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Make Money Online Newbie

Creating Good Quality Content For Your Niche Site

Posted July 22nd, 2008

OK, so I’ve been messing around with the mechanics of how my affiliate mashup sites will work, but have come to the point where I think I need to start getting some static content (articles, info pages etc.) on to these sites too, in order to get more hits from the search engines for search terms related to my sites.

This may be obvious to most people, and I have heard the term “content is king” mentioned by pretty much every blogger I’ve read in the make money online community, but I think I was maybe slightly naive in thinking I might still get some decent traffic to my sites without having to write lengthy articles or setup a blog for each niche site.

So I’ve been looking into whether it’s possible to get some good content related to my niche for free. There are a couple of methods I’ve come across that i’m interested in:

Free Articles
There are a number of sites where you can get your hands on articles on pretty much any subject you need. These can be used free of charge, as long as the article and byline (with any credits to the author and even any links they want to stick in there too) remains as is.
A couple of examples of sites you can get these free articles from are Articles Base and Ezine Articles, but a simple search on Google for “free articles” show that there are many other sites out there.
Wikipedia Content
You can find articles on Wikipedia for pretty much any niche that you’re interested in. The beauty of Wikipedia content is that you can take it and modify it before putting it on your site. So you can start with the base Wikipedia content, then edit it as you like and essentially end up with some semi-unique content for your site.
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia license (see the full license/copyright text here):
“Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement).”

Out of the above two methods for gaining content, I’m leaning towards modified Wikipedia articles. This is for a couple of reasons.

To at least have some uniqueness.
I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can penalise heavily sites/pages that they deem to be duplicates of other pages on the web. I would imagine a direct copy of a popular article from one of the free article sites could get used by many other sites out there, and so there would be a high risk of your page being penalised as a duplicate. At least with modified Wikipedia articles you have some chance of avoiding this, if you modify it enough.

Does anyone else use either of these to get content for your affiliate sites? Do you always write your own? If so, even on niche subjects you may not be an expert on? Do you use another method/resource?

I’d love to hear any comments on this subject.