The best content for a wordpress blog

Nothing beats the power of great content online. Yes, Steve Pavlina's blog is a good example.

Why are we looking for short cuts here? I don't know about any of you but I am in this for long term.Online business -- be it blogging, AM, etc - must be thought of as real businesses.

If you were in the construction business and you thought you could build skyscrapers with low-quality building materials, how long would your business last?

Drip-feeds, auto-feeds, ripping off content and doing everything in your power NOT to work hard in one's business is detrimental to your brand. You don't want people to feel cheated, do you? When they came looking for what you promised they would get, they got nothing but the same clipping they had read somewhere.

Money is exchanged for value. No Value? No money. No money? No Business.

I think we should all come out of the "Money for nothing" temptation and produce blogs/sites like techcrunch.com, inc.com, entrepreneur.com and many more. A lot of work goes in there. Content is what keeps people coming back there, not an online publishing company's social marketing prowess or the ad spend on PPC.

You need great content, but in most cases you have to go beyond simply great content. You have to design and implement a coordinated plan to drive traffic and build a community. You'll end up getting traffic from SEs, social bookmarking sites, blog comments, returning subscribers / visitors, and articles (syndicated and directories).

You have to write and title for visitors and search engines. You also have to use all the the tools at your disposal. They key is to use a synergistic approach that augments the great content to ensure you build traffic more quickly.

It depends on your objectives. If you want to build a personal brand social site, then, yes, you will need quality unique content. But, if your objective is to market to a particular niche in a billboard or TV commercial manner primarily using search traffic, then lightweight content of various types is the ticket.

Also, remember that most people here are 'content connoisseurs' and value high quality content. We're almost like music snobs who listen to the best classical music or the trendiest alternative underground modern music. But, the masses love the mass produced drivel that the radio stations play over and over again. And the masses are the ones with the money. As P.T. Barnum said, "No one went broke underestimating public taste."

I agree with your 'synergistic approach' idea if you're building a social marketing site. Having both social referral and search traffic can help.

But, with most of my niche marketing blog sites, my objective isn't to 'build a community' but to sell a particular product or to achieve paid click-thrus to landing pages that make a sale I get a commission on. Therefore, I'm only looking for a one-time search visitor who'll click and buy, not someone who'll stick around and come back to get free information.

I guess my message is that you don't necessarily need to have quality unique content to build a site that's successful at making money. All you really need is buying keyword targeted content that's not total garbage and backlinks.