Publishing fresh new content for a website on a regular basis is not just advisable but actually necessary if you want to entice search engines and rank well for them. Unfortunately, coming up with such content day in and day out isn’t easy and actually takes a lot of work.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that over the years several options to automate content on websites have sprung into being.
Different Types of Content Automation
The phrase ‘content automation’ is often used to describe any one of the variety of different methods that have surfaced over the years. Today, some of the more popular types of options to automate content include:
- Content scheduling. In this method the creation of the content itself isn’t automated, but rather the content is created independently and then is automatically published based on a particular schedule. For example, content could be set to be published daily at 11 am.
- Scraping content. Basically this involves using automated software that searches for content containing specific keywords and ‘scrapes’ snippets from them that will then be republished. It is a method that is frowned upon and often violates copyright law. A better approach is to only scrape content from specific RSS feeds that allow their content to be republished, and then credit the source.
- Outsourcing content. Many SEO firms and other services have teams of writers that are able to create content on a regular basis. Of course, there will be a fee involved in this sort of automation.
- Enabling guest posts. Lately guest posts have become even more popular than ever and websites that already have good traffic and high PageRank can allow users to submit content. That means the website will have a stream of unique and new content coming in for free, and a scheduler can then be used to publish it at certain intervals.
Needless to say none of these options for automating content are perfect. Then again, there is no such thing as a flawless method of automating anything.
It is possible to reliably automate content to a certain degree by using a combination of these methods however. For example, a website on binary options trading could enable guest posts and schedule the publication of the content that they acquire. If the content that comes in isn’t sufficient, then additional content could be outsourced and periodically (i.e. Once a week or so) the website could scrape and republish content from high quality RSS feeds about binary options that allow it to do so legally.
Some work will still be required – but it is much less than attempting to create fresh new content from scratch on a regular basis.
It is unlikely that there will ever be a ‘perfect’ way to automate content – especially in terms of its creation. That is why it is best to automate the parts that can be automated, and use the time that has been freed up to focus on the parts that can’t.