Want free content for your website? Forget it! It’s a bad move. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as they say. To build a great blog with lots of regular and loyal readers who hang on your every word, you have to put in the time and effort to create great content yourself (or pay a sub-contractor to write original stuff if you have VC backing, of course).

There are sites out there like ezinearticles.com that offer downloadable off-the-shelf articles for your site, but don’t be tempted. Some of them (not necessarily ezinearticles of course) can contain very poor quality, badly written articles so obviously stuffed with keywords for the sake of some misguided SEO (search engine optimization) effort, that any self-respecting blogger or webmaster will steer well clear. Moreover, if other sites are publishing the same content then your site simply becomes and echo chamber and can also be filtered out of the search engine results pages (SERPs) regardless of your so-called pagerank.

However, if you are ever stuck for ideas on what to write about, sites like ezinearticles.com coupled with a few thoughts from my recent Giving Good Headline post could provide you with renewed inspiration. Those free article repository sites categorize everything, and they have an awful lot of material to categorize.

Check out the categories for your niche. Health and fitness, say. They will have dozens of categories covering everything from acne, aerobics, and allergies to weight loss, womens issues, and yoga. Evergreen topics that will also attract readers to a health and fitness site. Moreover, these categories will have proven themselves popular again and again, if they hadn’t they wouldn’t be listing them, they’d create others.

Take a look in the categories you are hoping to promote, you’ll find dozens of articles. Now, without breaking any copyright laws, what is to stop you grabbing one of the titles, tweaking it slightly and writing your own original content? You could use Wikipedia and other subject-authorities to get your facts straight. You could check out Google News and the blogosphere in your niche and summarize the latest news (try Google Alerts and RSS to keep up to date on particular niches). Add your own spin and opinion and link back to useful sources.

You might even search for Creative Commons photos and images with which to illustrate your post or enable Zemanta, the Firefox addon I’ve mentioned briefly before, to automate the addition of free pictures and related links.

I almost posted the original much shorter version of this article as a comment on a Blogstorm post about ezinearticles, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense to publish it as a full-blown article in its own right. Hopefully, Blogstorm will spot the backlink and hopefully Sciencetext will get more out of it than if I’d simply posted a terse comment elsewhere. So, another quick tip for expanding your blog: Don’t comment on other people’s blogs, respond with your own post on your own blog and trackback/linkback to their post.