Date: 15 Oct 2009 Comments: 0

One of the biggest challenges for people first starting out is how to find content for their sites. As mentioned in other posts, you can hire content providers, create it yourself, use PLR and use content that is made available through article directories.

This is the quickest and easiest way to launch your site or blog, but it has its drawbacks.

Here are the pros and cons of using articles written by others.

The Cons

1) The material likely will appear on other people’s sites as well, which means you will be publishing duplicate content. This can affect your position in the search engine results. Google, for instance, wants to see original content. If it doesn’t find it, your site will not make it into the top 10 results unless you happen to be one of a very few people using that article. Over time, however, if more people post your article, you will have more competition for that top position.

2) You cannot change the article or the author’s resource box. All must remain intact, which means you cannot leave off the resource box or insert your own links into it. While you are using the article to promote your offers, you will be advertising someone else’s product instead. You can only add your links within the article itself.

The Pros

1) Free material that meets your immediate needs. You can get your site up and running very quickly using article directory content.

2) You get to see the quality before you use it.

3) All the research has been done for you by the author.

4) You have tons of articles at your disposal, which makes it easy to find what you want.

5) It’s an easy way to keep fresh content on your site

As you can see, there are some positives to using article directory content, but if you do choose this option, you might want to make it a temporary thing. Focus more on getting your hands on material you can call your own, that you can put your name on, modify as you see fit, and include your own links. That way, it will be original to you.

At this point, you might want to look at the post that talks about how to use PLR to build your site content.