I’m creating a website for my business (following fadi’s advice for setting it up) and was wanting to put articles on there to attract more visitors. Now being a beginner myself I can’t really pen a lot of articles with my limited REI experience so I was wondering what the rule was for say “quoting” someone else’s article. I’d put a link to their site and give them full credit.
Is it always wise to ask permission first, even if you provide a link to where you got it and the name of the author?
You need permission from the copyright owner to use his material. You may be able to get away with posting just a link without permission, but that doesn’t help generate much traffic.
scostell - you can get an automatic feed from a feed provider that will include news/information directly in your website.
A colleague from my local REIA group sent me a link to his website (http://www.azhomezone.com/). As you can see he has two windows on the right - one shows the mortgage rates and the other shows real estate news. He has only to include the feed directly into his website. The feed provider will update it on a regular basis.
You can typically get those feeds for free. If you are using a hosting service (GoDaddy.com or 1and1.com, or other similar) they typically offer you a host of feeds that you can easily add to your website.
I hope this helps. Good luck!
PS: other than meeting the owner of the above website in the REIA meeting I don’t have any other connection with him or his website.
You could buy some articles, depends on what you want to put on your website… some of them are very cheap…
Thanks guys, pretty much what I figured. I think i’m gonna try and write my own. I could write one on each stumbling block that I face going forward. Won’t be putting out a lot of articles, but it’ll grow slowly.
Writing is not easy, and it is not suposed to be… All my articles have so many mistakes, and written poorly… that is because I just sit down and write what is on my mind without going back and editing… something I am starting to do to clean them up.
Who are you trying to attract with your articles/blog? This is extremely important to figure out. Is it to network? for sellers? just a blog about you?
I’d be looking to attract buyers and other investors with my website for the most part. It will be for networking. I’ve noticed by following other people’s blogs and from going to other investor’s pages, that it’s a great way to build up your contacts. Granted you have to get the traffic to your website, so the content has to be good and timely. Also not to mention your marketing has to be good to make people aware of your page :biggrin. I figure if I can write some articles about the steps to becoming an investor I’d be able to attract (hopefully) a lot of new investors who could potential become full time investors.
That’s my thought process right now in terms of why I want to write some articles.
You are trying to attract two opposite spectrums.
For sellers, you need to write about things like:
For Investors, it depends on the level of investor skills you like to target. Make sure whatever you write, will not turn off your buyers or seperate them into different blogs.
There are a lot to write about. As far as getting traffic, it is not easy and require lots of patience. I have only little over 500 unique visitors in august (first month of my blog), my goal is to have that many a day. The good news however, average time on site is starting to be more than 2 mins, and bounce rate 57%, which is excellent.
You need to build the content up, and you need to assume you will get no traffic for 6 months or you will be disappointed. Traffic takes lots of work. I am waiting for the next PageRank update from google which should happen hopefully in a month and a half to see where I rank and how many links I attract.
You also need to gear your posts to be be sales letter likish if you want people to contact you to do business with you, not just get free information and go away. You need to show them the need for you.
See? I just came up with an article 
Hope this helps!
Here are couple of solutions for you:
Easy way but not as good
Go to article websites such as http://www.ezinearticles.com. Basically, you can take the real estate articles that are in there, and publish them on your own site. Make sure you include all information/ bio, author’s resource box, etc. and abide to their policies http://www.ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html
Here’s the problem when doing that:
You end up with what’s called : Duplicate Content. Since the article you republished has already been written on the web, Google and other SE will see your website’s article as duplicate content. Google penalizes sites with duplicate content when it comes to Search engine rankings.
Hard Way, the Right way
Go to Google and search for Real Estate PLR articles. (PLR stands for Private Label Rights). Basically, you can purchase already written articles and use them in any way you want. (Make sure you read author’s requirements when buying PLR articles). In most instances, you can put your own name in the articles and do whatever you want.
Here’s what you’ll need to do.
A lot of these articles have already been purchased and chances are, they’re already on the internet. So, duplicate content penalty again. Here’s how to fix that problem. Rewrite the articles. Either yourself or hire someone to rewrite them for you. You can go to guru.com or elance.com and get them rewriten for about $6-8.
Hope this helped. Let me know if you need anything else.
Peter
Thanks for all the replies, gives me a lot to think about.
Try hiring a writer, that would be better!
You will just hurt yourself if you get articles from other sites, article directories, blogs etc… hire a writer to do write content for you.
PLRs are no good, you’ll end up having duplicate content if you use them… rewriting PLRs is a no no too. These articles were made for the sake of having content, nothing more.
Kurt,
I totally agree with you. Personally, I shy away from anything that can be viewed as duplicate content. I would either write my own articles, (which is my #1 choice and what I do personally) or I would hire someone to write them for me.
As I said before, PLR articles will, in 90% of cases, end up as duplicate content so you would need to rewrite them to avoid the penalty. For someone that doesn’t know how to or what to write about, it’s a lot easier to rewrite the articles than write them from scratch.
Peter