What are the main objectives of your website? You might have many but the top two are most likely something like:

1. Sell more products (whether by online sales or by generating leads)

2. Inform and up-date customers, employees, and vendors on products and services.

If you are not regularly refreshing your existing current content and writing new website content, you are missing the opportunity to develop a site will become a valuable tool supporting business activities from sales to employee training to customer and vendor service as the business grows.

Writing Website Content without Becoming a Writer

Don’t worry. No one is suggesting that you write all of the new website content yourself. Writing for a website can be a full-time job and you surely don’t have time to add it to your crowded to-do list. However, through outsourcing, making the most of existing relationships, and a few other methods you can create a content generating machine with only a small initial effort on your part. This will give you the constant flow of new, targeted content your website visitors crave. So, how do you get other people to write website content for you?

Add a business blog to your site. Blogs are important to your company’s site because it gives your business a personality – a friendly sense of who you are as a company – in the otherwise faceless world of the Internet. A business blog can also help build your credibility and establish your company as an industry leader.

Speaking of industry leader, Dave Taylor shares great first-hand experience about the benefits of a business blog in “Can Blogs Really Help Businesses?”.

A business blog is a great place for people to contribute articles. You can pay a blogger to write for your site through elance or payperpost, or if your budget is tight you can recruit volunteer guest bloggers. People rarely write for free, so offer them the notoriety of full credit for their posts and valuable links back to their site. You might also be able to trade services or products for posts.

Create a forum. A forum is like a message board, and is a great opportunity for visitors to ask questions and get answers from each other. People enjoy seeing commonly asked questions, and ideally, it draws in readers to participate in conversation about your business or industry. You’ll get repeat traffic to your site. Start your forum with just a few categories, and then get the conversations rolling by asking a few provocative questions in each category.

There are a couple of downfalls to forums. First you need to be sure you have enough traffic to your site because if you don’t have people to talk in your forum, it will look like no one cares. Another issue is that you cannot sensor what is written. Depending on your business, you might not feel comfortable giving up your editing power.

Still, a forum is probably the best way to build a community amongst your readers and there are plenty of professional forums out there that do a great job of pulling people into websites and creating content.

Invite vendors to create content. Vendors are always looking for ways to get the word out about their products. Offer each of your vendors the opportunity to add content to your site. Make it fair and routine by creating a contribution schedule.Set the rules clearly regarding how many links they allowed to their own site (if any), article length, tone, and make it clear that you will be editing.

Accept and display product or service reviews. Set up the functionality on your site to support product reviews from your customers. Amazon.com’s model of this functionality puts the customer feedback directly on the bottom of the product description page. Even negative reviews can increase sales by telling potential customers about the worst aspects of a product allowing them to decide if they can live with that or not.

Invite employees to write. Make it a development opportunity for a staff member. Most employees will welcome the time away from their regular duties which brings up the point that you should be careful not to make writing website content a chore based on deadlines and deliverables. If you are not paying extra for it, let it be a reward.

Use pre-written content. Use online aids to make the work less time consuming. You can either purchase pre-written rough drafts online, or use free public domain content.

Private label content is readily available and affordable and should be considered a rough draft of material that will be rewritten. You can buy the rights to packages of articles that you can use on your site. Rewrite the articles so that they are specific to your business and different than the original – the rights to these articles are sold many times over and you want your material to be unique and unlike that on other sites in your industry.

Public domain articles are copyright-free, which means you can use it on your site without needing to get permission. Subscribe to free article distribution websites to get this material emailed to you. Watch for stipulations though; many times you will be required to keep the article intact and include the required author’s name and bio. Often you can’t change the article in any way.

Outsource writing by hiring a content writer. There are several job boards online where you can post a project for free. Make any budgetary constraints known and you may find someone who will fit the bill. You can also hire a company offering professional copy writing services such as Lead Optimize or Invesp who will search engine optimize each of your pages for particular keywords while writing website content. The greatest thing about professional copy writers (and often the biggest sticking point for their clients) is that they are experienced with translating what you tell them about your company and services into truly effective content that will generate sales leads and sales.

Conclusion - Too Easy

There are many options available that allow you to practically automate writing website content. Use the stakeholders in your business to give your site varying viewpoints and styles, and to make your website dynamic and interesting. New informative and interesting website content will keep your readers coming back for more, and eventually help turn them into qualified leads and customers, too. Adding new website content on a regular basis will pay you back many times over in repeat and new traffic.

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