Is spinning articles really worth your time?

I beg to differ. First of all, I think the George Forman grill is the best thing since sliced bread. They even came out with a non-stick version.

There are no short cuts to quality articles. You get what you pay for. Paying for people to write articles for $4 on eLance does not compare to hiring a quality writer.

Hi Neil,

I outsource the work on my system, so it's no bother to me. The
income far outweighs the money I pay to get the ArtiFacts built.

I do what I do best, and get somebody else to do the bits I'm not
so great at.

HTH

Glenn

Heck, I'm still using mine

Just as with everything else in life, effort has to made in order to achieve what you are aiming for.

If you have good quality, well written PLR articles (or even your own composed articles) and top of the range article "spinning" software (and one or two of those software products have been offered on the forum as WSOs), then spinning articles can be worth the time. Bear in mind however, that copy and paste does not work. You have to personally change/re-write certain sentences, keywords and paragraphs, move them around and add additional content.

A lot of what I have mentioned above will depend on what exactly you intend to do with the "spun" articles that you produce.

Regards,
Jeff Henshaw.

Hi erinwrites,

Because not everyone has the exact same business model, obviously. For example, does an adsense marketer want people to stay on their site forever, delighting over every beautifully crafted word?

Do e-commerce style affiliate marketers who use datafeeds and buyer keywords need Shakesperian quality prose on their 'air-conditioning' pages?

Don't get me wrong, I consider myself partly a writer too. But I'm a very open-minded one who just wants to end up on the beach - regardless of how I get there.

The internet is a tool to get me to the beach and ideally, I can sell the PC and just stay there. I would rather be able to sip cocktails and surf and oggle while fondly recalling how my carefully crafted words inspired and lifted people on a daily basis.

But if I find that I get the sand between my toes more quickly and permanently by spinning the crap out of everything and keyword stuffing the heck out of my pages - so be it. I'll still be smiling when I get there, safe in the knowledge that 95% or more of the world's writers are either unemployed (and a long way from the beach) or spinning in a different way when they bend over for their demanding editor who is funded by the guys at the golf club who have shares that need a little tickle.

It's all relative, when you see the big picture, in my everso humble opinion :rolleyes:

(Sidenote - why do all writers believe that theirs is the only valid artform? Get with the times. Technology can be beautiful. Most writers are paid to lie anyway, so please dispense with the righteousness. You're probably talking about people who use spinners badly. There are bad writers too, you know?)

Back to the point. Google is clever enough to be able to find the same products in the marketplace that we do. In my opinion, they are fully aware that article directory deluging can now be automated. And articles are pretty easy to spot - they live in directories and usually have a resource box.

The next thing on their hitlist will (possibly) be blogs containing contextual links that either -

a) follow a certain format

b) have a similar number of links in each post that all link to unrelated websites - in each respective article

c) have other footprints

It would be foolish to think that it is us who are one step ahead.

Article spinners have gotten a bad rap over the years, but in truth they are really only a "tool". It's not about what tools you use, it's about what you do with them. Used creatively a good article spinner (or rewriter) can produce excellent results, while saving tons of time. Used non-creatively (not putting much effort into it), of course the results won't be very good (Not saying the OP hasn't put any effort into it, just making a general statement).

In my tests over the years, I have gotten virtually the same results (SEO-wise) from articles I've re-written, as I have from original articles. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but the results from an original vs a rewrite of the same article have been very similar.

But of course there's a lot more to getting "results" than just focusing on what percentage of your article should be "rewritten". For starters, you need to make sure you have a great original article to begin with (a good niche, good tightly-focused keywords, and well written). If the original article doesn't have all that, then trash it. It's won't be worth the time to rewrite it.

And when it comes to the actual rewriting part, I do much more than just "swap synonyms" (although that is often a large part of it). In addition to that, I also change the title, and completely rewrite the first paragraph (and sometimes more). And sometimes I'll take individual sentences from *other* articles I've written and do a little "mixing and matching" where it makes sense (BTW, PLR Dashboard works GREAT for doing this, as it lets you search articles on your HD for specific keywords). And when all is said and done I make sure that the rewrite is between 50-80% unique (depending on what I'm going to do with it).

