Tips for Using Free Articles to add Content to your Website.

How to get the greatest benefit from using free-to-reprint articles to add fresh content to your website, blog or newsletter.

  Using free reprintable articles is a great way to quickly and easily add a lot of quality content...

  However, there is increasing concern and controversy among web publishers regarding the use of another authors' work to add content.

  On the one hand, there is so much of it available that it would be almost impossible for a webmaster to compete in volume, and adding dozens (or hundreds) of pages of content is fast and easy. Plus, it adds value for your current visitors while helping to attract new visitors.

  On the other hand, search engines are looking more carefully at websites that copy some (or all) of the content that is already published on other websites... and in some cases, they are reducing the page-rank of (or even de-listing) websites that have too much duplicate content.

  That creates a real dilemma for us, because there are so many benefits to adding that type of content that it's difficult to reject the option completely, yet the possibility of a down-grading in page-rank is nothing to ignore.

  So what's a webmaster to do?

  We have to Make  the Content Unique
  Actually, it's unethical to change an article in any way when you republish it in a newsletter or on a website, but there's no TOS I've ever seen that says you can't put your own comments, rebuttals and opinions all around - and in the middle of - any article you republish.

  Yes, you can even add a comment or two right in the body of the article - provided that any reader can tell that the comment is added in and not part of the original article.

  So - if you reprint an article of, say, 1000 words, and add a minimum of 100 more words (10%) in comments, editorial asides or any other related content, then you have created a whole new page that the search engines will recognize as UNIQUE content.

  It's a win/win/win situation - your readers get fresh, relevant information on a regular basis... the author gets the exposure, a linkback and a bit more traffic... you get another page of unique content - and somebody else did ninety percent of the work.

A Practical Demonstration:

  I've made a page - using a real article - to demonstrate the points I've outlined above... Tips_for_Adding_Article_Content_DEMO. The text I've added to make the page more unique has a pale yellow background color like this. In real life, you probably would not want to do that, especially with text ads.

  On that demo page you will see a regular page, with an average article pulled at random from the BLT-Web Article Directory. I've added a few short paragraphs at the beginning, two in the middle, (using <blockquote> tags), and two at the end... plus a contextual ad in the upper right.

  If you use <strong> or <em> tags on your added editorial content, then search engines will give that text a little more weight, so be sure to use your keywords a few times in the paragraphs you add.

A few pointers on Monetizing your article pages.

  The traffic and value-to-visitors benefits of using articles for content are only one side of the coin... an article page can be made profitable as well, without reducing the value of the information for your visitors.

  Contextual ads do really well on reprinted article pages, it's very common to see AdSense ads on article pages because they generate a lot of clicks.

  But - AdSense isn't the only game in town. While it may be the easiest way to monetize an article page, there are other, more profitable ways to go about it. With some imagination and a good merchant or product, you could make a lot more than a few cents per click.

  For instance, let's say your website is about pets and the article you're reprinting is about dog training, if you write a text ad leading to an eBook called "Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks" then you could easily make the commission from a sale, instead of a few cents off the clicks for what may be the exact same product that someone else is selling via PPC ads!

  After all, that's all the AdSense ads are - targeted ads based on the text from the page that they are displayed on. Wouldn't it be much better to take 5 minutes and make an ad that will give much more profit than the AdSense ads?

  There are two other benefits to not using AdSense - one is that the small text links that Google adds ("Ads by Google" and "Advertise on this site") aren't there to distract and point out that the links are advertisements. That makes it easier to 'blend in' a text ad with the content, which may increase clicks... the other benefit to not using AdSense is that you can code any link you build to open in a new window, which Google won't allow for AdSense ads.

  In the final analysis - making your content pages more unique will help you get a better pagerank and the resulting higher traffic levels can help you reach your goals, so it's worth the effort.

Related Resources:

  Where to find articles to republish:

articlebiz.com yeeheey.com articleworld.net articlecity.com get-articles.com pressarticle.com

articlexplosion.com articlehub.com 1st Choice articlesfactory.com articlepros.com articledepot.net

  In addition, you can contact authors and other website owners and request that they send you any new articles on your chosen topic. Most of them will be more than happy to do that. Who knows, that kind of contact may even develop into a good long-term relationship for both sides.

If you have articles that other webmasters can republish:

  There are many good reasons to get your articles published on other websites, (See Article Marketing - The Best Advertising You Can Get!) If you have written some articles that you would like to have published you can use this free Article Submitter Script... and send your articles to hundreds of ArticleDashboard-powered sites automatically. (See the included 'doc' files for more info.)

  As far as free submission software goes, that may be the best available, but it is limited. If you want to use a full featured article submission program you will have to buy one... if you would like a recommendation I can offer "Instant Article Submitter" for your consideration. It's an easy to use program that will get your articles 'out there' in minimum time and with minimum fuss.

  If you do send your articles out to be reprinted, you may want to take a few minutes and re-write them a little... that way your work, as published on your own website, will remain totally unique.