The question has come up several times in the past few days due to my last posting which discussed a tool for helping you to create multiple unique versions of a single article. Is rewriting and publishing your own articles ethical?

I talked a little about the ethics of this particular article factory tool in that thread, and ultimately I really believe it comes down to each individual’s perspective for themselves.

However, I also think it only fair to again point out that the tool I discussed does not create or add words to your own writings on its own. The machine is not writing the articles in this case. The user is creating every word, jot and tilde being put out in the multiple versions, so it is really no different than the user sitting down and manually writing multiple versions of their own article, it’s just faster.

And after some of the discussions I’ve been having with others on the subject recently I think it’s also only right to examine why exactly such a tool even has a purpose. In other words, if there wasn’t a need for publishers to have multiple versions of the same content then maybe they wouldn’t create them, manually or through automated tools.

You see, as I view it the publishers aren’t the problem here. Not even marketers who are shooting for sales.

The problem begins with the search engines, specifically the “how and why” of their index results ranking systems.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you search Google for “declaration of independence” (without quotations) and check out the first result displayed (I’ve linked to what it was at the time of this writing since rankings do change regularly) you will see that nowhere on that page is there a readable version of the Declaration of Independence. What’s up with that?

The top result is relevant to the term, I’m not disputing that. And it even links to a text version of the right document, but that’s an added step for the user who was most likely expecting to find a copy of the text when they made their search, yet it didn’t appear in the top result… why?

Because the ways that Google and other search engines rank what’s the most relevant or important content for any given search term are severely lacking.

That isn’t to suggest they aren’t doing the best they can, I think they probably are, but there are limitations on just what can be done and on how intuitive an algorithm can be designed; not to mention that there is after all, only 1 top spot for any given term.

And that’s where the breakdown between search engines and publishers occurs. Search engines want to serve the best results to their users, and publishers who feel their content is the best result for a given search term want to have their page served first.

Unfortunately, because the methods being used by search engines to determine “the best” or most relevant content have flaws; publishers are forced to take additional steps beyond just creating great content if they want their pages to appear first. They have to also wear the hat of promoter for their content.

Publishers have to publish great content, AND then apply some strategy to that published content for assisting it in climbing the ranking systems of search engines. Which might explain why I didn’t find a text version of the Declaration of Independence in the #1 spot on Google… since Jefferson isn’t around to do any link building for his document.

If he were then surely the 2nd result from Google (at the time of this writing) would have been propelled up to #1 with just a tiny effort. Heck, if Jefferson had just had a Delicious or Digg account to bookmark the second result from it probably would have jumped up to the top spot easily.

Of course the flip side to publishers trying to promote and aid their works in ranking better is that the search engines are at the same time trying to prevent them from aiding their works to rank better. Because the search engines, despite the flaws in their systems, don’t want outside interference or “manipulations” being applied–which is completely understandable on their part.

It isn’t that they don’t want the best material reaching the top, they simply don’t want individual publishers each determining what is or isn’t the “best” material.

The whole thing is an ugly catch-22 where publishers and search engines act like opposing candidates in a heated election race. They shake hands and smile warmly to one another for pictures, but deep down neither trusts or likes the other very much.

And this all brings us to the real reason of why a publisher would need (not want) to create multiple versions of the same basic content.

As a publisher and having been online since the early 90’s I know of a lot of ways to help a piece of content rise in the search rankings. But, most of them are dubious at best, and some are down-right nasty; so I tend not to use them in my business model.

On the other hand, there is something publishers can do to improve their chances for reaching searchers looking for a specific topic (by keyword term) that isn’t nasty at all, and doesn’t seem very dubious either. Instead of trying to “game” the search rankings they can try to saturate them.

As long as each piece of content is topical, relevant and somewhat unique it’s possible for a publisher to reach more searchers in this way. So, by creating multiple versions of the same core content publishers gives themselves a wider and longer “reach” among searchers for their topic.

That doesn’t mean publishers want to waste their time rewriting the same thing over and over, and it certainly isn’t helpful for the search engines who are trying to “get it right” for their users… it’s simply an effective method for publishers who believe searchers for a specific term and their content should be connected.

I’m sure some puritans will say that rewriting and creating multiple versions of the same thing is spammy, but I think that’s a silly argument. It’s like saying that Ford should only be allowed to run the commercial for their latest car model 1 single time only.

A better argument against creating multiple versions of the same content, and the one I stand behind, is that it doesn’t actually benefit anyone in the end. Publishers waste their resources creating it. Search engines waste their resources filtering and indexing it, and the end user searcher only needs to find a single version of it to be happy. The entire dance, regardless of being effective for connecting content consumers with material, is horribly inefficient for everyone.

