Okay, thank you for the reply.

No problem, happy to help! They say that content is king when it comes to your website. Writing articles is good to drive traffic to your website, but I would concentrate on your website first to make sure you have a lot of content. The more content you have, the more your readers and subscribers will want to re-visit your website.

This is what I know for duplicate content:

Google does not punish you for publishing syndicated content or for syndicating your content to others. Duplicating your own content on your own site could have negative effects and syndicating your content may mean you lose position to another website.

Consider scenario 1: You republish an article that has been syndicated by another website.

If you take syndicated articles and publish them on your site, that means Google will see two (or more) closely matching pages on two separate domain names. The articles on each page will be almost identical but perhaps the page furniture around that article may be different. That means either one of the two articles could be more relevant in search results than the other, depending on the search term used by the person carrying out a search.

Google will not see both articles and decide that the newest one deserves to be removed from the index. It will decide, based on a wide variety of factors, which article is the most relevant one to show to the searcher. Generally, all else being equal, Google will try to show the “official” original – something it identifies using a number of parameters on all copies. It is feasible that Google will display your copy of the original if it is deemed more appropriate for the searcher.

Some people may tell you that there have been cases of sites being de-listed on Google for running duplicate content. If they have been de-listed, I’d be willing to bet that it was caused by over-optimisation, bad backlink profiles and a general lack of quality and originality, rather than the fact that they were copying content.

Scenario 2: You publish an article that is then re-published by lots of other websites.

In a similar fashion to Scenario 1, Google is going to make a judgement call on your content to work out which version of a page to show. Google can’t punish you for syndicating your content, logically, because doing that would be to destroy the very notion of writing press releases.

Press releases are content that gets duplicated. They are written precisely for lots of people to republish them either in part or in full. Google would never ride roughshod over this practice by claiming there can only ever be one copy of something online.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I hope it helps!

Thanks Romeo2076 for the informative explanation on content. Very helpful so thanss much for taking the time to spell it out for me.

Thanks for letting me know that.

Thanks for the tip on searching Google. I can't be more specific because this is just a "what if" question. What I am trying to figure out is just where to put content to start. So If I understand things correctly, my first priority for content should be my website not writing articles for article sites. I am developing an authority membership site and was wondering if it would be a good idea to write articles before site launch to generate interest.
Thanks again for your input.

Get some awesome content on your site, once you have a few pages completed add a few posts. Then you can start generating articles to drive interest to your site.

You need to have somewhere on the site that provides your reader with a reason to be there. Get that in place then worry about the traffic. If you have good content and you get some links pointing to your site it will get started.

Eventually you will want to write 2 articles for every page or post but get the site established first.

Thanks again @labman

Thanks!