I have some similar questions... So basically then are you writing your own original articles and what not, then submitting that same exact article to however many article depositories?
I have a blog I'm doing with lots of high quality, completely original content, and I've been posting it on my wordpress. Then recently for offsite SEO I posted them to Squidoo as a start, and only did minor formatting so the same text and graphics would make sense. At least for now, one of my Squidoo posts is getting minor attention. I'm hoping they'll pick up more ,and plan on syndicating all of my articles there, perhaps doing some SEO for them down the line. Should I attempt to monetize my Squidoo ads at all? Will that provide any benefit, could I potentially rank them higher without any ads? I'm more interested in driving targeted traffic towards my blog for now.
I'm also keeping a food journal on my blog (which is about health and nutritional science), which yesterday I decided would be worth reposting to LiveJournal with a link to my blog at the end of each post, as LiveJournal is a somewhat high ranked page, and it wasn't all too much work to do, as this blog is in its infancy still.
Will this provide any substantial benefit to my website? So far, I haven't seen anything that says Squidoo will have a problem to me linking back to my website, I left it as a URL. Should this be anchor for higher optimization? I did notice one of my lens was showing up on Analytics... so I assume it's helping.
Is there a limit you would say to the amount of depositories you submit an article to? I heard 5, if I'm reading correctly.