Being in the blogging industry for several years now, the one thing which I am consistently reminded of is the need to be able to produce new and fresh contents for my blogs. At first, I spent most of my time actually writing the articles myself. However, after starting my PhD in IO Psychology, the ability for me to continue to produce a high quality and consistent postings to the blogs considerably decreased. I did dabble in private license rights (PLR) site contents, however, in the end I turned to outsourcing to find writers for my blog.

If I do the math correctly, an hour of my time is worth a considerable amount of money. At the same time, with around 200 unique readers to my blogs on a daily basis, the amount of advertising revenue being generated my by blog posts is starting to reach the point where I need to seriously invest some money into the blogging sphere. I currently run 3 distinct blogs ? one about business, one about technology, and one about cooking. However, with the traffic starting to increase, I needed to find a way to get a constant stream of fresh contents onto my pages.

One of the first stages in automating the contents generation process is through PLR (private license rights) contents. These articles are professionally written by someone else, and are sold to other users to re-purpose for their own websites. The downside of using PLR contents is that it significantly decreases your traffic ranking in Google as well as causes our blog to be much less unique than every other blog out there using the same PLR contents. PLR contents are excellent for filler contents (especially for newer blogs), however, they should not be relied on as a central source of contents for your blog. Many service providers catch onto this duplicate contents, and will label your website or domain as spam, and even go so far as to remove your blog and all associated blogs from their service. Imagine that – just for taking a few re-purposed articles, Google Blogger may decide to take down your entire blog (and all your years of postings with it).

The second stage in the automation process is to hire monkeys to pound at the keyboard for around $1-$3 per article. Going to oDesk or Elance and posting your request, can usually net a few good writers and a bunch of other monkeys within a few days of your initial job posting. The idea here, is to take the outsourcing contractors and have them do the grunt work for you by producing article contents for your site on demand. If you can narrow down your topics, demographics, and come up with a targeted set of themes for your writers, more than likely the investment in their writing will pay off very well in the long run. It becomes a win-win-win situation for everyone. Your contractors get paid, you get a bunch of unique and quality articles, and your readers (appreciating the quality and originality) keep coming back to your site for more.

The final key in contents generation is through the use of a diversified portfolio of writers. I have several low key writers who post around 5 articles to the blog each week at a rate of $15 per week. This gives me a good amount of unique and interesting contents, however, the quality of the articles is relatively low. The purpose of these articles is to have fresh and unique contents as well as overcoming the duplication problem the PLR contents provides. In addition to my low key writers, I have a staff of high profile writers for my blog. These authors usually charge in the range of $20-$50 per article, but the quality of the articles is far superior to everything else on the site. While the ROI percentage for the low key authors is higher, the traffic generated by the high key authors is much superior to the traffic going to the low key articles. Thus, the ROI from the high profile writers does not come from the direct article itself, but as a springboard for reading other articles on the site (increasing overall site revenue).

All in all, creating compelling content for your audience, as well as driving traffic to your blog can be a relatively inexpensive process – with a budget of around $200 per month per blog, I am able to turn that around into around $300 worth of advertising revenue per month – having the costs pay for themselves. As I continue with this business model, and as my readership continues to increase, I will look at hiring more of the outsourcing contractors, and use less of the PLR filler contents to continue to increase the quality and quantity of blog postings.

Stephen is the writer and operator of numerous blogs on technology, business, and cooking. For more information about blog automation and outsourcing your blog writing, please see Real World Computer Science. Also published at Automating Your Blog For Fun And Profit.