Question for knowledgeable article writing marketers

It's really a question of ethics and some people won't see any problem with it. It's not nearly as bad as just stealing someone's work word for word.

The problem I have with it for me personally (I've written articles for years) is that you don't do any independent research and you're stealing someone else's research. If the article has something a little wacky in it, you won't know. If it's missing something important, you won't know. Plus, it's just one of those areas for me at least that feels wrong.

I always use at least 3 sources, sometimes 4 or more. I might really like one article and base my article more on it and then throw some other stuff from 2 or 3 other articles I've found through research. But when you read my final article it doesn't resemble any of the articles because I've completely based it on the research of 3-4 (maybe more) articles.

When I read an article in Men's Health or other places, I look for ways I can do it better, places it's lacking. And I improve it. There is always room for improvement, right?

Hope that helps!

"You can take their ideas but not their words" seems to be the general consensus of opinion. However, my non-lawyer understanding is that it isn't necessarily quite as simple as this, because "derivative works" can also breach copyrights (that's what I've seen internet lawyer Brian Kindsvater say, in other threads - "spinning" articles like that would be infringing their owner's copyright, so I don't really see why re-writing them yourself wouldn't be, because the outcome's pretty similar, isn't it? I stress, again, I'm not a lawyer and on this subject you should be guided only by the opinion of someone who is).

The problem is the same for musicians. There are only so many notes and so many ways of ordering them to create a pleasant, harmonious result.

If you were to write an article on a very specific niche area, say, on "The Life Cycle of the European Tree Frog", it would probably have a great deal in common as other articles on the same subject. It may also share a good deal of syntax and common phrases with many other articles already published in the public domain. Could anyone accuse you of stealing? Perhaps not if you publicly acknowledged your sources with links to them.

You have to marvel at someone like Sean Mize who seems to be able to churn out 1200 articles about Success Coaching (amongst other topics) without repeating himself or running out of inspiration.

It'd at least be a good source for titles or topics, even if you don't choose to rewrite paragraph by paragraph. I'd assume that many of the articles are feature length pieces, anyhow, so you'd be looking at things that would be much longer than the typical online article.

John's exactly right... Science may have definitely come up with new stuff over the past 10 years.

If I were you, I would use some of those topics as a starting point. After all, if they were considered "exciting" enough to make it into Men's Health over and over again, there's obviously men out there looking for the answers! Once you've got some topics picked out, do some additional (more current) research. That way, you'll have the most up-to-date facts, and you'll have a bunch of different sources of information.

Definitely sounds like research to me too, if you're taking information from different places and putting it in your own words. I think you'll end up putting in your own slant and opinions anyway.

But why limit yourself to Men's Health magazine? I know you said you already have years of them, but you can and should still look at others. Yes, all those magazines say the same thing over and over. It's the same with all the women's magazines too. However, they know how to write a headline better than anyone. You can just look at headlines of old magazines at magazines.com and get loads of ideas for new twists on the ones you have.

Only caveat is the medical and time-sensitive content. You'll have to check your facts and do current research for those topics. Press-ups? No problem. How to prevent prostate cancer? Stay away or start consulting with doctors.

Is this your own content ?

Assuming it is your own content then there is nothing wrong with re-writing it. The thing is with any content PLR or your own, you must make sure you reach high quality.

I know many people assume high quality is just about an article that reads well but this is not exactly true. High quality content must contain the below in order to be seen as high quality to the search engines and readers both.

* Proper Formatting - short paragraphs that are 2 - 3 sentences long.
* Proper Keyword Research - article must contain proper keywords.
* Proper Semantics - article must contain related words and phrases.
* Proper Grade Level - article must read at a proper grade level that corresponds to your niche, according the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.
* Proper Spelling and Grammar - this is self explained.
* Proper Position Of Links - yes links need to be in proper places (if no links allowed in the body of an article I do not syndicate to that site).
* Content must be engaging, attractive, informative, and include a call to action in the resource.

All of these are required for a proper high quality article. I know many miss 80% of these points above but that is why their articles do not produce as well as they think they should.

Any content including plr can be re-written to meet the above. It is just a question of would it be easier to re-write or write from scratch. This depends upon the writer because some are very skilled at re-writing vs writing from scratch while others are very skilled at writing from scratch.

Edit: Oh I see you actually meant men's health magazine, so that answers my first question. The rest still applies.