Writing articles or blog post - What do you use?

You've misunderstood this, Mike.

EZA specifically invites authors to submit to them as articles anything already published as an article on their own blog (or elsewhere). They suggest this in the email series they send out to new authors (you should sign up for it: it's very good). They also suggest it, and explain it in some detail on their blog.

They want "original" content, yes, of course - but that doesn't mean "not previously published elsewhere".

You're confusing "original" with "unique".

It's "unique", not "original", that means "previously unpublished".

Article directories don't require previously unpublished content, and for all the reasons explained throughout this thread, it would be a big mistake to give them any.

Like many other professional article marketers, I have a very large number of articles in Ezine Articles. All of them had previously been published, in identical form, on my own blog first, and most of them in quite a number of other places, too (including some real "authority sites"), before ever being submitted to EZA.

This post explains a little more: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post4309204

If you have time to read a longer thread, you'll find in this one a whole succession of experienced, successful article marketers explaining why they always publish all their articles on their own sites first, and have them indexed there, before submitting them to Ezine Articles (or anywhere else): http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html

Many people have had the experience you describe, of having articles rejected by Ezine Articles for not being "original", and have mistakenly assumed, when that's happened, that it was the fact that the article was previously published that caused the problem.

It wasn't.

"Unique content" and "original content" are two very different things.

What Ezine Articles were telling you, when they rejected your article for lack of originality, was that the information in the article comprised only information already available in other articles in their database, and therefore nothing "original to them".

This thread may also help you a bit, Mike: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

Please don't take this the wrong way, but it really isn't necessary to post in the huge, bold typeface/font you've used above. It sometimes causes some annoyance when new members do that, because it tends to look to others as if they're trying to achieve some kind of "artificial prominence" over other members' posts. You can see that some people might resent that a little, I think? Thanks for understanding ...

It depends on the post or article.

For short updates, quick link-outs, etc., I usually just type it into the blog's editor.

For longer, more involved articles I'll use a text processor like NoteTab Light, then copy/paste into the editor for final formatting.

For articles I intend to syndicate, I use Word or OO Writer, then save as both plain text and html (filtered html with Word). That way, I can provide both.

Office org, which can embed clickable links in, which is handy for draft blog posts, to convert the file into a PDF.

All you need to do is copy/paste it in and out of "Notepad" while you're copy/pasting it anyway: that strips out all the concealed MS-Word formatting codes.