Free Reprint Articles: Why Do Publishers Want Your Articles? [And What Do You Get Out Of It?]

Free reprint articles are an online marketing tool where a website owner writes articles on the subject matter of his niche, and then online publishers publish the articles on their sites.

You may wonder how this arrangement works--what does the publisher get out of putting your article on his site, and how do you benefit by creating content that he publishes for free?

Submitting articles for article marketing is a win-win situation for both writers and publishers. First let's cover what publishers get out of the deal. Why don't publishers just write their own content? Wouldn't that be easier? Then they wouldn't have to draw attention to the author of the article, and they could keep all the attention for themselves.

Some website owners do write all of their own content, but many find that they either don't have time to create a steady stream of articles or maybe writing is just not their strong point. In that case, employing free reprint articles is the perfect solution.

In some situations,the publisher may write some of the content, but he chooses to supplement his own content with quality free reprint articles on the same general topic. Some publishers like the idea of having articles by different people on their site, as they think it enhances the variety and makes the site more interesting for their readers. Every writer has a different tone and style and different areas of expertise, so the idea of having a "team" of different writers on a website is appealing to some publishers.

With free reprint articles, the publisher can build up the content on his site in a relatively short amount of time. The publisher's end goal is to create a website that his readers find interesting and helpful. The longer he can entice readers to browse through his website the more views the pages on his website will receive. A "sticky" website also helps with search engine rankings.

That is why publishers like free reprint articles--but what does the author get?

People write free reprint articles with the purpose of drawing attention to a website. Every time you submit an article, you will also include an author biography with information about your business and a link to your website. When readers look at your article, they can click the link(s), and in that way you create a new source of traffic for your site.

The articles that you submit also can impact your search engine rankings. Every time your article is republished, you build links to your website (via the author biography that is published along with the article). These links help search engines to establish the topic and authority of the pages of your website.

By communicating to search engines what your specific topic is, the search engine then knows what search terms to rank your web pages for. For example, if you've established that your website is about surfing in Hawaii, then when people type "surfing in Hawaii" into Google, your website will appear in the rankings. The greater the authority (importance) of the pages on your website for that search term, the higher they will appear in Google's rankings.

Does that makes sense? At first glance you may wonder what a publisher has to gain by publishing links to another person's website or what the writer has to gain by letting other website owners publish their content for free, but actually the two sides benefit a lot. Each one is getting something absolutely essential out of the arrangement, and that's why publishers continue to seek out free reprint articles for their websites and why website owners continue to create content to help market their websites.