And keep in mind that this is a numbers game. Don't expect to see any results after submitting just a handful of articles (even if they are very good). You need LOTS of good ones, consistently, over a significant period of time, before you will get any substantial SEO benefits from them.

Hope this helps!

hum... I'm getting out of spinners AND rewriting right now.

Nice headache... but with the changes in EZA and other directories... it will not worth it anymore.

Moved a good deal of my resources to other formats like video, podcast and images.

RDG :p

I concur.

There's nothing like fresh content. The only way I'd ever use a spinner is if I were a horrible writer and had absolutely no money to pay someone.

...Like when I first started :p

Scott, one big problem with spinning fresh articles for each
visitor, is that it confuses the search engines. This may
well affect your ranking.

HTH

Glenn

Hi Colin,

It's just such a fascinating subject, especially when real writers have their say.

There are so many parallels - ask the average highly paid cordon bleu chef what they think about the quality and presentation of fast food. Ask the average landscape painter what they think about the value of graffiti. Ask the average orchestra composer what they think about the depth and value of grunge or death-metal.

You have to consider what the goal of the person is. Some want to create a product that they can be proud of. Others want to create an effective wealth system that they can be proud of.

Many want to achieve the latter while pretending to be achieving the former. In fact, most of the successful in the first world adopts that approach. They want the wealth, while appearing to be totally altruistic and driven by a passion to make the world a better place.

You have people like the guy who owns Wikipedia, who appears to be genuinely driven by the desire to help by collating information and serving it up on demand.

Then you have all of the other most popular websites who try really hard to project the same motivations, yet they clearly enjoy the beach as much as I do.

Hi erinwrites,

Most marketers don't care what you do. They care about what the majority of their target market does, because that is a more profitable concern. Ask any decent marketer what matters most -

a) presentation

b) effectiveness, regardless of presentation

Do McDonalds care about presentation more than volume? No.

Let's get to the bare truth. Why do proper writers hate spinners? Why do cordon bleu chefs hate McDonalds? Why do real musicians hate soap stars singing over karaoke beats doing well in the music charts?

Because they are proving that the buying public are more interested in novelty than quality. And they are profiting from this, hugely and effortlessly.

Because they can put their energies into their system of mass production to access the market en masse.

Now don't get me wrong, if you have read my posts here over time you will probably see that I come from a background where quality counts. I do love quality writing, music, art, food etc. And I don't feel that the world is a better place when it is controlled by mass marketers.

But, it is. They own our governments, they own our infrastructures and they virtually own me and you.

It is down to each of us to find our own solutions to this situation that we find ourselves in. Personally, as I have already suggested, I am only interested in getting the sand between my toes (and those of my friends and family) on a permanent basis and shutting out all of the noise.

I've tried being the internet marketing equivalent of a 'starving artist' and it isn't fun. Some would say that making sure that your aims in life are 'noble' is of the highest priority. Others would add that to fail to do this will incur grave consequences (grave pun intended).

But on the contrary, based upon surveying the current (and past) landscape, it would appear that one of the gravest errors is to over-estimate one's self-importance in the big scheme of things. Who am I to consider that my paltry spinning activities are so important as to have any effect on the value of the internet as a whole?

I don't believe that my aims are bad or wrong, I don't believe that yours are too. But if someone wants to tell me that my use of technology to spin words (for original content purposes online) is somehow wrong - then I will only seriously entertain those suggestions as valid when I believe that that same person is also complaining just as loudly at the people in power about how they spin their words in order to dupe the masses and keep them down.

Otherwise it's simply a situation where the masses (that's us) are just fighting amongst ourselves.

And if you need to understand the irony there, I suggest studying the section of 'The Life Of Brian' where the 'peoples' front of Judea' (PFJ) bump into the 'campaign for a free Galilee' (CFG) when they were both trying to take Pilate's wife hostage :rolleyes:

Captain Mainwaring had a catch phrase for young Pike in 'Dads Army'. I very nearly quoted that here


Just kidding.