Recently I was asked how to rewrite content yourself, or where you can outsource it?
My personal opinion on this is to write your own original content using your own voice (which is what I personally do myself), but I realize that some people either don't have the time or they are not confident with their own writing.
So there are two choices to rewrite other people's content
- Do it yourself
- Outsource it
OK so lets look at doing it yourself first.
The most important thing that you need to keep in mind is to avoid plagiarism. Don't just copy and paste a whole article (unless you have permission), or paragraphs as it is both illegal and it devalues the person that wrote the content in the first place.
Ideally you should be taking the main points of the original article and writing a whole new article based off these bullet points, but I know people are looking for an easier solution than that. I don't endorse or recommend any of these strategies, but have decided to find solutions for those people looking for shortcuts.
One solution is to search the internet for PLR (Private Label Rights) articles that are related to your niche or topic. PLR articles usually allow you to legally use the entire article (or parts of the article) on your site and are extremely cheap to purchase. Usually the quality of the articles will not be very good, but there are always going to be exceptions to this.
You can also search for public domain information or Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. You may find some stuff here that you can use on your website without having to worry about copyright issues, but it is highly recommended to always refer to the source of the information somewhere in your article. To find out more information about avoiding plagarism you can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism.
The problem with using other peoples work though is that it is duplicate content, and Google and other search engines will penalise you for this.
A better solution is to use online software to manipulate the text of an existing article, so that it can be spun into many different unique versions of the one article. The results from doing this are sometimes poor, but depending on which spinner you use some results can be very good, if not excellent.
Article spinning is based around using synonyms to create variations of the same word. For example the word "big" could be substituted with huge, large, massive, gigantic, or enormous. These words are separated by an opening bracket, a bar, and a closing bracket and in this example would read like this:
{big|huge|large|massive|gigantic|enormous}
The article spinner chooses a random word for all variations that are in the curly brackets and this creates a near perfect unique article every time it is spun. It is always a good idea to double check the results from the spinner and make adjustments where necessary.
The tools that I recommend for this are ContentBoss to create the spinning tags automatically, and then JetSpinner to actually create a unique version of the article. You will need both of these tools to get the desired end result, but ContentBoss is very cheap and JetSpinner is free.
I used to personally use these tools for article marketing and found them to be a perfect combination if you use ContenBoss first, and then paste the formatted article into JetSpinner.
You will be able to create fresh content in 5 minutes flat using this method, but like I said, check that the finished article reads properly.
Now, lets look at outsourcing the whole job to a writer.
This is probably the best option if you can find someone that does a good job and doesn't charge too much. The big problem here is that you usually get one or the other.
Most of the writers that do a good job will charge a premium for it, and most of the writers that are cheap will write articles that are rubbish. It's a catch 22 situation, but having said that there are always exceptions if you are prepared to do a bit of digging.
The best way to do this is to use carefully thought out keywords in a Google search and to contact the ones that appear to be the best. I would avoid freelance sites such as Elance, Odesk or Xing and concentrate on finding sites that specialise in writing good quality content for a reasonable price.
An example of this would be http://www.hire-a-content-writer.com/ which was found using the keyword "hire a content writer". This site is a company that has a team of specialists writers from just $8 a hour (at the time of writing this post). The point here is to find a reputable company that specialises in writing content, instead of looking for a one man show on a freelance site.
Obviously you never now how good the quality is going to be until you actually try these people, but if they provide poor quality work then you simply don't use them again, and look for someone else. After a while you should be able to find a reliable writer that provides you with quality work at a reasonable price. In time you will become a better judge of finding suitable writers.
And to finish off you may have trouble with writers that are based in countries where English is not the first language. Most writers from these countries will struggle to write articles with the correct grammar, but you can usually work this out from the price they are charging. For example if a writer charges $2 a hour, there is a good chance that they will not provide you with good work.
I recommend that you write your own unique content from scratch, but at least now you have some other options to get fresh content onto your website.
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