websites want content. They often try to figure out ways of getting content. Here are 6 Ways of Getting Content that Probably Won’t Work:

1. Get private label rights (PLR) content for some dirt-cheap price. Chances are you get weird, open-dned articles that don’t even really make sense and sometimes are plagiarized.
2. You can skip the middleman yourself and just plagiarize. That’s illegal, not to mention immoral and unethical. Not only that, you can’t really sustain that kind of content stealing. It’s like trying to furnish your house by shoplifting.
3. You can use free-source stuff like on Wikipedia but then your article on hyperthyroidism looks a whole lot like the 30,000 other articles out there on hyperthyroidism. Google robots are pretty good at picking up duplicate content.
4. You can try to get somebody to write for you. You’re going to find that writers who know what they’re doing aren’t cheap. This leaves you with the other kind of writer. There are writers who will write an e-book for $200 but you may be dealing with people who do not speak your language, have no writing credentials, or are trying to con you.
5. You can scare up some public domain stuff and hope you can recycle it, but you realize that content that is really old … sounds dated. It’s pretty hard to find something useful in that haystack.
6. You can write it yourself. Yikes. That’s the thing you wanted to avoid because not only is it not good, it’s not fast. And if you calculate the amount of frustration and munchies you have to stomach to make it happen, it’s not even all that economical.

So how do you get good content if you’re a web guy and you don’t want to pay me $10,000 to write your book? (Five-figure offers, please comment here and we can chat offline).  There are actually some ways.

1. Good writing for online purposes isn’t Shakespeare. You practically have to threaten people to make them read Shakespeare today, so why do you want to write like some boring dead guy? Good writing for the online world is nothing more than good communication. You have to be able to tell people how to do something or all about how something works. Get a microphone and record yourself talking. Don’t let yourself get freaked out, this recording is just for you and the anonymous transcriptionist you’re going to hire online. Use an online transcription service (they’re not that expensive) and get your recording transcribed (put into words). You can use it as is or … even better … go through it with a red pen and make some edits. Take out the parts that sound slow or confusing. Maybe add a sentence to clarify a point somewhere else. Hey, look at you! You’re writing!
2. If you can figure out the technical end of this, record yourself (talking to somebody. Audio is enough, but you can use video if that’s more comfortable for you. This can be a conversation, but an interview format (Q&A) works even better. Get it transcribed (if it’s video, you can get the audio portion transcribed). This time, you can use it as an interview.
3. If you’re pretty conversant in your subject, talk as long and as much as you can, and then chop up your transcribed text into several articles or chapters for an ebook. You may need to add some transitional stuff, but that’s about 100 times easier than writing new content from scratch. (Transitional stuff is the stuff that is missing, the words or sentences you need to make the finished piece read properly. If you can’t figure out what they are, ask somebody who is reasonably literate to help you.)
4. By the way, depending on what you’re doing, audio and video content, as is, is great, too. Multimedia content makes your site very appealing. And there’s no harm in double-dipping–you can easily put audio on the site and an article on the same topic.

These are decent ideas, but a lot of internet guys don’t actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to content. That is, they may want to do an infor product about opening up your own nail salon without ever having opened or even set foot inside a nail salon. This can be done, but it’s a step up on the ladder o’ difficulty.

1. Find somebody who does know the subject and do an interview. Get it transcribed. Rework your content. Make sure the person knows what you’re up to, but most of the time, that person won’t care. He or she may even be flattered, especially if you offer to mention their name or give them some kind of plug.
2. Go to a convention, conference, meeting, or otherwise figure out how to mingle with a lot of folks who know the subject. Talk to anyone and everyone. Then speak what you found out in a microphone and get it transcribed. Your finished transcription is probably going to be jumbled, so you’re going to have to sit with a pen and paper for a bit. You’ll need to weed some things out or move other things around. But that’s okay; it’s not that hard. What’s even better, you’ll wind up with all original content. (Some conferences make you sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting doing something like this, so that’s out–but those are mainly sneaky Internet marketing types who know this trick and don’t want it used against them. Most people not in Internet marketing or some other secretive field will have no problem letting you learn from them and write about it.)

Another way to write something is to do research. Sit at your computer and Google some keywords and pull up some information. Wikipedia is great for this, but Wikipedia is what everybody looks at, so go deeper. Print stuff out. Try to find magazines on your subject or other blogs. The point is not to rip these places off but to collect snippets. Research is really just pulling a few bits from here, another thing from there, and so on, until you have enough snippets to make your own quilt.

You may end up having to write some things down or keep notes on your computer. I know this sounds a lot like school, but it’s how it’s done. For instance, let’s say you wanted to write about swine flu prevention.

• Get some statistics–that’s always good for writing. You can Google “swine flu statistics.” For anything health-related, cdc.gov usually has statistics.
• Get some definitions–Wikipedia isn’t a bad idea here, but you may find other sources that can help you define your terms (for instance, what exactly is swine flu? What is any kind of flu?)
• Get some tips, information, facts, background, controversies. Instead of trying to write what’s in your head, find what’s going on in the subject and base your writing on that. For instance, with swine flu there really isn’t a lot of concern over what it is or how it started, but there happens to be a lot of conversation going on about prevention. What can we do about it?
• Pull all of that together. If you’re halfway good at writing, you can probably write it from there, but if not, try your microphone trick and just give an oral report on the subject.

Don’t plagiarize, but you shouldn’t have to. First of all, you’re only taking bits and pieces and putting them together yourself. Whenever possible, put things in your own words. Make it sound like you. You may read that “swine flu is a potentially life-threatening disease.” Chances are, this is not what you would say. Think about what this sentence means and say it in the way you would tell your best friend. “Swine flu can kill you.” That’s good. Or you can be more subtle: “Some people who get swine flu may die.”  You could also say: “The reason everybody is so worried about swine flu is that this disease can be fatal!”

There are dozens of way to write just about any idea, so take what you find and say it with your own voice. Intensify it. Swine flu is a serious topic, but sometimes when you write, you want to make things sound goofier or funnier or easier or happier. Infuse some vitality into the facts.

By the way, here’s a tip for writing an article:

• Give it a good headline
• In the first paragraph, lead off with FACTS, FACTS, FACTS. Statistics, numbers, dates, definitions, whatever you have that is hard and indisputable goes here. Don’t be afraid to get people scared or excited or hopeful. If you don’t get them in the first sentence or two, you’ve lost them. And facts (hard facts) give you credibility.
• Make sure you offer definitions of key terms.
• If you have anything to make a list out of, do it. People love lists.
• Give tips and advice. Be practical. You’re not writing for English class, you’re writing for your peers and most of us are busy.
• In the conclusion just re-state your main ideas. Don’t belabor the conclusion, nobody cares.

One last tip: when writing about non-fiction topics, try not to make things up. Don’t say, “89 million people are going to die of swine flu” even if you found some lunkhead online who wrote it. People don’t mind emotion (in fact, they like that) but most people can tell when you’re lying. So give your story a little spin but don’t spin it off into the lands where pants combust.

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