Creating Website Content Yourself

This is the first in a five-and-a-half part series about content: where to get it, how to get it, plus a few of the pros & cons of each approach.

Where & How To Get Content Part 1: Do It Yourself

The easiest way to start getting web content together is to create it yourself: Nothing to organise, no need to communicate your vision to someone else. Here are a few of the good & bad bits of creating your own content:

Great: The big pro of DIY content writing is that it’s *exactly* how you want it.

Great: Zero risk. If you write something & it’s not great, you’ve lost nothing and - hopefully - learned something.

Great: No money. Though your time isn’t free, you don’t need to have anything in the bank to create your own content.

Great: Learn & communicate. If you’re looking to learn about something, or to reach out to other people across the world, there’s no better way than by speaking for yourself on the web.

Depending on your situation, the cons of putting together your own web content can often outweigh the pros.

Bad: It doesn’t scale at all. If you can write 1 article per day, then you’re stuck with a 1-article-per-day website.

Bad: DIY content depends on your time. When your other priorities go up, your content slows down.

Bad: It ties you up. Could you move forward faster if your time weren’t tied up writing content? Accountants call this the ‘opportunity cost’: Let’s say you buy $100 of fish on monday, and you sell them for $500 on friday. That’s a 500% profit. But, while you had that $100 tied up in fish stock, you could have made 10 other deals & twice as much money.

Of course - if you’re a bigger business - many of these problems disappear. “Yourself” could be the 600 people your company employs. If you’re an insurance company, get your customer support team to note down all of the questions & answers they get. Publish them straight onto the web & you’ve got a huge asset.