This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials we provide on content marketing and web content creation! We recommend subscribing to our FREE content creation course to learn how to create great content for your website or blog.

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Content Marketing With WordPress – Using 3rd-Party Content

In the content creation process, sometimes you will come across situations where you will want to use or include third-party content (i.e. content created by someone else) as part of your own content.

This includes:

• Using Private Label Rights content to save time writing content yourself,
• Quoting someone verbatim or referencing sections of text from another site (e.g. publishing research findings, definitions of terms, etc.)
• Publishing products or service descriptions, summaries, etc.
• Publishing news items, industry updates, etc.
• Creating training content about third-party products or services,
• etc.

In this tutorial series, we explore ways to repurpose content and the do’s and don’ts of using third-party content.

The Challenge Of Creating Original Content

Online content publishers and SEO experts often have very different views about publishing “unique” content  on websites. Whenever possible, you should definitely aim to publish high-quality unique content on your site and publish often if you want great results.

The problem, however, is that creating high-quality original content on a regular basis takes a lot of time and can be very expensive. Many businesses don’t have

Consider this example:

Let’s say that you own a small business (e.g. a local travel agency) and outsource your web management and web marketing to a local web agency. Let’s also say that this web agency has advised you to only publish 100% original search optimized content in order to rank well in Google.

Here’s the problem …

Your local web agency has the easy part – giving you advice! It only takes a few seconds to say the words “If you want to rank well in Google only ever publish 100% original content!” The problem is how do you actually implement this advice? Is your web developer going to create this original content for you? Most likely, not. They are not travel experts, they are a website agency, so they will probably just farm out the work to a freelance article writer and add a commission.

This creates a couple of additional problems.

First, depending on your budget, the articles written by a freelance writer will probably not be quite as in-depth as the article that you would write if you had the time to write it yourself. Creating a great piece of content with depth, substance, and detail can take many hours to write, if not a day or two or more. How much time do you have available to write your own content? If the doors of your business are open and there are clients to be serviced, then you are probably busy enough as it is.

But it gets worse …

Your web agency has probably also advised you to maintain an active social media presence. This means creating content for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

If you have been instructed by experts to:

1. Only use 100% original content,
2. Publish content often, and
3. Maintain an active social media presence,

This creates a logistical problem when it comes to creating 100% unique and original content. For example, if your content marketing strategy involves publishing content to your blog 2-3 times a week and posting content to your social media sites on a regular basis, how much unique and original content will you need to create every month?

A lot! That’s the problem with hiring experts to tell you what to do when they have no vested interest in your business. If their income does not depend on the success of your business, there’s no reason for them to lose sleep helping you figure out how to solve your business problems.

So, even though you should definitely aim to publish high-quality content that is unique and original and publish often if you want great results online, there are many reasons why this may not always be practical or doable.

(How much unique content can you create with a busy schedule?)

If we go back to the local travel agency example, travel agents often receive regular newsletters, updates, and marketing information from airlines, hotels, and other tourism-related services. This information could easily be rewritten, recompiled, expanded upon, and repurposed into new articles and given a unique perspective or angle. Summaries and excerpts can then be created from these articles and posted to social media with a link pointing back from the excerpt to the main article published on your WordPress blog or website.

Although not 100% unique per se, these articles would be original and unique enough to serve a practical business purpose and could be put together in a fraction of the time it would normally take to create a 100% unique piece of content. You could then establish a realistic “mix ratio” of original, rewritten and repurposed content for your business that would allow you to publish new content to visitors on a regular basis and maintain an active social presence.

Ultimately, how much of the content published on your website or blog is 100% unique is something that you have to decide as a website owner or web content manager.  There’s no point asking someone whose business depends on selling you additional services what to do unless they are actually going to do the work themselves and be responsible for creating the results you want.

With this in mind, the purpose of this section is to help you become aware of different methods and tools that you can use to repurpose existing information into high-quality original content that is unique enough and good enough for most practical purposes.

Our expertise is helping people build a digital presence they can control and manage using WordPress. We are not SEO experts and, like most people, we are not privy to the secret inner workings of Google’s search algorithm. It is up to you to decide what type of content you will publish on your website and whether using content that is not 100% unique will help your business or not. We personally use all of the methods described in this section wherever we feel that it’s appropriate to do so.

Using Third-Party Content – Tutorials

This tutorial series is divided into the following sections:

• Rewriting Existing Content
• Using Content Writing Tools
• Using Content Rewriting Tools
• Using Ready-Made Content

Click on the individual tutorials above, or click on the link below to start learning more about different methods of creating content for your site using third-party content.

To learn more about rewriting existing content, see this tutorial:

• Rewriting Existing Content

(Source: Pixabay)

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