Spinning Articles and Rewriting Them – A Definition

Posted by A blog for Newbies about Internet Marketing on August 28, 2011

There is a lot written in many of the more popular forums about spinning articles. The debate at times becomes heated. What is lacking is a definition. What is meant by spinning an article?

Definitions

Traditionally, spinning has been and is associated with articles that are gibberish. I have read material on the web that can only have been written by a robot, or perhaps by a third grade foreigner attempting to learn to read and write English. The results are much less than acceptable. In fact, they are abominable.

If that is spinning articles, then it should surely be banned from the web. It is quite obvious that no human ever looked at the article before it was published on the web.

I can only conclude that the article was composed by one of those automated non-human spinning services. Although, I have never used spinning services and I can only speak from my observation. And, my observation is not quantified.

It appears as if the material is generated by substituting synonyms for specific words or by substituting phrases. The results seem to be generated without human intervention.

Another definition could be that of rewriting an article with some human intervention. The author selects specific words or phrases and allows the software to generate articles based on those substitutions.

Again, human intervention is limited and the results often require significant editing to make the article ready for web publication. Of course, some article marketers may be only interested in SEO and publish the material “as is” resulting in sometimes nonsensical verbiage or at best second or third grade reading material.

If the definition of spinning an article falls within either of these two definitions or methods, then I must agree with the naysayers and ask that all such work be banned from the internet. This is where the debate fails to distinguish between the traditional limited definition and a definition that is more universal.

Repackaged Articles

Few can deny that they have “repackaged” an article to save time or to quell a writer’s block. Rewriting or repackaging an article is acceptable.

A publisher-editor of a well known and popular article directory once said, “Repackaged, rewritten articles on the same subject are hardly ever 100% unique.” He also said, “… the use of existing articles reworded or not, is not an issue.”

Given that even repackaged rewritten articles are hardly ever 100% unique; would it be far fetched to describe those articles as spun articles? I think not.

So the hotly debated spinning issue comes down to what kind of spun articles are acceptable. It is not whether or not articles should be spun; it is rather how they should be spun and how they are used. That spun articles are acceptable is a fact. The quality of spun articles and their use are the issues.

Now that we have established that rewritten spun articles are not an issue what remains is a debate over the quality and use of those articles.

Two Schools

Obviously, there are two schools of thought. One school believes that spinning is wrong, bad, spamming, and black hat. The other claims that spinning is useful, not spamming, and good for SEO.

The first school holds their view simply because of their limited definition of spinning. I doubt that not at least one of them have written on the same topic more than once. That they have, regardless of whether they used an existing article as a template or not, they put a new or different twist on the subject and in that sense the article was spun.

Fully Automated Services

One method is to use a spinning service. You submit an article to this service and they generate spun articles which then you can use or not. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, most often, the results are abominable.

Automated Human Assisted

Another method uses software that takes an article and replaces words that you identify with synonyms. This gives much better results than the first method. However, the results are still very often less than acceptable and require significant rewrites and editing to make them worthy of publication.

Human Generated Auto-Assisted

There is a third method that does generate high quality, informative, and unique content. In its strictest sense, this method is one of rewriting an article. The author rewrites the original article on a sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph basis. An article with a sufficient number of paragraphs can be rewritten paragraph by paragraph. Human automated assisted tools will yield countless high quality unique articles.

With the magic of randomizing software and the truth of mathematics, thousands of unique articles in the eighty plus percentile of uniqueness can be created. Even the closest of scrutiny would find it difficult to determine the originals.

What is the problem? How are properly rewritten articles spun or not spun, not be valid informative quality articles? Negative responses elude me.

Learn to rewrite your articles with quality content with human generated auto-assisted software.

Comments No Comments »

Article Writing for Newbies – The Little Verb That Could

Posted by A blog for Newbies about Internet Marketing on March 15, 2011

Do you remember the children’s book, “The Little Engine That Could”? So what does that have to do with article writing for newbies? Let me tell you a story.

Article Writing for Newbies

Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper

I remember my grandmother reading that book aloud. It has stuck with me all these years. Maybe it’s one that you were fortunate enough to have been exposed to.

That little engine’s chant, “I think I can, I think I can, …” is burned into the psyche of more than one generation along with “I had a dream” and “Ask not what your country can do for you …”

I would ask my Mom or Dad, “Can I do this or can I do that?” I no sooner finished asking the question when they would respond with another question, “I don’t know. Can you?”

Of course, what I meant to ask and should have asked was, “May I do this or that?” I was asking for permission using the wrong word. They knew what I was attempting to express, but they were teaching me a powerful lesson.

