Why Should You Give Your Content Away?
Like traditional print magazines and newspapers, websites are always looking for great copy to make them look good, and they don't want to pay for it! This is a great opportunity for the content rich website owner to generate lots of qualified, relevant traffic and lots of good quality inbound links.
Creating and writing informative articles and syndicating or sharing them across the internet is a sure-fire way or getting lots of established sites relevant in your field to link in to you, making your search engine rankings shoot through the roof! As your information and knowledge spreads across the web, more and more readers who enjoy them and find them useful will follow the links to your site. You will quickly become a leader and authority in your sector as your name and homepage links gets shown on hundreds of other sites.
Most website owners and online publishers have never heard of article syndication and those that do tend to think it's too much bother. But it really is easy. If someone else came to you and offered you a free article in your subject area that was well written, informative, useful and all they wanted was a backlink, you'd bite their arm off!
Sourcing Your Articles
If you are a keen writer and are creating all your own content, then great. On the other hand, if you are busy out there promoting your site on the streets or in the media then you could hire a freelance ghostwriter or journalist to do it for you. You could do it direct through sites like www.elance.com or www.directfreelance.com where you just post a simple project outline and freelancers bid for the work. Alternatively, SubHub can work with you to take some of that pain away and help you with the creation of new, exciting, useful and relevant articles.
You can also just replicate articles from your site. Take some of your freemium content and start there. This also means that when people link directly to the article, they are not stumped with a login box. A good idea is to produce some overlapping content. This could be done by taking a longer article from your site and breaking it out into several other articles. This way, you can create a 'series' that would ensure exposure over a longer period. Each article within the series would need some general information so that new visitors are not lost.
The writing does not need to be award-winning at this stage; just simple, informative and to the point introductions to your area of expertise.
Tips on Writing Articles
1) Include a disclaimer. At the bottom of each article add the sentence “Webmasters are free to reprint this article provided that it is not edited, the author's information is included, and the links are included as live links.” Lots of directories will reject articles that have links to your site in the body text. Include links to your site in the “author info” section.
2) The “author info” section, also called the “resource box” at the bottom of the article, is where you include a link to your site and a brief introduction. Include this, as there's no point in syndicating articles without it. Here is an example of a simple resource box text:
“Miles Galliford is the author of “The Subscription Website Bible” and owner of http://www.SubHub.com, Powerful Subscription Websites.”
Distributing Your Articles
There are lots of free article directories where you can register and submit your articles. They are large, general sites and their submission guidelines differ so check them first. As these sites are general, they will not give you the same level of qualified traffic as you would get from syndicating content relevant to your field. However, they are a great place to start. Many of the specialist sites come to the directories first to try and get some free content, so you may find your articles appearing on sites you have never even heard of!
- http://www.articlecity.com/
- http://www.goarticles.com/
- http://www.ezinearticles.com/
- http://www.bigarticles.com/
- http://www.articlealley.com/
- http://www.articlefusion.com/
- http://www.articlecube.com/
- http://www.articlego.com/
- http://www.articlegeek.com/
- http://www.articlebeam.com/
- http://www.articlefever.com/
- http://www.articlebin.com/
- http://www.articlecountry.com/
- http://www.activehowto.com/
- http://www.thearticlezone.com/
- http://www.my-articles.com/
- http://www.content-edge.com/