Though you may not have an option. There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your business building efforts.
Problem #1 - Search Engines
Search engines will only look down upon your site if it has the exact same duplicated content than other sites. The more sites that share your content, the less it will help you achieve good search engine rankings.
It is important to establish good search engine rankings for your sites because more traffic equals more leads and ultimately sales and partnerships. If you cannot even get visitors, then will never make an revenue. Working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the results to get customers, should be priority one.
Problem #2 - Getting visitors to click
Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring site visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. It is also important to get to go to your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on a multitude of other sites, they will be least likely to click on your links. The reason is for the very fact that people buy from those they trust and feel confident in their expertise.
If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not really know what they are talking about and therefore will not look heavily on your product recommendations. This will decrease the amount of traffic you get.
Problem #3 - Author Bylines
Most free content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you can get into trouble if you try to use it without following the stipulated rules). This poses a problem because most author bylines include links. When readers finish reviewing a really well written article, there is very good probability they will click on the authors domain rather than an affiliate link. This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they may get their name and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing possible profitable website visitors.
In putting the 3 problems together, you will see a serious decline in revenue for the simple fact that you used free web content from different article directories. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route.
