Whether you are running a website that is content-based or are selling products and need content to help drive your SEO plans, you can always use a few new ideas on where that content can come from.

Writing articles and content pages yourself can be a very time-consuming project, and you may not have time to do it adequately as you work on keeping your sites running, staying networked and working social media angles. Whether you are looking for traditional articles or producing in-depth content with animated flipbooks (click here for more information on flipbooks), you need material to work with.

So where is that vital content going to come from?

Add in Some Commentary
Most people think of articles or blogs when they think of content, but you can build a sizable number of words on a page with comments too. A good, on-topic conversation or series of comments can be just as interesting a read to your visitors as the page itself. Of course, you need an existing page in the first place.

If you are worried about trolls or spam, there are a lot of very good tools or plugins that you can utilize to protect your pages from garbage commentary.

You can either have your own comment section, or use a third-party service that lets you embed comments (like Facebook or Disqus). If you use another source, they may or may not help with the management of spam. Going with Facebook comments can be a double-punch of benefit because it creates content on your site as well as boost your social media presence.

Bring on Guest Bloggers
The notion of the "guest" blogger may seem odd, but it can be a wonderful way to get a little new content from fresh sources. Bloggers in your field write blogs or articles for you as a guest, in exchange for a link back to their websites and a little exposure for their name. It can be quite a win-win for both parties.

You look more authoritative as a site that attracts guest writers, and you get new pages out of the deal. Of course, you do want to be careful who you allow to post, as you clearly don't want to give a direct competitor a helping hand.

Once you get involved in guest blogging, you may want to try the other side of the coin and do a few posts of your own on other sites. It's a very good way to gain on-topic links back to your site and present yourself as an expert to a whole new audience.

Report Some News
Keep an eye out for relevant and interesting news stories in your industry, and build new content on current events that would impact your customers. Even in obscure industries, there are developments and important changes that you can discuss.

To really simplify this idea, you may even be able to have an automatic "widget" or news plugin that would draw news stories to pages on your site based on relevant keywords and categories. That can leave you with a continually fresh and current page of content with no effort on your part.

Keep your site filled with new content to impress your visitors and to boost your SEO appeal with one or any of these new tips.