So, I’ve been blogging for about three years, now. And I’m pretty committed to it. Three posts a week, rain or shine. Sometimes I take some time off, for a vacation, but most of the time, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, here I am.
It’s a challenge to come up with original content three times a week. Honestly, there are some days when I get up and I think I got nothin’. The well is dry. No inspiration, no ideas. But I’m serious about posting three times a week, so I write something.
Now, there are lots of folks out there who would say “if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. It’s better to post good stuff less often than to post regularly and have some posts be disappointing quality.”
Sometimes, when I’m devoid of inspiration, I turn to other blogs for help. Often, I’ll write a post that riffs off of another post someone else wrote. I figure either my audience maybe isn’t familiar with that blogger, or if they say something really interesting that sparked me, that others might find it interesting, too. But I always try to put my own original spin on it.
I’m noticing more and more these days, blogs that are built entirely on other people’s content. There is a new application called paper.li that allows you to create a “dailly newspaper” from the tweets and blogs of people that you follow. Could be a useful aggregator application that you could share with your followers, right?
But there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel right to me (and I should not complain, because my stuff gets picked up by people who are creating these papers all the time).
So, here’s my question to you: when you are reading a blog, how important to you is oringial content? Do you care if it’s original or are you just looking for value? I’m really interested to hear what you have to say.