People surf the web to enjoy themselves or to garner information. If your site does not provide either fun or knowledge, your daily visitor log will drop to 1 (yourself) sooner or later.
There are several ways to develop content stream, you can import contents from other websites, develop your own, or coordinate your users to self generate contents.
When importing contents (paid or gratis), there is one immediate problem; you should deliver more relevant and coherent information than the originating sites, or you would just hand over your visitors to the origin soon. (A word of caution! Hiding origin would never work in the fishbowl world of the Internet.) So it is no wonder that importing contents sometimes result in more workload than just developing it on your own.
Developing a content material is mostly a legwork, or more likely, a mousework. You should do a lot of search and check to produce a coherent content. After all these work, someone should actually sit down and write it up as a content material. This is most time-consuming and resource consuming way to put something on your site, but most rewarding, too. Ludios has successfully provided contents about Real Estate, Food and Nutrition, Wind Tasting, and even for Martial Art.
Coordination sometimes works wonders, especially for the “fun” factor of a website. You had better begin with a core base of loyal users, then encourage them share their own opinions and feelings with other members. Once the synergy is in, the core group will be self-developing, recruiting new members and expanding into several new areas. It may even be necessary to curb the overzealous development of the group sometimes.
Every website has different needs and may require different approaches. If you are more business oriented, sticking with importing and developing. If you are more people oriented (business homepage can be people oriented as well) you should put more energy in coordination.
Ludios manages a diet-related homepage with more than 500 members; first by providing diet information researched by Ludios, then coordinating member's effort and recipe swaps.