They were pointing out that only I knew whether I could. They would allow me or not allow me but, only I could. If you are parent, you may have done that too. They were also teaching me that using some words loosely does not always get the desired result.

So what does this story have to do with article writing? I have read many sales pages and articles and noticed that very often the author uses the word ‘can’ when using the word ‘will’ would do better to get the author’s desired result.

What do you as an article writer want? You want the reader to click through and read another page or read a sales presentation. By using the word ‘can’ instead of ‘will’, you are giving the reader a chance to question whether he or she can do whatever it is that you are you asking him to do.

For example, “You can learn to speak fluent Mandarin.” As opposed to, “You will learn to speak fluent Mandarin.”

In the first, the reader has an out. He has a choice to make. It is easier to see in the negative. He can say, “No, I cannot. I can’t even spell in English, let alone Mandarin. I really can’t do it.” Is it that he can’t or that he won’t (will not)?

In the second example, “You will learn to speak fluent Mandarin.” You are not giving the reader an opportunity to question himself. You are telling him that it is a done deal. You are telling the reader that by taking your course or buying your product, he will have Mandarin.

The choice factor does not exist. It may be a subtle play on words. Nevertheless, it works.

As powerful as the three-letter verb ‘can’ is, it does not match the power of the little verb ‘will’. As I said, it is most powerful in promotional articles, the pre-sell article.

But, it does work in any context. Try it in your article marketing. I think you will find that it changes the sense of your promotional articles and makes them more powerful and more convincing.

Are you just starting your article marketing career? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles, all under one cover. Writing On The Web: A Newbies Introduction To Article Writing is a road map to start your article writing career.

Learn from my experience. My book will show you the way to beginning your career in internet marketing.

Comments No Comments »

Article Writing – The Article Writer and the Truck Driver

Posted by A blog for Newbies about Internet Marketing on March 6, 2011

Just what do the article writer and the truck driver have in common? They are two very different jobs. Both sit a lot. It’s funny how the operative words appear in their names. In the first, it’s writer. In the second, it’s driver.

Article Writers and Truck Drivers

Article Writers and Truck Drivers

Let’s look at the truck driver first. A truck driver’s first and primary objective is to deliver his load, his merchandise to a certain destination. That’s why he gets paid. That seems pretty obvious. Independent long haul drivers take on any and all kinds of merchandise from one destination to another. On the other hand, truck drivers that work for one company deliver whatever it is that the company sells.

Underlying that main function of delivering a product to a customer, a truck driver’s main responsibility is to know how to drive. You may think, “Well, that’s pretty obvious!” But is it? Think for a moment. Basic and fundamental as it may be, without that knowledge, without that capability, the truck driver wouldn’t have a job.

Most likely, the truck driver first learned to drive as a teenager. He has the basic skills to perform the job of truck driving. He knows the rules of the road, how and when to shift gears, when to brake and when to accelerate. And, he also has to keep abreast of how to use the latest innovations like GPS and short-wave radios to help get to the customer faster.

Oh, and one other thing, the truck driver doesn’t sell anything. His job is to deliver what the customer wants, a new stove, a new cell phone, or a truckload of lumber.

Hopefully, you are beginning to see the parallels between truck driving and article writing. The internet marketing article writer’s primary job is to deliver information to a destination, to his reader.

He also learned his basic skills early on, probably in school. He knows, or should know, where to place a period or a comma, how to spell (well, most of the time), and he too must keep abreast of the latest innovations, like social media and other distribution methods to get to his reader.

How does he get paid? It depends on the type of writing.

A freelance magazine article writer gets paid by the number of words he writes. An internet article writer does not get paid by the number of words he writes nor the subject he writes about. He gets paid, like the truck driver, by delivering what the customer wants.

Article writers are like truck drivers in that they too do not sell anything. So, like a truck driver, an article writer needs to give the customer what the customer wants.

Article writers/marketers must be able to convince their readers that the information given will satisfy the readers’ wants. Make no mistake there is a place for writing sales copy, but that belongs in a sales letter.

It is also true that all article marketing articles contain some selling qualities, but it is more in the form of convincing the reader that the article satisfies what the reader already wants. In other words, the ‘want’ pre-exists in the reader and the article confirms that the desire can be fulfilled now.

You may ask, “Well then, what is an article marketer?” That is a different story and we’ll talk about that some other time. For now, when you write your articles remember the truck driver.

If you are a new article writer and want to get started on the right foot without confusion and with simple straight-forward plain English check out my new training e-book, Writing On The Web.

Photo by Rennett Stowe@Flickr

Comments 4 Comments »