Most MFA (Made for AdSense) sites use free article services to fill their sites with content. I would never recommend you fill your blog with free articles from any of these services because unique content drives traffic. However, one thing you may want to look at is sending a few articles to these services to help drive traffic and links back to your blog.
By making an article available on any of these article services, you let other webmasters reprint your article on their sites. You allow this because at the end of the article, there is a resource box that tells a bit about who you are plus a link back to your blog. If your article is picked up by a lot of sites, the resulting traffic and back links can be significant. Here are a few tips to get maximum benefit from the free article services.
Don’t Publish The Free Article On Your Site
I recommend the article you write for an article service be used for the service only. In other words, don’t publish the article on your site. The reason for this is to avoid the duplicate content plenty. Google places less trust on sites that have nothing but duplicate content. If your article is a hit and is reproduced by a bunch of sites, Google won’t ding you because you didn’t reproduced an article that a hundred other sites reproduced.
Use a Two Part Article
Most webmasters write articles for free articles services to get back links and not traffic. Let’s face it, most users of free articles service don’t get much traffic. However, you can increase the likelihood of a reader clicking on the resource link and visiting your blog if you break your article into two parts – the first part being the free article and the second part on your blog only.
If a reader likes what they read on the site the reproduced your article, then chances are good that he’ll click on the part two link and visit your blog to read the rest.
A Few Articles Sites To Send Your Articles To
The above is not an exhaustive list but it will get you started. You can find more places to submit your articles to by doing a search for Free Articles on Google.
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I heard google banned the blogs using that articles, because was duplicated content.
yeah i know google frowns on duplicate content..
Do you know how could we if that is true?
Simple, you own a bunch of the sites, they do well and then suddenly collectively get nerfed. Not uncommon. Just need to listen in on other people’s experiences.
Not all of them. If you know how to mix the articles with other parts of text, then it will look like original and Google will not ban you.
Article stuff is more or less dead…imho
I just started doing this last week to get new links. =) Makes me feel like I’m on the right track.
This can be a great source of traffic. Not anything like John’s review me idea, but it works on a smaller scale.
Content is definately King.
Sure, but content that’s going to be replicated a million times over on the web might not be.
Original content is king.
good point. is anyone else frustrated with people duplicating their content?
I imagine it can be frustrating, but it’s a risk you take for putting your work out there. Intellectual property could be a huge deal, especially if they’re “protected” by copyright.
Yeah, I’ve submitted a few articles and gotten some nice traffic and links from them – even affiliate commission from affiliate links in an article
I actually have my own article directory that people can submit their article to:
http://www.articleshowroom.com/
The front page is PR4 and some of the article pages are PR2 so article authors can definitely benefit from submitting.
Thanks for sharing this with us. I’ll give it a try.
Guess what? I am using this method to get backlinks to my blog.
Nice article. This is exactly how I got my site going in the beginning. I would have 5 uniques/day and the days I would post to Ezine my traffic would jump to 50 uniques/day for a few days and then settle down to 10 uniques/day with the new traffic coming from Ezine readers following the backlinks.
I had postings on photography on my site that had a lot of sample photos. You are allowed to include 3 links to sites you control in the article, so I would have a comment near the beginning and end to see the sample photos on my site including a link to the posting. Worked like a charm.
My other technique was to split the article so that the beginning part formed a complete article in itself. At the end of the article I would provide a link and comment saying that the article in full could be viewed at…
I would be interested to try the last 3 and if anyone has some opinion on them let me know. Ezine was the only of the few I tried that had any kind of traffic feeding back.
Thanks for sharing your experience on this, Neil; it’s been very helpful, too.
How high did your traffic get using that technique?
How long ago did you do this?
I’d be interested to know what you peaked at.. and what articles worked better then others?
I had a few articles submitted to Ezine Articles, they do work by providing traffic back to my blog. Now that John has reminded me of it, perhaps its time to add a few more.
Hey John
i think submitting posts to free article sites is a great way not only to increase traffic, but gaining exposure and credibility. However, i’d much rather post to article sites that pertain to my blog, which in my case deals with commodities and stocks and hence i choose to post to an article site like seeking alpha.
Definitely smart in my opinion. You’ll get way more ‘quality’ traffic this way. Traffic that will stick around and return another day.
A lot of the article directories are mostly used for backlinks though, i think.
Yes, it would make more sense posting to ezines that cover your blog niche. It’s helping me build some backlinks too.
Thats actually a great Idea I didn’t know places like that existed.
Hey, John are you in one of the forums that I usually visit =? (Only you’d know what forum it’s). Had this same info on the forum, but was too busy to post on one of my other blogs.
I submitted some articles, but the traffic I got was not sensational. At least, it did not pay off the time I spent on writing the articles.
Thats what has happened to me too
Well you do it mostly so that you can get the links anyway.
Oh cool info, I will give it a try!
However, they are good for backlinks. And you can submit the same articles to all ezines, because you don’t care about duplicates, as long as you don’t publish those articles on your site, too.
Sure you won’t get your site nerfed, but it definitely kills the value of those backlinks that you’ll get. In all likelihood, you’ll only get one effective version of each backlink from each article you submit.
that’s the evil way of attracting visitors, using 2-parts article … evil yet creative – how come i never thought of that before? … you score big of being one of the most evil bloggers around john …
Yeah I really like the part two thing, it has been recommended as a tip in lots of places, but I wish I had done it earlier, not 30 articles in!
I strongly agree — It would be ideal to maintain duplicate-free content on your own site. It’s one thing to submit an original piece to an article service for publicity and backlinks purposes. There’s just no point in posting the same article on your site.
I totally agree with that. I wonder how much you need to rewriting you would need to do to avoid the duplicate penalty. A new title and totally different wording?
Think about it — people have been writing about the same things, day in and day out. Sure, there are a few good novelty articles, but the rest are pretty much “recycled.” I think that one can still keep the idea or subject and write everything from scratch…it’s far better than just “copy-paste.”
It is but even then you can re-write an article and say inspiration found here (insert link)
You know what, out of sheer curiosity, I might just click on something that read “inspiration found here” LOL.
lol
The best thing is original content, but my site is not muchly indexed and when i publish my articles, someone steals it and publishes under his web. This makes no sense.
Nice Idea! thanks! I will give it a try!
The part about splitting your articles into 2 parts so that readers will come to your site and the other half… F&*#ing, absolutely brilliant!! Why didn’t I think of that? John Chow your a GENIUS!