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Articles Index >> Marketing
Why Is Everyone Using Free Content on Their
Website?
by Michael Cheney
A trend over the past year or so has been for people to ad free content written
by other people to their websites. You find an article database that has content
written by authors not connected to your business and you use these articles
as free content on your website. The idea is that you get content for nothing
but in return the authors get a short about box at the bottom of each article
which promotes their product or service.
There are a lot of websites that have sprung up to offer this type of service.
Some of the bigger ones include ArticleCity.com,
GoArticles.com, and eZineArticles.com.
There are many others but those three represent the larger players in the field.
So what are the benefits? Well the benefits are that it is extremely quick.
You can browse through a selection of categories from each of the directories
on these sites and choose articles that are matched and relevant to your target
audience. You literally copy and then paste them into your website and you can
have hundreds, if not thousands, of articles ready on your site within minutes.
The other benefit is that obviously each article contains keywords and phrases
that are relevant to your target audience. The more content you have, the better
your chances are of being found in the search engines. So it’s like conducting
automatic search engine optimization. Every new article you ad is a new chance
for people to find you through search engines.
It isn’t just marketing and business issues that have a series of articles
for them. You can find articles on a whole bunch of topics from cars, pets,
education, family, food and drink. You can find articles about almost anything
that you can use on your website. But don’t forget that you will need
to include the biog box from the author.
Those are the benefits. The downside to using free content is that everyone
else is using free content, which means there is a lot of duplication. If you
go to one of the article websites and grab an article and place it on your site,
you’re not going to be alone in doing this. There may be tens or even
hundreds of other website owners doing this same thing. This makes it very difficult
for you to get ranked for that content.
Also, more and more, search engines are actually clamping down on duplication
of content on the Internet. So although this technique might be very effective
right now, chances are that within a few months or years this technique will
no longer work.
A later development has been for people to get paid access to articles that
they can then rewrite and edit with the author’s permission. This means
that you are getting a halfway house. You are getting lots of content for your
website but it’s not duplicated because you have edited it to your own
style so that it is different from all of the other versions on the Internet.
Generally, content obviously brings a lot more targeted traffic. The trick
though is turning all this content into cash. Don’t forget, whenever you
ad an article or piece of content to your website always have at the forefront
of your mind what the purpose of that page is. What is the call to action? What
do you want people to do as they are reading the article?
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