The draw is to increase the number of inbound links to your site, which should help increase your ranking with the search engines. Generally, the more links pointing to your site the better it will be ranked by the search engines. The kind of link which the search engines love is for it to appear naturally in the context of an article, which you can more easily gaurantee when it's your article.
This concept has lead to an interesting service. Several sites exist as "article exchanges". An article exchange site allows webmasters to download and republish articles, with the "payment" being to link to the originating web site. The webmaster who republishes these articles gets "free" content, and the author of the articles gets more links to their site. Win-win.
Generally the services are free.
Search Engine Optimization Through Article Syndication (emediawire.com December 22, 2005)
Article exchange web sites
Content Edge (content-edge.com)
Web sites which will accept articles:
- http://goarticles.com/
- http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
- http://amazines.com
- http://www.articlecity.com/
- http://bpubs.com/
- http://businessknowhow.com/
- http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
- http://www.promotionworld.com/
- http://promotenewz.com/
These Yahoo Groups allow for the exchange of articles:
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArticlePublisher/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_eContent/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeWrites/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freE-zinecontent/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publish-announce/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ReprintArticles-Paradise/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWriteArticles
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aainet/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content/
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
Be careful when reprinting articles others have written. They may not have their facts straight. It might be helpful to remember the distinction between "writer", "editor" and "publisher", and that as the editor/publisher of a web site you are responsible for the quality of what you're publishing.