Supplying content to a blog in a private blog network is an important step to keep it alive.  The amount of content in each post is not quite as important as the sincerity of the post itself.  The key to success is to approach content generation as if the blog was not part of a private blog network at all.  Each blog should appear to be genuine.

Proper Word Count

One mistake that many owners of private blog networks make is hiring a freelancer (or group of freelancers) to produce a large amount of content for them at a static word count.  The reality of a blog is that every post will vary in length.  No genuine blogger posts 500 words consistently every other day for six months straight.  Ideally, outsourced content should consist of various word counts with different approaches (for example, some information articles and some opinionated articles).

Instead of assigning a word count to writers, asking for arbitrary lengths could be beneficial, with an absolute word cap to avoid spending too much money on content.  This aids in making the posts seem more natural.  As an added bonus, it prevents the writers from filling articles with subpar content to reach a word count goal or reusing content from previous articles – which is a perfect shortcut to ruining a site’s page ranking, especially if the articles end up on different blogs.  Most writing-centric blogs have posts anywhere from 150 words to 1,000 or more words, but the content always comes first.

Avoiding Cross-Linking or Overlinking

Possibly the quickest way to destroy a private blog network is to reference one site from the network on another in a blog post.  One must always remember that these websites are ancillary devices meant to drive traffic to one or more central websites – not to each other.

In addition, the main website should only be linked to intermittently.  Filling every post on a blog with contextual links driving users to one site is not only suspicious – it is annoying and may deter people from actually following the links.  Instead, only insert the link into every fifth post or so.  Linking out to other established websites on the topic is helpful as well, and necessary to some degree.  Having only one or two of the same outgoing links on a blog immediately marks it as nothing more than a backlink generator.

Non-Written Content

The issue that most see with posting non-written content such as videos or images is that they do not work as backlinks (though an image could potentially be hyperlinked to an external website).  Posting a YouTube video or a few supporting images can make the blog look more natural and will break up the space between important posts.  Since not every post should link to the main site in the network anyway, an intermittent video is perfectly fine.