We have had quite a few contacts over the last couple of years from site owners, many of them ‘newbies’ to web mastering I assume, asking us “what the benefits of using articles from our directory on their site would be?”
Often they don’t understand yet just how content rules the web, and sometimes they wonder about the use of ‘duplicate content’ and SEO efforts.
We know that most of the publishers reusing articles from our directory are eZine and Newsletter publishers who see Content Caboodle as a valuable place to find additional content for their publications–and for them there’s never any concerns or questions about ‘duplicate content’–they just want good content on topics in their fields to provide to their subscribers.
But there’s a growing number of webmasters recognizing the value of repurposing articles too, so we thought this was a good time to talk about the uses and benefits of doing so.
For starters, providing additional quality information on topics related to your website will build trust and authority for you/your site with your visitors. Whatever field you’re in, there’s likely a treasure of great information available for use that you don’t have to spend your own time writing from scratch when you reuse an article from Content Caboodle.
These articles will provide you with additional pages of content to offer your site visitors on topics they care about, and often also gives you the chance to look at topics from different perspectives from your own, which your visitors will also appreciate as “one size fits all” never applies online.
By reusing other’s articles you’re giving additional value to your site visitors, which will encourage repeat visits, positive word of mouth advertising, and help you to solidify yourself and/or your site as an authority presence in your field.
Next, there are ways to reuse articles that are completely legitimate, within our Terms of Service, and that will provide you with SEO benefits without any need to worry over the dreaded (and widely misunderstood) ‘duplicate content’ issue.
Lets say that you want to create a page (or blog posting) on your site about “Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets”, because they’re related to the field your site covers. But there’s a small problem, because you aren’t an expert on Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets, what can you do?
You could spend hours or days researching the topic so that you can write expertly on it, but that’s a serious investment of time. Or, you could hire a freelance writer to write the piece for you, but for a quality piece that’s going to require a serious investment of money (and maybe time as well depending on how fast the writer you hire is). Or, you could find a quality article that covers Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets here on Content Caboodle, read it to ensure the quality of information is right for you and your visitors, and then build a web page around that article in a way that will make the new page your own, provide value to your visitors, gain SEO benefits and comply with our Terms of Service for reusing articles.
Here’s how that can be easily accomplished: After reading the article and deciding it’s a good fit for your site, you write a couple of leading paragraphs to summarize the article and add your own thoughts or opinions to it, then you follow those leading paragraphs with the full article and author’s resource box (as per our Terms of Service), then either end your page, or if you’re so inclined you can even add a couple of follow-up paragraphs to remark on the article and perhaps spawn some comment discussions (if you’re posting to a blog) with your readers.
By adding your own content before (and possibly after) the article on your page, you add value and provide plenty of unique content for SEO purposes, and by utilizing the article in full (including the author’s resource box) you comply with out Terms of Service for reusing content.
So you see, with a quick search on Content Caboodle and a couple of sentences of your own, you can build a full page covering nearly any topic for your site and visitors in a very short amount of time.
There are many more ways that a creative webmaster can legitimately reuse article content from our directory, add value to it and benefit from it, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here to point you in the right direction.
