1. Offer to pay guest authors for their work. A guest author could be someone you found on your bulletin board who happens to write well.
2. Exchange articles with the guest author’s site. Your site visitors benefit by providing them with another point of view. And you might just gain some new regular visitors from your guest author's site!
3. Make sure you get exclusivity. When someone writes for you, make sure they won’t submit that same article to dozens of other Websites and newsletters. When your site publishes exclusive content, you have opportunities for syndication in other publications, online and off, and you gain a lot of reader loyalty. The key phrase in a contract with a writer is that you’re buying all rights, including electronic.
4. Use one of the great software tools which we’ll be discussing a little later!
Can you use reprints?
Reprint articles written by others, but you must always obtain permission. All work, from the moment it is written, is copyright and owned by the author, whether it is marked with a copyright symbol or not. Content is not free. You can, however, make reprints interesting and personalized by putting your own 'spin' on the content. Write an introduction to the subject, or comment on the author's opinions or conclusions.
Take care to avoid 'editing' the original article without the author's permission. Although it's not entirely avoidable, it's best to look for articles that have not been overly reprinted on other websites and electronic publications.
Another great source of content is public domain work. Public domain typically means that the copyright has expired, and now anyone can use it royalty-free. Other examples of public domain would be stories or poems which have been passed down throughout the generations, and nobody knows the original author. If you search the web, you can find a good deal of public domain content.
