Unique Articles on EZA and Site?

You can do both. You can submit the same article to different directories or go with writing separate articles (in other words, spin them). However, both these methods serve different purposes. Submitting the same article to various sources is used for article syndication. It is done with the aim of someone liking your article and posting it on their blog or site. This happens rarely as you need to contact site owners yourself to get your content on their site and they do so only when they are highly impressed with your content. Article Syndication, nonetheless, brings good amount of traffic.

Whereas submitting different articles or spun versions will only help you for backlinking. This is what major software such as UAW and Blog Blueprint do. It is like submitting your content to random places only for a link pointing back to your site.

Both methods are efficient and bring traffic and are a matter of debate.

You are making a common mistake here, sashas. What works for someone else may not work for you. Your best bet is to simply test it out for yourself and see if your return is any better.

Honestly, I only use EZA. I haven't found the returns from other article directories to be worth the effort (maybe I should add ArticleBase to this list though).

What I really want to know if there are any SEO penalties if I post an article that is already indexed on my blog to EZA? Will Google penalize me for posting "duplicate" content? If it does, which content gets the priority - the one on my blog (posted earlier), or the one on EZA (posted later, but possibly indexed earlier)?

If you're going to go down this route then you might want to consider guest blogging instead.

The main benefit would be that you could target high traffic sites to approach. This way you would get your name, and resource box, in front of the eyeballs of your potential customers rather than hoping, EZA aside, that a few small sites will pick up and use your article.

Bill Platt (Warrior name:tpw) has an excellent free guide that you might want to download and take a look at about article marketing beyond the basics.

Nigel

Sometimes I create unique for syndication. Other times I use the article that I posted on a website or blog previously.

I am a big fan of mixing it up.

It's what I do (but I tend to submit them also to ArticlesBase and/or GoArticles, myself - though I get very little back from them, admittedly).

No - it would be pretty wasteful of your time/energy to give previously unpublished content to an article directory!

There are people who do exactly that, but "rather they than I". :p

There are, of course, a lot of other additional things you can do with your articles, by way of syndicating them. Don't just wait for people to syndicate them from EZA: seek out webmasters and ezine/newsletter compilers/publishers who will also syndicate those same articles - this is where the real money is, in article marketing.

And when people do re-publish your articles (either through direct contact or from EZA in the way intended), build relationships with them, offer them future work, and so on. Especially if (as is so likely) their sites are context-relevant: you can get good, targeted traffic (and maybe some good backlinks?) this way, too.

No.

It isn't duplicate content. It's syndicated content.

Why "possibly indexed earlier"? You need your content to be indexed on your site before you submit it to EZA. At least, I do, with all my niche sites.

That still sometimes won't stop the EZA copy from outranking your own copy, temporarily, but contrary to what some people imagine, that isn't what "first indexation" is about anyway.

In the long run, if you always have your work indexed on your own site first, your site will gradually, increasingly, reap the rewards of having done so, and after a while the EZA copy will never outrank your own site's copy, which is hugely beneficial.

Well, yes if you have deep pockets & no if you are smart!

after going through your thread, it seems like you are doing good so far and i don't think you need to experiment with unique articles unless you have set up some marketing budget for the same & are curious to see the outcome...

I'm only posting unique articles on Ezine right now. I used to do the same as you, but with Google cracking down on Ezine, I think it's probably best to only post unique articles there. It's all a guess though.