Yaro has been doing an experiment to see whether writing article to submit to ‘free articles’ directories is a worthwhile way to build your blog (a strategy that quite a few bloggers use) His post is at The Verdict: Is Article Marketing Worth Your Time? The results don’t seem conclusive but I’m sure others would have experiences to add to Yaro’s so head over and have your say.
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Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I do think article writing is a good strategy to follow, but not necessarily for the backlinks it gives you. I think it’s a good way to establish yourself as an expert in your field and to gain audience members that might not otherwise find you. Of course, you have to write good articles for that to work! See my article writing tips for detailed instructions….
I would be worried about the negative SEO effects of duplicate content. I think it might be ok if you used an old article from your site that was already established in the search engines. Then they would see your site as having the original.
in my own opinion i think so.
I don’t think there is much negative effect from occasional duplicate content, and you don’t have to post a duplicate of the article to your own site.
Infact Article submission is a good strategy to attract more traffic.
Article directories themselves have RSS feeds which regular readers subscribe.
I personally subscribe to many topics of EzineArticles.
I follow interesting writers to dig more of it.
If your articles can give the hope that your blog have more content to read, sure the article readers will follow the link to your blog.
Duplication SEO content arises only when large parts two websites look identical, It is a time wastage for both readers and SE.
You Submit only one quality article to Ezine publishers and keep the rest within the confines of your own blog,
Indeed a good strategy
I did a lot of this at one point (and earned “expert author status” at ezine articles, and the results weren’t noticable–no increase in traffic. I’ve gotten a lot more bang for my buck from buying a link in the Yahoo! directory (yes $300 is a lot if you’re starting out, but if you value your time at say $50 an hour, it doesn’t take long until you’ve spent the equivalent of $300 on syndicating articles). Also, if you have a blog that looks at gadgets occasionally, send any cool ones along to sites like gizmodo and engadget. They’ve always given me credit with a link if they’ve written about the item, and sometimes other blogs will pick up on the story and link to you too.
Just a note on other subject related to this one.
Are we breaking copyrights when we add a review from another site or magazine to our very own? Let’s say I have a music blog and I’ve seen a review on the latest Dave Matthews Band album on Rolling Stone and I would like to post it on my blog. Am I breaking the copyrights of the Rolling Stone magazine? Even if I mention that it’s from that magazine?
I would never add a full review from another source to one of my blogs.
I would quote a paragraph (or two short ones) maximum and always include a link to the original source.
Well, I’m not saying I would put the whole article on my blog.
But do you or anyone here knows if the Rolling Stone magazine could take any legal action against me if I did? I think that’s an important question on blogging, because a lot of people have put some part of an article or review from a magazine on their blog.
Darren really knows what is he talking about, coz most of his blogs consists of “XXX reviews YYY: ‘some quote’” :-))
Sergio – I think you’d be asking for trouble by republishing full reviews from RS (or any other publication) – both legally but also for reputation’s sake. The Blogosphere tends to look down (and get pretty angry) about copyright issues.
A little late jumping in here, but fwiw a recent thread at the Warrior Forum included posts by some well know internet marketers who adamently debunk the ‘duplicate content’ penalty…
Now there may be reasons why they’re able to make it work, and likely that includes adding additional content to the pages that feature each article, using only articles that relate to the theme of that particular website, and having other content on that site aside from just articles (ie not simply a website consisting of 10,000 free articles covering a wide range of unrelated themes).
And as an aside, feel free to use my (free) resource page to both find and submit articles via a ton of article directories. My site should be #1 on google when you search for:
article directories
:-)
Just my 2 cents!
I’m sure submitting article is good way to promote your site, specially if in the end of article you provide a good reasson for the readers to visit your site. While it might not necesarily help your search engine result, you can get a lot of good traffic from interested reader.
There is a free article submitter for article directories based on article dashboard.