If you keep hearing about the issues surrounding too much duplicate content* but aren’t sure what constitutes duplicate content, try this. A site dedicated to ferreting through your writing to find the dups and suggesting alternatives: http://www.dupecop.com/
*Duplicate content is content used on your blog and then recycled excessively online via articles and dup content postings to other blogs
I use article marketing to get people to click through to my web site after getting useful information from an article I have written. I am looking for people to look for me by my name, which is unique. I am selling me so my name is my brand. It seems to me in my situation I want lots of people to get to know my name so I want lots of articles out there and they can be duplicates as long as they have good information. Doing a search for my name will bring up me. Can you explain if you see a flaw in my thinking?
Syndication of content elsewhere is not a big problem as the search engines are pretty good (and improving) at determining which site was the originator of that content, and de-valuing the replicated content.
The most damaging duplicate content is that which gets indexed internally, on your own site under more than one URL. CMS systems are notorious for c=inadvertently creating these issues when not carefully configured.
An outline of CMS duplicated content can be read here.