ideas with legs

So you’re trying to build a blog following and in turn make a profit from your influence. Understandable.  BUT what’s the best mix of your original content vs reposting/curating of others’ content?

Create

• One BIG Blog Post Per Week - Chock full of your own insight and STICKY content, you will want to spend at least a week prepping these.  Check out@PattFlynn and his guest post from Jim Harmer’s blog @ImprovePhoto where Jim discusses how to create “killer content” that will go viral.
• Six Smaller Posts Per Week - Maintain the recency of your blog’s content by posting smaller, stream-of-consciousness posts of your own thoughts where you can break new ideas from your own point of view. @ThisIsSethsBlog (Seth Godin) does a great job of this by dropping yoda-esque parables about marketing on his blog every day.

Curate

• Seven News And Curation Posts Per Week - Industry news, relevant content, other folks’ ideas that you can link to are all good sources of content for your blog.  Their ideas, when built upon, will make you a thought leader and information distributor to your audience who will thank you with their viewership. Mashable does this frequently.

Repost

• Repost As Needed - As you are cruising industry news on your blog, go ahead and repost content from other blogs on your platform (tumblr, wordpress, blogspot, etc.). As long as you add a line of your own content to this, you’ll be considered to be involved in the conversation.  This is similar to content curation.  This Isn’t Happiness a PG-13 (sometimes NSFW) blog I follow does this well.

So there you have it: a blog post framework to go forth and begin building your blog’s following with.  Also, it’s important to note that as you dedicate more time to your blog you can go above and beyond this structure of content curation.  However, it’s important not to get burnt out when adding in levels of production as your capacity to produce increases.

Does this jive with how you would structure your own content? Let me know!