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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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.

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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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You log in to each directory separately and it seems as if every directory has its own set of formatting rules, anchor text rules, html rules, and resource box rules. It’s a madhouse.

What can you do?

You want to submit to as many different directories as possible. And then, there is the issue of duplicate content. As you well know, some directories will not accept articles that have been submitted or published elsewhere except for your own website or blog.

That issue makes a case for spinning/rewriting your articles. If done correctly your articles will never be labeled as “duplicate content”. Read this article, “Spinning an Article – A Tool to Increase Your Traffic”.

I do not condone article submitters that automatically submit your article to 1000+ directories. In the first place, just what are the directories that are being submitted to? Are these directories just adsense farms? What is their page rank?

Second, I have no knowledge or control over the formatting and content that actually is published. I am too much a perfectionist to allow the slipshod submission of my content to any directory. When submitting to article directories I want control of the content.

Thirdly, it is an insurmountable task to keep up with the changing requirements of each of these directories and I do not trust that one type of formatted submission fits all the different requirements of every directory.

And finally, every directory has a different set of categories to categorize your article. If it’s placed in the wrong category, it will never get read.

It takes manual intervention to properly submit your article to a directory. Anything you can do to automate the process will save you hours of work.

Any program or software that tells you that all you have to do is push a button and presto your article is submitted to hundreds or thousands of directories is misleading you.

If you have ever submitted to multiple directories, you know the effort and time needed to do the task.

Listed below are 25 directory sites with PR2 or better.

articlesbase.com PR6 few ads

buzzle.com PR6

ezineArticles.com PR6

goarticles.com PR6

helium.com PR6

promotionworld.com PR6

isnare.com PR6

articlebiz.com PR5 fewest ads

articlecity.com PR5

articlealley.com PR5 few ads

searchwarp.com PR5

articledashboard.com PR5 few ads

articletrader.com/ PR5 few ads

ideamarketers.com PR5

articleclick.com PR4

articlesfactory.com PR4 few ads

articlesphere.com PR4

articlecompilation.com PR4

articlefeeder.com PR3

amazines.com PR 3

articlerich.com PR3

articlewarehouse.com PR3

free-articles-zone.com PR3

web-source.net PR3 few ads – techie directory

ultimatearticledirectory.com PR2 few ads

Not all directories are created equal. Just because a directory has a PR6 does not mean that your article will bring you traffic or link juice from this directory. The home page of that directory may have a PR of 6 but the articles within it are most often ranked with a PR of “n/a” or “0″.

Directories generate revenue by selling ads on their sites, some more than others, or by charging a subscription for publication in their directories.

You must realize that some of these directories are adsense farms and are more concerned with their bottom line than with promoting your article. I personally no longer submit to ezinearticles because they are an adsense farm.

You will notice that I have noted those directories with few ads. Of those articlebiz.com has the fewest ads surrounding articles in their directory. The directory with the most ads is ezinearticles.

There is another alternative. That is a paid subscription to a directory. It is a good investment in that you pay them a fee and they publish your article and in some cases they promote your article.

Publishing and promoting your articles with only SEO is no longer the ideal in article marketing. You must promote through social marketing to achieve success.

Article Productions provides the tools to accomplish success in article marketing. Read my review of Article Productions at http://NewbieAffiliatesDirectory.com. I have used AP for over a year with excellent and outstanding results.

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Some claim that beginning an article by selecting the title first is best.  The title should grab your potential reader and customer. Advocates of starting an article by thinking of a title first, argue that unless you have a good title in mind, the body of the text will not flow naturally.

They believe that your focus will ramble and so will the body of the article. They argue that your content will skip from topic to topic without a logical flow. Consequently, your readers will loose interest and leave.

The title must be SEO sensitive and therefore keywords and keyword phrases are the first thing one should focus on.  Search for keywords and phrases that a customer will likely type in a search. Only after you have found good keywords, do you formulate the title. After that you can create the content and populate the content with keywords and phrases.

