Making Money with Articles: Is Free Article Content An Option?

Some website owners try to use articles from free content directories to get visitors to their site and earn some money. This is mostly crucial for those who have just started up as an affiliate for several companies and do not yet have any capitals, yet need to built small niche websites to drive visitors to their site so that they can begin making some profits .

Although this can sometimes be the only option for those who are running on a non-existent budget, it is not a way that will effectively build your web site or income. There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your business building efforts.

Problem #1 – Search Engines

Search engines will only look down upon your site if it has the exact same duplicated content than other web sites. The more websites that share the exact content with you, the less chance it will help you achieve good search engine rankings.

Good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your website so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even get visitors, then will never make an revenue. Working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the results to get customers, should be priority one.

Problem #2 – Getting visitors to click

Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring website visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. You must also be able to convince those visitors to click on your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on a multitude of other website, they will be least likely to click on your links and buy your products. This is because most people want to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or whom they feel like are an expert in the niche.

If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not actually know what they are talking about and therefore will not look heavily on your product recommendations. This will reduce the number of web site visitors who are willing to click through.

Problem #3 – Author Bylines

Most free reprint content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you will get into trouble if you try to use it without following those rules). This poses a problem because most author bylines include links. When a reader gets done reading a really intriguing article, there is a strong possibility that they will will click on the author resource box link rather than your own links. This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they may get their name and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing possible profitable web site visitors.

Once you put these 3 problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in profits just because you used free website content from article sites. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route. If you don’t have the funds, however, you may be better off writing your own content and then hiring professional services once you have made a profit to work with.

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