Hi Hans
Yes - we have done this. We did a combination of researching and writing our own content as well as some "for hire" content. One of the avenues we used was a writers forum called
Constant Content - Website Content, Order Articles that you can pay for full rights of certain articles and use them as 100% as your own and/or commission writers to write on a subject for your site. They are then yours and only yours - unique to your site. We thought it helped immensely.
One thing - I guess that is comes with the territory - is that people do rip off the articles from our site for their blogs etc and call them their own - but not much you can do about that without spending a ton of time hunting them down and having them removed. Guess it goes back to the saying that we are doing things right if ppl want to copy
Carol