Others suggest that you create content first. They argue that you can be walking down a park lane and see a worm.  Out of the blue or maybe out of the dirt, you get this crazy idea about the possibility of selling something to do with worm farming.

Learn the craft of Article Writing CLICK HERE.

Ideas come from everywhere and anywhere. If you carry a notebook, you jot down some ideas. If you don’t carry a notebook, you promise yourself that you will remember the great ideas that came to you.

You rush to your computer and the words come pouring out. Now you have several hundred words of wonderful sales worthy content. You find key words and a product that fits your content.

Still, you have no title. After you have the content and said all that you have to say, you select the title again based on keywords or long tailed keywords.

Which method is better? Does it matter?  No.  So long as you ultimately submit an article with good content and SEO optimized, you have done the work.

I prefer to concentrate on the content first, and then I select an appropriate keyword title. My logic is that I choose a topic I want to promote, do the research (dig in the dirt, so to speak) and while fresh in my brain, I write the content.

I then do keyword research and modify my content to accommodate the keywords. Only then do I give my article a title. Others do it differently.

No one way is the right way. What matters is that you complete the task of article writing. Whatever way works for you.

Just do it!

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To spin or not to spin, that is the question. I am relatively new to internet marketing. I chose article marketing as my method of marketing because I like to write. That sounds logical enough.

In the course of writing my articles, I soon discovered two things. One, I am too particular about my writing. I edit and re-edit and re-edit. I know that there are article marketers that whip out ten, twenty, or more articles everyday.  To this day, I am not sure how they do it. I can see slaving over maybe ten articles per day.  But, more than that everyday?

I mean quality content articles, articles that provide information, that say something. Now I am not knocking those that can pump out twenty or more articles of good content. But, just how many of those authors are out there.

I mean really writing solid articles with usable information. Take this article, so far I haven’t said much. I have spouted about my disbelief. Have I truly relayed to you any useful information? No, I didn’t think so. I have almost written 200 words and have yet to give you, the reader, useful information. Maybe, this how and what those authors write to get such volume.

The second thing I discovered is that although content is king, volume is his kingdom. Content without volume is like a king without subjects. Without a kingdom, there are no revenues and the king goes broke.  The kingdom (volume) provides subjects (traffic, readers) which in turn provide revenue.

I concluded that there are at least four ways to increase your writing;

1. Write more.
2. Hire writers to write for you.
3. Buy Private Label Right (PLR) articles and rewrite them or attempt to publish them as is.
4. Spin your original articles.

I have already dismissed the first one for reasons I stated earlier. I am slow. The second way is too costly for me now and I fear that I would be overly critical and end up rewriting them any way. The third method I reject for the same reasons as the second. I would end up rewriting the article.

Besides, what I have seen of PLRs, the best they can do is give you ideas for articles. We are left with spinning your article. That authors spin their articles always had me wondering. Why not just write another article? Surfing the forums you hear horror stories about automatically spun articles that put out un-intelligible garbage.

Why take the time and money to input an article into a spinner only to have it come out reading like alphabet soup? And, besides all that, you are cautioned to make sure that the spun article does not exceed 30% duplicate content. Doesn’t that sound like a complete re-write? I have never been an advocate of spinning articles. It seemed to me that I would just be rehashing the same stuff over and over again.

Many article directories will accept previously published articles. Some do not. Submitting previously published articles is like a writing a syndicated column for newspapers. The same article appears in many different newspapers. Why not do the same with an article marketers article?

There is a difference. One day I was re-reading one of my articles that I came across while surfing the internet. I clicked on the link at the bottom just to make sure the link was working properly. The link worked all right, but it went to one of my blogs. Can you guess what the first post on that page was?

