I have seen that may bloggers are using free articles on their blogs. By free articles, here I mean the reprintable articles that different article directories and e-zines publishes. The reason of using free articles in blog posts, may vary from blogger to blogger. But, I am sure that one main reason is content. But, do you think that it is a good strategy to publish free articles, specially when you intend to make some money with your blog?

In my view, you must think twice before publishing free articles on your blog! Why? Free articles do supplies content, attracts search engines and blog visitors. And probably you will get one or two customers out of those visitors. But, if you look for long term benefits, you will get noting but problems from those articles. Still not getting my points? Let me elaborate how free articles on your blog can ruin your quest for making money online.

Poor Search Engine Ranking:

Search engines visits blogs and websites for fresh contents and keeps an record of each and every webpage they visit. When they finds same duplicated content in multiple webpages, they simply drops the rankings of those pages. Even search engines like Google can penalize your blog for too many duplicate contents.

So, with free articles posted as it-is on your blog, you will never be able to get good position in search engine result pages, because those article are already on multiple websites. Thanks to killer article marketing techniques and article distribution services!

And good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your site so that they click on your affiliate links to buy a product or service recommended by you. Bad search engine rankings means lesser organic traffic and lesser traffic means less revenue. When you cannot even get visitors to your webpages with affiliate links, how can you expect to earn some revenue from your affiliate links?

Loss of Credibility and Authority:

Let us assume that you are getting some visitors to your blog posts, even though you have duplicate content on your blog. Don’t be happy my friend, because this is only half of the battle. The most important part is convincing your visitors to click on your affiliate links and to make them buy the product/service that you are promoting.

When visitors comes to your blog and see the same content that they have seen on a number of other sites, they will be least likely to click on the links provided by you. Why? This is because your visitors are human like you and me and they love to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or whom they consider as an authority on the subject.

When your visitors realize that you are using duplicate content on your blog, the first thing that comes to their mind is that you are not an expert or you don’t know anything about the topic. And that’s why you are using duplicated content. Therefore they will never consider you as an authority person and will not even look on your product recommendations.

So, the ultimate loss is yours. This will reduce the number of visitors who will be willing to click through your recommended links. And lower click through always reduces the chances of better revenue. I’m sure that you know it!

Loss of Valuable Traffic:

Most of the free articles carries one or two lines about the author with one or two links provided by the author. We call it author resource box or author bio-box or whatever. When you use a free article, you must follow the rules specified by the content provider and keep the resource box intact.

This poses a great problem for you! Because most author resource box includes links. After reading a really intriguing article on your blog, there is a strong possibility that your readers will click on the author’s link rather than the affiliate links provided by you.

In fact, this is the main reason why authors offer free content for republishing and it is called article marketing. So, by publishing free content on your blog, you are helping those authors to generate traffic, sales and credibility! And in return, you are getting nothing but a big zero.

When you will put all the above points together, the picture will become clear! By publishing free articles on your blog, you will loss search engine ranking, you will loss your credibility as an authority person and you will loss your valuable prospects. Ultimately you will loss revenue, that you could have easily earned by not using free articles. So, if you are serious about blogging and want to make money online with your blog, write your own content. Spending some hours every day on writing or hire a good writer to produce some good content on your behalf. Remember: “In Blogging, Content is King”.