How to Blog Without Writing

Since this blog is all about giving writing tips for bloggers, I thought I would take a different angle and look at blogging from a perspective of those who don’t want to / can’t write.

Quite often we hear the mantra that a successful blogger needs to write good unique content. But, Is it possible to blog and develop a successful website without doing any writing?

Picture / Video Blog

If you are able to take interesting, unique pictures this can make a very attractive blog. I think to stand out, though your pictures would have to be of a particularly high standard, or offer something not found elsewhere. You will face alot of competition and it may not be so easy to monetize. However building a successful picture blog, gives you an opportunity to sell your own pictures.

See: Ursi’ blog for good example of photo / link blog

Cartoon / Comedy blog

This is a successful blog which offers humorous cartoons. By enabling others to use and embed the cartoon enables the blog to get lots of backlinks. I think this is an interesting point: offering free content is a good way to success on the internet. It is part of Wikipedia’s success, because people can freely copy the content, the site receives many link backs.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Use Material in the Public Domain.

There is an increasing amount of writen material which is free to copy under certain conditions. Sources of material to copy can be found at Wikipedia and ezine article sites. At Wikipedia the material is available under a GNU license, all you have to do is to acknowledge the source. This can be useful for building up pages. However, if you make a site out of duplicate material, you have to ask the question; Is this site offering anything new and useful? If it isn’t then it’s going to be difficult to make it a success. Also an additional factor to bear in mind is that Google and other search engines are discriminating against sites which are primarily duplicated content. Having said that I have pages on one site, from Wikipedia, which rank reasonably well. Yet, if the site was just duplication I doubt it would get any rankings.

Quotes / Poems

Quotes are a very popular internet search. Quotes about people, topics and subjects get a lot of hits. With regard to quotes and poems there is nothing you can do to make it unique (unless you comment on all the quotes). You can probably find some subject related to your blog. I have a short collection of quotes on writing. These quotes are actually quite useful for writing articles.

Links

Offering links to other sites and to the breaking news can be a helpful resource. Some sites have developed a reputation for being a very good link resource. However, to have a site solely dedicated to linking, would have to do it very well, or specilise in a certain niche. In a way links is the primary function of sites like Digg and Slashdot.

Get other people to write for you.

Successful sites are often able to attract guest bloggers or even regular contributors. This means you can spend alot of time doing other things and leave other writers to produce the content. Examples include lifehack and Blogging Tips. This option can be very good so long as:

1. you can get good writers.
2. To attract writers you will need to have a well established blog, with decent readership and page rank.

This is part of 31 days to build a better blog at ProBlogger