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.

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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

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Informational articles are just that. They provide information. They are the “quality content” we hear so much about. Filled with facts and figures they give your visitor food for their brains and subtly lead them to your call to action. I use them to populate the bulk of my websites. They give visitors valuable content.

On the other hand, promotional articles emphasize selling, more like sales copy. They are more like copy writing. Although these articles have “quality content” their intent is to satisfy or quell an emotion like fear, lack, or love. The bulk of their words are intended to convince the visitor that no other option exists than to sign on the bottom line. I use these as the index or landing page for my sites.

I was reminded that all that matters is the bottom line. Whether you construct informational articles or promotional copy, at the end of the day only the number of conversions is what counts. Let’s face it, we are article marketers and selling is what we do.

Nevertheless, I still have reservations about populating my blog sites with strictly promotional material. If someone is searching for, say, “tractors on farms” and I have a website with that for a domain name, I would think the searcher most likely wants hard information about tractors on farms and not a sales pitch for the latest John Deere model.

That is not to say that in the course of that article I wouldn’t allude to or link to my John Deere sales page. I would. After all, I am trying to earn a living from my article writing.

If I had a website “TractorsonFarms-dot-com”, and filled it with nothing but articles on how much more fun you could have buying and using my tractor for the summer hayride, or how you could win the annual state-fair tractor race with my tractor, or how much better it is than driving a mule, I guess I would have a very entertaining website and come to think of it I might get some sales from it.

As opposed to a “TractorsonFarms-dot-com” that has lots of info about tractors, specs, how to best use them, maintain them, etc. I can see that those visitors looking for free information would flock to the site and maybe buy or maybe not.

I can see that the verdict may be up in the air. But in the end, it’s the bottom line. I’m beginning to think I might buy from the entertaining site. Hmmmmm.

What’s your opinion?

Click on the links to learn more about the art and science of article writing and copy writing.

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In any case, the author is compensated in money or some other non-monetary gratification. A publisher accepts and publishes an authors’ work for the same reasons that the author writes. He chooses and/or rejects the authors’ work based on self-serving criteria, as does the author submit his work. The criteria for publication vary from publisher to publisher.

The criteria obviously depend on the publishers’ mission statement.  Nevertheless, unless the publishers’ assets are unlimited, the publishers’ overriding concern is profit, profit to continue publishing and to make a living.  That is not a bad thing. It is just a fact. I have met many poor authors and I have yet to meet a poor publisher.  Many poor authors have altruistic mission statements, consciously or unconsciously.

Just as a SCI-FI author would be foolish to submit his work to a home and garden publisher, so would such a publisher be foolish to accept it.  The publishers’ mission statement and policy dictates what is accepted and rejected based on the publishers’ assessment of profitability.

I believe these assumptions are valid online and offline.  The only difference that I see is that the online publisher delivers no hard copy to the public.  The author receives no up front compensation for his work.

The publishers’ responsibilities to the author are to state, outline, or dictate his mission statement or policy. The authors’ responsibility is to determine if his work fits the publishers’ criteria. If it is mutually beneficial, then both profit.  If it is not, then the publisher rejects the authors’ work or the author finds another publisher much like in the offline world.

This whole issue is complicated by the marriage between marketing and article writing. Marketing and writing are not necessarily mutually exclusive. All authors and publishers need both marketing and writing to exist. I am not referring to copywriting. To me that is another form of writing. Copywriting is advertising. It is not article writing.

So what is the emphasis and who determines the emphasis between writing and marketing? Both, the publisher and the author make that determination by choosing to participate in one another’s mission statement.

So what’s the problem? If an ezine directory sets certain policy, either I adhere to it or I find another directory. It has to be of mutual benefit to both the publisher and the author.  If the directory/publisher  does  not fit your style of writing, just move on and find one that does.

Are your article marketing sales suffering? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles.

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What is it that holds us back? Fear? I think fear of the unknown is what holds most of us back.

We are afraid that our website will not compare well against the thousands if not millions of websites and web pages floating in cyberspace.  Well.  Get over it!

We fear that our writing will be criticized by our readers.  So what!   Are you afraid of some unnamed critic without a face?  Your high school teacher is not watching!

Newbies, unite!  Why do so many newbies fail?  There are many reasons.  You get discouraged because you don’t make a sale in the first few weeks.  You hear all the gurus telling you that you can or will make thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands, within days of using their secret formula.  Most of those gurus have been at this for ten or more years. How long have you been at it?

Do you remember your first car? Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it was probably a clunker.  Were you proud of it?  Did you take your girlfriend or boyfriend for ride? Did that old clunker get you from here to there?  Were you afraid of what others would say about it?  No. You were on the road. You had freedom. You were moving.

When did you upgrade to a newer hotter car?  Probably after, you started making some money.  What is the difference between your old clunker of a car and your clunker website?  None.  You have to start somewhere.  The point is YOU have to start.

We fear that our readers will criticize our writing.  Are you afraid someone is going to send you an “F” for poor composition or grammar?  I do not mean to say that you should throw grammar or composition to the wind.  I am saying that you can express yourself much more freely than when you were in school.  Besides, that is what editors are for.  (Note the “for” at the end of that last sentence.  I think it is called a dangling preposition.  I would get an “F” for that.)

I just received an email a few minutes ago from a fellow internet marketer, David Saeger  (The Home Biz Guy) on the same subject!

Here is what he said, “Ready, FIRE, then aim … This is the operating philosophy you MUST adopt to succeed with a home based business. That’s backwards for most people who like to aim before they fire.”

In Internet marketing, that is a good philosophy.  You have to start.  You have to move.  The Internet changes daily.  What you learn today, what works today, may not work tomorrow.

Most businesses struggle their first year before they see a profit not to mention the initial monetary investment to start the business.  In internet marketing, you don’t have that concern.

Give it a year.  If after that time, you still are not making money maybe you should reconsider.  However, that assumes that you have really done something other than study and read about it.

Take action! Just do it!

I have been there. If you are just starting out, you need something that gives you a step-by-step map from someone who hasn’t forgotten the frustrations of trying to get started. Get my book, Writing On The Web and get started on the right foot!

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