Business Blogging: Covering External Stories – Good or Bad?

No two blogs are created equally, and for that reason, business blogs all touch on different subjects and different stories.

Some people who write in business blogs wonder if covering external stories is a good idea or a bad idea.

Some people shy away from the idea simply because they are not clear on the matter, while others attempt it even if they do not know if it is a good thing to do or not.

The truth about covering external stories is that as long as the story is relevant to the subject of the blog, and the content is rewritten to suit your blog or credited back to the original writer, there is nothing wrong with covering external stories in your business blog.

There is only so much business blog content that you can create based on your own company.

You can talk about a lot of company related information, or focus on information relating to the industry that your company sits in, but still you will eventually run out of content to write about, because as much information as there is out there, there is not an infinite amount of ideas to capitalize on.

This is why it is important for many business bloggers to explore the idea of covering external stories in their blogs. External stories may be drawn from other blogs, from websites, from newspapers and from numerous other sources.

The trick when it comes to external stories is giving credit where credit is due in your business blog.

If you want to write about stories that have already been released on the internet, then what you need to do is give credit to the original writer, even if you post a completely unique version of the same story online in your very own words.

When touching on external stories in your business blog, you should choose to write a unique version because it will make you stand out in search engine results, but you should also provide a link or a track back to the original writer to give them credit for the content, the news story, the idea, or whatever else you drew from in order to get your blog entry.

Coming up with unique content for your business blog is not always going to be easy.

There is nothing wrong with looking for inspiration in other blogs and on other websites, as long as you meet a couple of conditions.

First of all, you need to make sure that you are writing unique content so that search engines do not penalize you for duplicating content that was found elsewhere on the internet.

If you found the content you are referencing through a search engine, then they will surely notice that yours is a copy.

You also want to make sure to reference the original writer with a link or a track back to give credit for the content that you used.

Finally, you should make sure only to cover external stories that are actually relevant to your business blog and the subjects that you write about in it.

If you find content elsewhere on the net that is relevant to your blog, feel free to talk about it in your blog, just do so in a unique way if you want to garner traffic from your post.