How to get original content for your site
Use your in-house resources
Your social media efforts can go largely unrewarded if you can’t keep people on your site, and keep them coming back, once you get them there in the first place. Your content is the key to this. Most Radio stations nowadays have someone who is in charge of developing and posting content for station websites. Sometimes that person is local, sometimes he or she is centralized and responsible for content for many stations. But developing content for a Radio station website is not an easy job. Not if it’s done right, that is.
We talk a lot about originality of content. This is of utmost importance if you want your content to be search-engine-friendly, and if you want to avoid the “oh, I already saw that somewhere else” reaction from your website visitors. But it’s tempting to just surf other sites and scrape content from them, maybe adding or changing a few words here and there, and calling it your own. Don’t do it. Google and other search engines are smarter than that. Google knows that nobody wants to go to a site and be presented with the same old articles they have already seen elsewhere. You would need to change at least 20-30% of the words in each article to make it appear “original” to Google, and even then a human being will still recognize it as duplicate if they’ve seen it somewhere else.
Also, you don’t want to run afoul of copyright law. The law states that you can use a small portion of someone else’s story if you credit it (fair use clause) but judges frown on writers who try to pass something off as their own by changing it slightly.
So the best plan is to avoid re-use of content entirely, or to the greatest extent you can. You have jocks, salespeople, promo people and others on staff. Use them. Figure out which ones have the capacity to create content and allow them–no, REQUIRE them–to contribute content to your site. Others in your organization can pass on leads about potential stories to your small crew of writers who are literate enough to actually compose a story. Create a mailing list with all your writers on it and have everyone on staff send leads to that list. Someone on the list will claim a lead sent to the list by your promotions director, engineer, AE, or whoever came up with the lead. The writer that claims it sends a quick note to the list saying, “I’ve got this one” and proceeds to do the necessary research, writing, and posting. Bingo, you’ve got original content!
Use Partnerships
If you don’t already have partnerships with other media outlets in your town, you need to start developing those now. Find local TV station, magazine, and newspaper contacts that will work with you to supply original content for your site in return for links back to their organization’s sites. If you can, work a reciprocal arrangement whereby one of your jocks or editors can provide a weekly column on Music, Fashion, The Local Dance Scene or whatever would complement the current offerings of the partner’s site.
I’m not talking about each site re-posting content from the other partner’s site–we’re talking true original content here. Just re-posting your content on their site and vice-versa will possibly harm both sites more than it will help because search engines could apply penalties for duplicate content.
Sharing writers across blogs or sites will create a partnership for your radio station that can carry over into other areas. For example, when you need up-to the-second audio from breaking news, a close working relationship with a local TV station that has its own news organization is priceless. Making some changes at the station? Your local newspaper is still read or monitored by many of the people you want to see your press releases. And an occasional article about your station or one of its personalities in the local city magazine can go a long way toward increasing awareness of your station and its activities in the local consciousness.
As far as social media goes, this type of arrangement is a win-win. Both partners benefit from additional original content and both also benefit from having another quality inbound link, an important part of your search engine optimization campaign.
Surf, Research and Write
When you just need an original story for your site, there are many ways to find a subject your audience would be interested in besides just curating information from other sites. After all, if everyone just spent all their time re-purposing stories from other websites, where would the original news come from? Answer: there wouldn’t be any original reporting. Everything would dry up and we’d all be out of work.
Try finding some popular topics and do a little research. Figure out a nice angle that would make the topic more appealing to your particular listening and web audience, add your own take to the story and post.
Google Trends
Try doing a Google trends search. You’ll see the hottest topics from the past 24 hours, and under “hot searches” you’ll see the search terms being
used the most on Google in the past hour. This is a great way to find topics that might interest your website’s readers, or topics you might want to tweet about. Remember, not every post on your website has to be about music or artists. How about lifestyle posts that might affect your listeners and the readers of your website?
used the most on Google in the past hour. This is a great way to find topics that might interest your website’s readers, or topics you might want to tweet about. Remember, not every post on your website has to be about music or artists. How about lifestyle posts that might affect your listeners and the readers of your website?
And Google Trends is also a great source of topics for your Facebook page. If a majority of Google users are interested in a topic, chances are a large percentage of your target audience is as well.
Twitter Search
Check out Twitter Search to find out what people are saying about your Radio station’s market, music, artists and more. Click on the “Discover” tab at the top of your Twitter page to see what others are talking about on Twitter and what they’re saying. These are always good topics for you to throw out to your readers and listeners because many of them may be contributing to the popularity of the topic themselves.
Find out what’s HOT and join in! But always make it original. Make it your own. Add your target audience’s slant. Ask your audience to join in as well.