How To Get Instant Help Writing Your Posts

Ever heard of Zemanta?  I hadn’t until my friend Cenay Nailor told me about it.  The problem that a lot of bloggers face is getting good quality content for their site (or sites in Cenay’s case).

Where Can You Get Content?

Well, the most obvious and BEST place is from your brain!  If you can make yourself creative, or you are just plain VERBOSE, then creating content is quite easy.  For those who struggle, I would suggest that they can go to one or several of the several hundred article-sites like GoArticles or EzineArtilcles and find good quality articles related to your blogs topic.

So What’s The Problem?

Though you can easily find articles on just about any subject, you still have to spend time finding these articles AND reading them to make sure that they are sufficient quality to put onto YOUR site.  Then you have to find something VISUAL that will make the post more appealing and THEN you should ideally find related links to OTHER articles about the subject.

Enter Zemanta

Zemanta is a free service (at least it’s free for BLOGGERS) that suggests content in REAL TIME for your post.  So, you will get suggestions for things to add to your post AS YOU WRITE IT!  And not just articles.  Zemanta will suggest images for you to use and links to other people’s sites that have similar content.  It’s a bit like using StumbleUpon in that it suggest things that might well be relevant, but in this case, relevant to your post, not your personal likes and dislikes.

The images it suggests have already been checked for license issues, so you won’t have to spend your precious looking for photographs and then checking to make sure that they are okay to publish. The Zemanta team does that for you.

Links To Other Sites

If you see a link to an article or website that you like and you include it in your post, you AUTOMATICALLY get a trackback to you post.  In effect you are swapping links and you know how much Google and Yahoo like links back to your pages.

Why Is It Free?

It’s free for bloggers, not for advertisers.  Eventually, the Zemanta team intends to use this new protocol to offer advertising.  Will it work for them?  Who knows.  In this day and age of super-expensive advertising ($3million for 30 seconds at the last SuperBowl) I think it will work very well for them.  Time will tell of course.

For now, try it yourself and see what you think.  I’d be interested in your opinions.

Luke.

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