Free Articles for Your Website

Submitted by Klaus Brune on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 21:34.

Free re-printable articles have become a huge phenomenon.

There are some reasons you may want to consider this option for adding content to your site.

There are also good reasons why you might want to avoid it.

Let's cover both...

Reasons to Consider Free Articles for Your Website

It's a fast way to get some content on your website in a hurry, and you're planning to mix it up with some original content of your own with related key words as soon as possible.
The primary visitors to your site are coming from a place OTHER than search engines, and the free articles that you are using will add some actual value to the experience. For example, the main purpose of yoru site is technical support for products that you sell, and you also want to provide reading material of interest to your visitors, on topics that relate to your industry. This gets the visitors to stay on your site, and can be leveraged into extra earning potential through the use of ads (for your own products, or for Google) and add-on sales (like having links to Amazon books on the same subjects, recommended further reading).

When (and Why) NOT to use Free Articles

Appearance of Credibility: If you're trying to get approved for an affiliate program, or for Google AdSense, then it's a really good idea to have ORIGINAL content on your website, or a unique product or service that you offer to your site visitors. If your site contains NOTHING but free articles, this will be immediately obvious to any person reviewing your site for approval. Recognizing websites with free article content is one requirement of what they're doing for a living. Don't let your website be one of them.
Duplicate Content: This is a very bad thing, when search engines are indexing your site and deciding where to rank you in the search results, based on how your content compares to other sites with the same key words. If all the content on YOUR website is identical to the content being shown on fifty thousand OTHER websites out there, what do you think your chances will be?
Writing Quality: All the articles you use require to use them exactly as-is. The writing will not be sub-par, as it does have to be approved by the repository. The trouble , as you will learn when we start covering writing techniques, is this... many of these articles are not optimized properly for their keywords, and thus will not get the best results from the search engines. So while the writing quality may be acceptable for humans, it isn't always the greatest for the spiders crawling the web.
External Links: All the articles will contain links to the article repository you chose, the author's website, and most often BOTH. The entire reason that the author provided the article for "free" is to promote THEIR website. This does not NECESSARILY have to be a bad thing, IF the article does contain useful information AND the article author is not a direct competitor for your own services or website. The bad news is that if a visitor clicks the link, they've left your site. One way to partially alleviate this is to configure your website to supply an icon letting people know that what they're about to click is a link that LEAVES your site for another (just like we've done here).

So what's next? Why, where to GET those free articles, of course. Here are some of the free article repositories you'll want to look at. Which one is best for your website will depend on the sort of content you're looking to provide.

Free Article Repositories

There are, of course more, than just these three, and I encourage you to do a bit of research and find one that suits you. The above are in my order of personal preference. Your experience may differ. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you start using the service of your choice...

Notify the Author: Pay careful attention to the terms of service before you put articles on your website. The requirements will vary, but you will almost always be required to notify SOMEONE that you're using the article, whether it's the author (via an email), or posting the URL where you've published the article back to the site via a web form that they supply.
Actually READ an article before you publish it, especially if you're making use of more than one service. Publishing the same article twice on your site will be pretty embarrassing, right?

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