11 Sites to Get Free Website Content Online
If you own a blog, you will be writing articles for your blog constantly. Most of the time, you can generate the content yourself. But occasionally, you may need help in the form of free content, which can be a filler for your blog.
Where can you get free and legal blog content? This is an interesting question to many bloggers. Actually there are many places where you can find content that can be used on your site for free. You don't need to pay any money to use them. If you know the secret, you can find free images, free articles and free videos and other types of free content for your site easily. Before telling you the sites where you can find free website content, I have to warn you that you should pay close attention to the license of these content. If you want to use them legally, you have to meet the licensing requirements. Otherwise, you may encounter legal problems. The following is a list to sites which provides free website content. Free video clips for your blog TheNewsRoom.com Thenewsroom.com is the site for the Voxant Newsroom where you can find a large collection of high-quality articles, images, and videos. You can choose what you need to embed in your site. Let me tell you what can find there. The material on the Voxant Newroom site is provided by many news agencies and/or press release agencies such as CBS, Reuters, BBC and the like. Besides international and national news agencies, they also have materials covering local news. So next time, when you are looking for a video clip for your blog post, you should consider looking around on http://www.thenewsroom.com. Of course, Youtube is always your first choice. Hulu.com Hulu.com is another website where you can find free video content for your weblog. You may have watched some television shows on Hulu. But do you know that they also allow you to embed some video clips to your site if you follow their rules. Many major media companies are parteners of Hulu including Fox, MGM, NBC and so on. Free images for your blog Flickr.com Flickr.com is a website where people can share their images and photos online. And it is also a website for bloggers to find free images for their blogs. But not every image on Flickr is free to use. Only those with Creative Commons-license are eligible. So when looking up free images on Flickr.com, you should always check their copyright information first. To find CC licensed photography on flickr.com, you can use their advanced search function: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. For bloggers who run a Wordpress blog, the wordpress plugin Photodropper (http://www.photodropper.com) is very useful. With the photodropper wordpress plugin, you can easily and quickly embed flickr images into your blog posts. In addition, this plugin will help you format the images and add the attribution in the right way. By using this plugin, you will reduce your risk that your use of flickr's images violating their terms of use or the Creative Commons License. http://www.sxc.hu/ Stockxchang is another web site providing quality stock photography online. Some of their images are for personal use and some of them can also be used for commercial purposes. Their images comes with a variety of licenses. That is why you have to check the image license every time you find a new image on http://www.sxc.hu/.You want to make sure that you fully understand the proper way to use their images. Free audio clips for your blog http://archive.org/details/opensource_audio If you are looking for open source audio work, you don't want miss archive.org, the website famous for archiving websites. But many people may not know that they also have a big library of open source audio for reuse. But again, before using any of them, you should check their licenses, because these sound tracks are associated with different Creative Commons Licenses. http://spinxpress.com/ Spinxpress is an online site where visitors can search for Creative Commons Licensed Audio works. Free articles for your blog Articlebase.com You can also use free reprint articles on your blog. Nowadays you can find free reprint articles on many article directories. One popular article directory is articlebase.com. If you are looking for free text content for your website, you can run a quick search on articlebase.com. Once you find the article you need, you can easily embed them into your weblog. They even provide you the HTML versions of the articles. But to find a good article to fit your site, you may need to spend some time on the site because the quality of their articles vary a lot. Some of them are good, but others may not be good enough for your purpose. To republish articlebase articles, you must obey their rules that can be found in their publisher terms of use. For instance, you may be asked to leave the links in the article intact when republishing them or link back to the original article source. If you don't mind adding these links to your blog, you can consider using free articles from these article directories. But be aware that there are many shortcomings when using free articles from article directories. One of them is the duplicate content issue, because the article you choose may have already been republished online many times. Search engines may consider them as duplicate content and it will influence your site ranking in search engines. Wikimedia Commons is a comprehensive online media library, and it is a part of the famous wiki site: wikipedia.org. On their site:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, you can search for text content, images, audio and video files licensed under Creative Commons, public domain or open source licensing among their millions of media files. As you can see, if you do a bit of careful searching, you can find lots of free website content on the web. If you use the free content properly when posting them on your website or weblog, you don't need to worry about copyright issues. When looking for free web content for your post, you cannot rip off other authors because it is not legitimate. These sites listed above are just some examples. They are not the totality of all resources available. If you know some online resources to find free web content, you can let me know by leaving a comment below. If you need more resources or want to learn more about where to find free content online, please check back on this blog later since I will keep posting whatever resources I find here. Thanks. You may also like: How to Make Your Own Free Websites Easily *Update* More tips for finding free website content: If your blog accepts guest posts, other bloggers can write and publish their work on your blog and in return they can get backlinks and exposure for their own blogs. If you find an informative blog post online and you want to re-publish it on your own site, you can write an email to contact the author of the article and ask for his or her permission. If you can offer a backlink to his or her blog, he or she is likely to accept your offer. There is no guarantee that he or she will give you the permission, there is no harm in asking, right? To find free content with Creative Commons Licenses online, you can use the Yahoo CC search engine: http://search.yahoo.com/cc. To learn more information about the Creative Common License, visit http://www.creativecommons.org/. The best way to find free web content for your website is to find public domain works. For instance, the Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ contains many free ebooks. Copyrights of these ebooks have expired and that is why they are in public domain. In addition, some works are in public domain because they are dedicated to the public. For example, all works created by the US government (found on their sites and reports) are in this category. However, I am referring here to the US Federal Government, and not the state governments. The works created by the US state governments are usually copyright protected and not in the public domain. To find public domain works easily online using search engines, you can search with this sentence: "This work is dedicated to the Public Domain". Remember always double check the license before using these free content. Remember check for plagiarism before republishing the free content and make sure that they are not plagiarized. There are a lot free online plagiarism checkers that you can use. The Mutopia Project at mutopiaproject.com is a web site to find free sheet music. |
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