Why you should not use free-use articles for your blog - and alternate ways of producing good content for free

Greetings Entrepreneur blogger!

Some aspiring blog creators try to use free-use articles and posts from free content websites to produce pages that will drive visitors to their website and make some money, perhaps by selling a product or via affiliate marketing. This is mostly done by people who have just begun working with affiliate marketing and do not have any funds to purchase advertisements or content, yet still have to create and grow niche websites that drive views and conversions for their affiliate links.

Although sometimes this approach to building a blog website appears to be the only option if you are operating on a non-existent or very low budget, it will not build your website or revenue, in fact it will probably *prevent* people from discovering your site... There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your website's success:

**Problem 1 - Search Engine Optimization**

Search engines will not promote your site if it has the exact same copy-pasted content from other sites. The more sites that share your content, the worse your search engine rankings will be. Thus it is necessary to somehow come up with your own, original content. If you do not want to write your own content, then there are several ways to work around this, but first the importance of good search engine rankings.

Good search engine rankings are required to get visitors to visit your blog or website so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even get visitors, then there is not even a chance that people might click on your links, and with conversion rates already very low, driving as much traffic as possible is 100% necessary if you truly want to make any money. When designing a website and writing content, Search Engine Optimization should be you biggest priority as it is the only way to drive traffic to your site for free.

**Problem 2 - Driving traffic**

While it may seem that working on good SEO and driving readers to your blogs and articles is the hardest part of the job, unfortunately in reality this is only half the work. You must also convince those readers to click on your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on every other page in that niche, they will be very unlikely to read more than the first paragraph of your article, let alone click on your links... This is because most people will only to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or who are experts on their subjects.

If your content is simply copied from other websites, you are quickly exposed as someone who does not know what they are talking about at all and thus readers will not trust your product recommendations. This will drastically decrease the number of website visitors who will be willing to purchase via your links.

**Problem 3 - Author Bylines**

If you do find some unique content and the author allows you to use it for free, it is likely that you will only be allowed to use it if you place the author's name and website link under or before the article. If you do not do this then you will face heavy copyright issues that will most likely put an end to your enterprise, especially if you are running low enough on funds to need free content. This is problematic as the authors credits (called a 'Byline') often are links to the author's own blog. Authors do this so that they can push their interesting articles to more readers who will then visit their website and click their affiliate links. By using this free content you are effectively acting as free advertising for said author. Using this type of content means that instead of driving visitors to your own affiliate links, you drive them all to someone else's site and not only lose all profit you could have made, but even worse, hand it straight to someone else.

**Solutions**

All in all, it is seriously damaging to your revenue to use free content for your website. If you do have enough money to buy your own original content, say from Fiverr or other freelancers, then it is definitely the best idea to go down this route. If you cannot afford to purchase content, then perhaps give writing a try! Take your laptop or writing pad to your local café, sit down for an hour with a nice coffee and write to your heart's content! If you struggle with coming up with what to say on your own, you can often find the bare bones, foundations (or plans) of articles that are free use under Private Label Rights. These are often just the basic points that really need fleshing out. They are also often written using bad or illegible grammar and spelling. You can then edit these, improve the grammar and make them longer and more interesting. Be cautious however, as the rights you get depend on the original author in a case-by-case basis! You are always allowed to edit and sell the product, but sometimes you are not allowed to simply publish it for free!

Hope this helps you to success with your affiliate blogs!

>> Oli :)