Yep, I had just read the same article. I found that to be annoying and, well, poor taste. I think a reader would quickly bounce off the page and go elsewhere. So, I decided to re-write the article, but I remembered that the same article was appearing in many other directories. I would have to write many different versions of that same article to give the reader some uniqueness and still convey the original message.

It was then that I became a convert to article spinning. A word of caution, most article spinners are not worth the price, free or otherwise. Be very careful, only select a spinner that allows you full control of the output and then check each spun article for uniqueness.

There is only one Article Spinner that I know of that delivers what it promises and it’s cheap! Click on that link and find out why!

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Do you have the copywriting skills necessary to convert your articles into sales? You can learn to write better articles with just a few copywriting skills. This article suggests learning the skill of copywriting to skyrocket your sales.

Here are three tips you can use to get you started.

Emotional Words

Use emotional words. Use words that excite like ‘fascinating’ and ‘electrifying’, words that fire images of romance like ‘passionate’ and ‘magical’,  and words that paint visions of pleasure like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘gratifying’. These are just a few of the categories that will motivate your reader to continue reading. I am sure you can think of other types of words that will create images in your reader.

Leading Questions

Ask leading questions. Ask the reader a question and answer it for him. “Do you want to make money, now? Of course, you do.” That is an example of a question and answer. Raising a question prepares the reader for a response. By answering it immediately, you have given him a response confirming what he already knows. It directs him to your logical conclusion, which is to buy your product.

Alluring Titles

Write an alluring title. You have just a few seconds to capture a reader’s attention. You can have the greatest content and the best copywriting techniques at your disposal, but without a captivating title your article will go unread. Use those emotional words mentioned in the first tip. If you can combine emotional words with your keywords, not only will your reader want to read your article, but the search engines will tag your article and you will get even more readers.

Gain the skills you need and learn more here.

This short article is not at all exhaustive of the techniques and tips used in copywriting. If you are serious about making money with article writing, Don’t delay in learning the art and skill of copywriting. Learning this skill will dramatically increase your sales.

These three tips alone can improve your sales, but there are many more.

If you are serious about improving your writing skills, and I expect you are, because are reading this, I suggest you owe it to yourself to use a training and coaching course on copywriting and begin your copywriting journey.

Learn how to use copywriting in your articles, gain the knowledge you need to quickly increase your sales,click here.

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Here are three MS Word tools to improve your articles.

1. Check your spelling – This seems obvious. Still many do not use their spell checker. If you use a plain text editor to create your articles, you can easily overlook even the most common of spellings.

Simply copy your text from the plain text editor, like notepad or word pad, and copy it to your word processor and do a spell check. You will be surprised at the misspelled words you may have overlooked.

2. Write at a fifth to seventh grade level. – Use the MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker found under the Review Tab at the top of the MS Word page to determine the age level that you are writing for. After selecting the spell checker and completing the spell check, it will ask you if you want to continue checking the rest of the document.

Respond with yes and a box will pop up called Readability Statistics. At the very bottom of the box is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. You want that score to be between fifth and seventh grade level. Most of your readers will read at that level. If it is a higher grade level, edit with simpler words.

3. Passive sentences – That same box will also give you the number of passive sentences in your article. You want to keep this at a minimum. You should keep passive sentences to no more than two or three for every five-hundred words. There is nothing wrong with passive sentences and there is no hard fast rule to the number of passive sentences you should use. But, you do want to make your sentences action oriented to help the reader move easily throughout the body of your article.

Learn more about copywriting here.

We have looked at three tips that you can use to improve the quality of your articles and ultimately salability of your articles. Keep in mind that content is king and no tools can create unique quality content like you can.

Quality content and good copywriting skills are necessarily a must. Let MS Word do some of the work for you. Use the three tips and your quality will improve.

Are you writing good content and still not getting the traffic you need to make sales? The solution is in copywriting. Add copywriting  skills to your quiver of techniques and your sales can go nowhere but up.

If you are serious about improving your article writing and maximizing your sales learn the art and skill of copywriting.

