There are many websites which provide free content which you can legally reproduce on your own website. Here is how they work. “experts” (and I use this term lightly, because there is no formal check on an author’s background) write articles and submit them to these content distribution websites. The articles are then categorized and published on the website for anyone to reproduce on their own domain, royalty free. This allows you to quickly and easily fill your new website with tons of new articles, reviews and commentaries providing content for your visitors and a bit of “credibility” to your site. Realistically it ads zero credibility since you’ve not written any of it, but a visitor to your Fitness Website who sees a hundred articles by a couple dozen “fitness experts” on your site, will think you must credible. The only responsibility you have to the author is to keep the work in-tact and leave the byline and links active.

Why would authors do this? - Simple advertising. These authors are usually associated with a website or business. They write articles on a specific topic, let’s say yoga techniques. Then they submit the article to dozens of content distributors. Once published there, that article begins to be picked up by other webmaster like yourself who need content for their own websites. Now the article is being published on many websites. This has three positive effects for the author’s website.

1. It ads incoming links from the byline (they will link to their own website within their bylines) . This will help to increase SEO rankings for their own domain.
2. Readers who enjoyed their article and wish to hear more on that topic or more from that author, will follow the byline link to the author’s website.
3. Name recognition.

Consequences

• Good - The upside to getting content this way is that it’s free, easy and you can fill your site quickly. This can establish your site as a place for information and encourage longer visitor stays and more repeat traffic.
• Bad - The search engines will recognize that this is duplicated content and will not give you any “credit” for the content on those pages. If you want to increase rankings (and thus bring in new traffic) you will have to produce unique content eventually. Another thing to keep in mind is that 90% (I’m pulling that stat out of thin air based on my own experience) of the free articles content out there is being written by someone who’s ultimate goal is to promote their view on topic X or to increase rankings for their website. So read articles carefully before you post them on your own site to make sure they contain a suitable amount of relevant information and are not just a “info ad”.

Recommended Content Depots - As I mentioned their are hundreds of these type of sites out there. And over the years I’ve closely looked at four or five dozen of them. Below are the two distributors that were the most user friendly (for both publishers and authors), have the largest selctions, and seemed in my view to have the least amount of “info ad” articles (though the percentage is still quite high). Also note that these two recommendations are for general topics, everything under the sun. There are distributor sites which specialize in specific topics. They will always have a higher quality of author and content. But to get your feet wet I would start with these two.

• Go Articles
• Ezine Articles