Good written content is critical to the success of a website,
and a web-based business can live or die by the quality of its
content. Content adds value to your website by:
 Making it easier for search engines to catalog
 Keeping customers on the site
 Convincing customers to subscribe to a mailing list
 Helping you sell new products
 Encouraging other webmasters to link to you,
increasing traffic and your spot in the search engine
rankings
Though many people seem to think that the bells and
whistles of a website are what interest and impress
customers, nothing could be further from the truth.
Customers want a website run by someone they can trust to
know what they're doing and be able to guide them if they
need help. Websites with fancy flash animations and other
gee-whiz components make a website seem colder and more
distant, while great articles and good blogs can win
customers over with the force of the webmaster's
personality.
But if you're like many webmasters, you don't know how to
do good web content. How do you do search-engine
optimize text? For that matter, how do you get started on
articles? How do you even find ideas?
For webmasters who have trouble writing articles, who
dislike writing articles, or who just don't have the time,
private-label rights articles may provide a solution.
Private-Label Rights Articles
These articles, also referred to as PRA, consist of a collection
of related, search engine optimized, web-friendly articles
that are sold in their entirety to webmasters and others
interested in adding some good content to their websites.
You can purchase these articles and use one or two or all of
them; you can change the content to better reflect your
website and your products; you can add or delete text, or
you can compile documents to make your own. You're free
to use PRA in any way you see fit, and you can use them
with your own name.
PRA aren’t terribly expensive, and are available for every
imaginable topic. They can be used to fill out your website,
or to put regular fresh content on your homepage and other
key pages, which may improve your listing on search
engines. With good content on your site, your customers will
be more willing to sign up for an emailed newsletter, giving
you a way to drive sales out to the customer rather than
waiting for your customers to come and see you. And if you
have good keyword-oriented articles, you'll have an easy
time running other ads on your site if you choose to do so,
such as Google's Adsense.
Or you can take advantage of the traffic-driving qualities of
article directories. These large repositories of articles,
thousands on everything imaginable, are really viral
marketing articles, designed to increase traffic and search
engine rankings for the authors. You can put PRA articles out
there as your own, with a resource box set up to send traffic
(and search engine spiders) to your website.
And PRA articles aren't limited to a one-time use. You can
use these articles and your modifications of them as many
times as you like. Collections of articles on related topics can
become ebooks. Ebooks can be placed on your website as a
free reference for your customers to download, or on article
directories so that your resource box points to you, the
writer of the ebook, as a real expert.
If you choose to do an ebook, don't just stop with the
resource box. Put your ebook in PDF format so that it can't
be modified, and make sure your website address is on
every page in the header or footer of the text – discreetly, of
course, but clearly. At the end of the book, you can put a list
of further resources that includes your own websites and
any affiliates, driving interested traffic directly to your
website.
Resources
You can find several article directories at the following
websites:
 http://www.goarticles.com
 http://www.ezinearticles.com
 http://www.ideamarketers.com
 http://www.marketing-seek.com.
Just remember: if you choose to use any of the articles you
find here on your website, you're doing for that other person
the exact same thing you're trying to have done for you –
driving traffic from your website to theirs. Be very selective
about which of these articles you choose to download, and
by no means should you fill your own website with articles of
this sort. You're always better off owning all rights to your
content.