It is very common for new webmasters to start grabbing some free traffic from search engines by using articles published in free article directories. This is perfectly legal as far as you keep a link back to its original author and don’t hurt the meanings by changing it too much. Being free, it is very attractive for newbie webmasters and if used correctly, also found useful to bring quality traffic at little to no cost. Most of such webmasters use PPC ads or very famous affiliate programs to earn money as they don’t get loyal visitors.
Even though this is a good option for low-budget webmasters yet it can destroy your repute easily and will make it difficult to pick loyal visitors for you. Here are a few major issues with this approach,
Issue 1: Ranking in Search Engines
The whole process is based upon the fact that you will rank well in search engines and hence get some free traffic. But it is important to note that you are using an already published article so whatever a user will search will also give an equivalent chance to your competitor to rank for the same keyword. This situation turned more worst when too many sites publish same article and hence also compete with you on that low volume long tail keyword. Hence amount of traffic you can get from search engines will be decreasing day by day no matter how much or less it would be in start.
Since you would not get enough traffic on your site, so it is less likely that you are going to get your ads clicked by those visitors. Even if a few of them clicks, revenue would be very less overall. No need to mention that it will also reduce gradually as you lose traffic with time.
Issue 2: Lowest Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
No doubt, ranking your website for a targeted keyword is not a piece of cake and requires a lot of analysis, efforts and luck (to some extent) to get well ranked. Even if you can get top position, your mission is not yet accomplished. You need to make up your visitor to click on ads or your affiliate link in order to help you earn money. If your visitors are going to read same contents that they might already have read (on some other site), they will not take interest in it and hence will not spot your advertisement or would be willing to click on it.
Remember, people like to buy products online only if they are being referred by a trusted person. If people knew you and see that you are recommending them it is most likely that they will attempt to buy or at least consider it seriously. By using free contents from article directories, you project yourself as a person who don’t know what he is actually doing and hence will loose your credit ability.
This all result in very low CTR on your website no matter if it is a Pay Per Click model or an affiliate marketing site.
Issue 3: Author Bylines
There is a lot of distraction for your visitors as they can find original author’s link at the end of article and might be more interest to read more on his site than to stay at your own site. Usually, articles are written for free directories to promote certain products or individual as experts and hence given their link back (you need to keep those links active in order to use these contents legally). Hence it is more probable that a serious read will follow that link to visit that author’s website despite looking at your affiliate links.
Once you put these three problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in revenue simply because you used free website content from article directories. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route. If you don’t have the finds, however, you may be better off writing your own content and then hiring professional services once you have made a profit to work with.