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Most word processors are programmed to alert the author whenever the verb is passive. It is not a bad thing. If you write technical papers and articles, it is acceptable.

If you are an article marketer, the passive voice gets a bad rap. Do you know that there is nothing wrong with passive voice? Allow me to explain.

In case you are not sure, let me first show you the difference. Active voice uses the subject of a sentence to do the action. Passive uses the object of the sentence to receive the action.

Example:

•  Bill threw the ball. (active)
• The ball was thrown by Bill. (passive)

(Note: I am using MS Word. Guess what just popped up. Yes, you guessed it. That little squiggly underlined that whole sentence. You just cannot get away from it. Don’t you just want that little squiggly line to disappear?)

In most cases, active voice is preferred. Active voice is better in the body of your article. Why is it better? It allows the reader to read easily through the body of your article. Active voice makes it easier for the reader to visualize what you want to communicate. More importantly, it gets him to the resource box quickly.

When is it acceptable to use passive voice? Let me show you two cases.

1) When you, the author, do not have a specific subject in mind or you want to emphasize the word or words affected by the action use passive voice.

Example: “Article marketers are not paid for their articles.” That sentence does not identify who it is that does not pay article marketers. The emphasis is on article marketers.

You could change it to active voice: “Publishers do not pay article marketers for their articles.” With this sentence, the emphasis shifts from the article marketer to the publisher. You may not want to do that. But, then again you might.

2) You may want to be vague or politically proper. You can use passive voice.

Example: “The critical remark was made by the wrong person at the wrong time.”

To change that sentence to active voice: “Tom made that critical remark at the wrong time.” Or, “The wrong person made that critical remark.”

In both cases, MS Word will alert you that the verb is passive. So what?

In the first, you want to emphasize “article marketers“. You want to emphasize the fact that they do not get direct compensation for their work.

In the second, you do not want to name names.

Do you see the difference?

Just because MS Word or some other word processor implies that it is wrong, it is not necessarily so. Before you change the sentence, make sure it does not change what you meant it to say.

Do you want to learn how to write, publish, and market your articles? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles. Read this article writing review.

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The theory being that because of its quality content, more people would read it. That it would or could become viral. That is, it would become like a virus spreading all over the Internet. That is a good idea. The concept is certainly worthy of a place in an ideal world. I like the idea of writing good quality content. It makes me feel that I am contributing to the knowledge base of the internet with tidbits of information.

The problem is that we are not in an ideal world. A book author writes one book at a time on a subject and then moves on to write another book on a different subject. A magazine article writer most often pre-sells his article idea or topic to a magazine editor before he actually writes the piece.

You might argue that if it works for a book author or a magazine article writer it should work for article marketing as well. Not so, the difference lies in compensation.

A book writer sells his work to a publisher. For every book sold, the author gets a royalty. Compensation for his work is up front. Upon acceptance, a free-lance magazine writer sells his article to the magazine publisher based on the amount of words in his work. His compensation is up front.

As you well know, the article marketer is not paid for his work. His compensation is totally dependent on traffic to his article or website. He may write fifty articles on the same subject but only one of those catches the eye of the internet buying public.

The blogger’s opinion mentioned at the beginning of this article fails to account for the public’s whims. Writing one article regardless of the quality of the content will more than likely be lost in the sea of cyberspace.

Whereas, writing several pieces on the same subject written in different ways may be the difference that the public is waiting for. No one knows which of the several articles will strike the public’s fancy.

The article marketer does not have the benefit of a high paid editor and sales force to market his words and create a best seller of his work. And, unlike the magazine writer, the article marketer has no way of knowing if his work will generate income. The magazine writer gets paid up front.

An article marketer must test the waters with his articles until one of them is written in such a way that the internet public will make it a “most read” article and the trickle of clicks from his work filters down to a product, producing income for the marketer. Writing just one article is not a good idea for the article marketer.

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

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