Hello Burf,
You are right on in using existing articles of general interest to promote your site. When presented properly it promotes your Site and the article author’s site (great mutual endeavors there!). You are welcome to use mine:
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Before you use my articles or any others, I want to give you a tip on how to usurp the original article in SERP though:
Post Bourbon and Jagger… If you provide a couple paragraphs or so of poignant commentary containing appropriate keywords and phrases when introducing existing articles you will most definitely defeat the dupe content filters and rank higher in SERP, many times beating out the original author and many of the existing SERP.
That is a serious post Bourbon/Jagger tip… Try it!
I would also like to note that you really don’t have to ask permissions, as long as you administer attention to copyrights by acknowledging proper authorship and paying due respect in linking on just about any published article you find of interest and value to your site.
It’s all about relativity and a variety of linked text these days!
Any time you provide both unique anchor text and "surrounding text" it helps both your Site and the original author's, even when you blow them out in the SERP!
:)
That how it works now.
Merry Christmas,
Ken