How many of you are using free content from article directories

Are any of you using free content from article directories to complement occasionally your web site or your newsletter (but not scraping 100%) ?

Do you use other sources (such as yahoo group article announcements) ?

Was it beneficial ? Any special recommendation ?

 

Some people seem to use them successfully. However, when I look at the available aritcles in subjects areas in which I know something about, they seem VERY shallow. I have bought some of the instant article sites sold here, but don't see much use for them except as a learning tool for how to write code to build a site like this.

 

i used em briefly to make a whole bunch of small sites......but that was it.

 

I have used them. When I actively added articles to my health forum the unique hits soared. Google would send tons of visitors and they converted very well to adsense.

 

I use it sometimes as long as it is a good article and I'm running short on ideas/time and want to keep the content flowing.

 

i sued the articles only when i have no inspiration to write my own. as long as you don't use them 100%, i think it's fine. after all that's what articles directories are for.

 

I am not good at writing. I use those articles.

 

I use them for small niche websites. That's been my focus lately.
There's only a few subjects that I may be able to write about that would actually have clarity on the subject matter.

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZtheomnicorpQQhtZ-1

Here's a sample site.

www.listbikes.com (I plan to make it a free motorcycle classified ad site, but right now have it developed for adsense and affiliate programs.)

 

Its a difficult decision to make. The best thing to do is search for certain sentences from an article using google and see if its indexed on loads of sites first.

The thing you don't really want is to publish an article thats already on loads of other sites as you don't get the full benefit from it due to the duplicate content filter (the article writer would still benefit though as long as you keep the link intact).

 

when i ran out of ideas i look for free articles... im only looking for free articles because im just being practical... why would i spend money if i could get the articles that i want for free... for me it works for me but i think if a certain topic is very hard to find then probably you might want to look to buy for articles...