How to Use Content Online and Not Fret about the Duplicate Content Debate
In affiliate marketing, your websites, blogs, and micro-sites are your lifeblood. You engage in article writing, article submission, and article marketing to get people to those different sites. This is through the links in your articles' author's resource boxes. Once visitors link back to your site, you develop your relationships with them further.
Success in building quality online relationships with potential customers depends on content. Visitors to your web pages want useful information that speaks to their needs. It's your responsibility as an affiliate marketer to provide top-notch content.
However, that's often easier said than done. It takes time to create original content. It's tempting to write some articles, and then place those articles across all your different websites and blogs. It's akin to "One size fits all" that you see in advertising. You write one article that you fit onto all of your websites and such.
The thing is the search engines and web searchers dislike this approach to building content. This is the duplicate content debate you hear about today. Duplicate content generally refers to significant blocks of content within or across domains that completely match other content. If they don't "completely" match, they are definitely extremely similar.
Some affiliate marketers seek to manipulate the major search engines. They duplicate the same articles and reports across their many domains. Their hope is to gain better search engine rankings because of all these keywords. They hope to gain traffic through a host of popular or long-tail search queries.
You have to look at the duplicate content from two viewpoints. First, the search engines have a responsibility to direct their users to fresh content. This is timely content that keeps their users up-to-date on certain subjects and topics. The search engines reputation with their users depends on providing them diverse search results.
Second, web searchers don't want to see the same content on all your websites. You probably link some, if not all, of your sites to one another. Each website helps direct traffic to the other. Think of the person who accesses your site. He or she then follows a link to another site of yours.
The last thing they want is the same content on another site. It's a waste of their time to link to the other site to read the same articles or reports. It's also frustrating to people when affiliate marketers use the same articles from other sources. Many affiliate websites that promote the same products use the same content.
There's a right way to use your own content, and the content of others. One way is to write your own articles and to tailor each one to each website you own. Each website has its own persona and is unique. Articles on these sites must also have their own persona and be unique from articles on your other sites.
It's important to have different content across different web pages within one site. Don't copy blocks of text across multiple pages on a site. This is the wrong use of content as well.
In addition, you're busy as an affiliate marketer. You may want to use articles your affiliate program provides. You may want to secure some Private Label Right's (PLR) articles.
Additionally, you may access articles from an article directory site. You found a great author who really understands topics related to your affiliate products. You know your target market would love to read this content.
You can use all of the above mentioned content and avoid the duplicate content debate by following a few rules. When you use affiliate program or PLR articles, rewrite them in your own words. This takes less time then researching and writing an article from scratch.
If you import articles from article directories onto your site, give credit to the original author. Indicate who wrote the article, the source of the article, and a link to the author and directories website. Don't rewrite this person's article. Publish the content on one website of yours exactly as the author wrote it.
An article such as this only scratches the surface of the duplicate content debate. As an affiliate marketer, you should gain a deeper understanding of the topic. After all, content is what drives your business.
You want to use content properly so as not to annoy the search engines. Look for a good article distribution service that makes an EBook on the duplicate content debate available for free. Study the book to ensure you play by the rules when placing content on your websites.
Good content does build your affiliate marketing business. Unique fresh content across your websites attracts the attention of search engines. They trust you are providing quality information and direct their users your way.
About the Author:
Chris Ellington is CEO of IPNM, the parent company of Article Marketer: first choice for article distribution by article marketers around the world. Learn about duplicate content here.
Article Marketing
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