I'm gathering from "free articles" you mean ones you can reprint from directories as opposed to writing yourself. I wouldn't suggest putting them on a site and expecting adsense to make you anything. It might happen, but you'd need to depend on traffic other than search engines. Instead: Find a bunch of related articles, make an ecourse out of them. Contact the authors and ask if you can make the link in their resource box an affiliate link to their products. You must get permission to do this because most article directories forbid changing anything. Some will say yes, some no. Even if you cannot change the link, you can still run it as is and include other advertisements in that issues before or after the article. Load them up into an auto responder series, promote your squeeze page and you're in business and creating a nice list for yourself that you can promote to over and over again.
I saw many free articles from article directory right now is being used for promoting the author's business or website. Well, it seems if you're using those free articles you won't make the money but the authors of those articles do.
You're exactly right - that is what submissions are for. You submit an article to promote your website (usually in the signature box), and hope the article gets picked up for additional traffic and back links. That's why they are free in the first place - it's essentially a marketing tool for the publisher with some potential value to end users.
There is a lot of abuse in this field as well ... many people sell zillions of copies of so-called "unique articles" and then they end up being posted everywhere on the net, which constitutes double content and penalizes you.
thats not bad at all... i have a few article sites that are just generic and there are hundreds of the same site they make a few cents every couple days which is just enough to pay for posting and cover the domain cost but other than that free articles have done nothing for me... however having unique articles written can be get pretty expensive and if your site never really makes any money off of it u don't have crap to show for the articles you paid top dollar for... so i would say start out with free and unique articles and then slowly take out the free ones because the uniques will get people to your page and then the free will keep them there for a little while till eventually you can just have all unique
I believe in writing artcles and selling to one person only. By this way I become a professional writer and have my own specific charge.
Your site has to be more then just a site with articles to make money... First it needs a purpose, a focus, or a niche, you can just have 100 articles on random things. Then you need good content not just "filler" content... Articles someone interested in the subject would want to read. Starting off with free content is a good way to kill a site before it even starts, 99% of this content is not worth reading. Then you need a community... People to keep the site active and to help create more content. This could be loyal readers, forum, photo gallery, websites, blogs, writers, etc... User generated content would be key for a new site starting out. Its nice when content is being created every day and you don’t have to pay for it. Finding a good mix of paid content and user generated content is the best way to make a site successful. Now with this said, its not going to work with every kind of site... but for most its a pattern to follow.
I think you should change the way you look at articles. Most people aren't using the articles to make money directly anymore, but rather to increase links back to their website. Of course, this model only works if there are still people taking those free articles and pasting them on their sites. Which side do you want to be on: the side with the duplicate content penalty sending links to other websites, or the side getting targeted links from one article beign copied on to dozens of other sites?