Still, publishers, whether commercially motivated or not, are just trying to reach people to consume their content. Just as Ford is trying to reach the most people possible with their commercials. And just as Ford will purchase as many runs for their commercial as they can budget for, content publishers can and will place their content in as many venues for exposure as they possibly can as long as that’s what it takes to make those consumer to content connections.

Publishers aren’t intentionally trying to overload networks or platforms with multiple versions of the same content with any malice. Trust me, as a publisher I’d like nothing more than to spend all of my time creating truly new content.

But unfortunately, everyone must live and work within the rules and parameters of their environment, and as long as there are flaws which prevent the perfect match of search index results to search term publishers are going to need to continue playing the duel role of promoter for their work and using whatever methods that exist and are effective for helping them reach the largest audience.

And tools, like the one I spoke of in my last posting, which don’t change the process but do speed it up and save publishers a little time in their promotional work will continue to have a purpose.

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Technorati Tags: Articles, publishers, rewriting, search engines

These are crappy times for a lot of people. The financial markets are falling hard, retail and service industries are seeing declining profit margins and missing projections, and real people are having to fight harder every day just to get by. Some have seen their hours and benefits cut back at work, and worse still many have lost their jobs–and a lot of “experts” are saying the worst has yet to come.

So, other than stating the obvious what’s my point?

I’ve noticed something that I feel is despicable over the past few weeks as times have taken a sharp downward turn for so many… several well known Internet Marketers have suddenly began ramping up with product launches and messages to their email lists.

Is the timing coincidental? Maybe for some, but there’s no doubt in my mind that some are also foaming at the mouth over these unfortunate economic hardships striking so many people because times like these create desperation, and desperate people are easy targets when you’re selling promises of fast or easy Internet riches.

Seeing people fighting to get by and worried over feeding their families truly pangs me, it’s no secret that I have a bleeding heart. But seeing Vultures preying on those struggles and desperation sickens me.

There’s nothing I can do about the creeps out there, but after talking with several other folks whom I work with often on projects there is something I can do for anyone within my reach.

Content is King! Unless you’ve been under a rock you’ve heard this a million times.

But creating good quality content can be a giant obstacle for lots of people, and if you’re worried about paying the light bill next month you can’t be in a position to pay writers to create original content for you.

The Group–my associates and I who work together often but have never bothered coming up with a spiffy name for ourselves–has a tool that can help with this.

It’s not a crappy rewriter program that randomly replaces words from a thesaurus database… or something that just shuffles around sentences and paragraphs to rewrite articles.

It’s a serious tool which automates the process that good Internet Marketers are already doing, and we’ve (the group) decided to provide free access to it in the hopes that it will help some of you to do better, and do it faster.

When a marketer enters a niche or starts a campaign they need content. Usually after a little research on the product they’re promoting and the keyword they want to target they will sit down and write several dozen pieces of content to use for blog postings, articles, Web 2.0 sites and etc.

And if you’ve been doing this for a while then you know that most of those articles will be about the same idea, just presented in unique ways to avoid being duplicate content. For instance you might write a group of articles such as:

1) Curing Your Acne
2) Getting Rid of Acne
3) 5 Steps To Being Acne Free
and so on if you’re promoting an anti-acne product…

What this tool does, using your input–every single word comes from you–is produce over 2 dozen original pieces of content on whatever idea you’re writing about that are each typically between 40% and 80% unique and will be 100% natural reading. They come from your brain and will read as though you manually wrote each one out and put serious efforts into them.

BUT — they won’t take you hours and hours to create like if you did it by hand, they’ll be created in a matter of minutes.

You start with 1 original piece of content that’s between 300 and 500 words, follow the instructions for formatting it, then press “Submit” and you will have over 2 dozen pieces of unique and original content that you can use anywhere.

It depends on how fast you are with the formatting, I actually haven’t used the tool all that much myself even though it’s been available to me through the group for a while, but even still I can prep an article and run it in about 15 to 20 minutes. So that’s less than 1 minute per piece of content produced… not bad at all in my opinion.

Is it ethical?

I know I’ve posted about ethics lately and talked about content spinning. In my opinion this tool is a little different from common rewriters because of how it works. Every word, punctuation point and letter used in the produced content comes from your mind, so essentially you are still creating the content and it is still original to you. This tool just automates the process of getting it from your mind to printable/publishable text.

Still, the question of ethics is one you really have to decide upon for yourself. I’m not going to make the case either way on that here.

My only intention when I approached the group about releasing this was to help some people overcome 1 large obstacle that they may face with online marketing. I’ll leave any moral debates on it for a later time.

As I said, this is freely accessible and with no strings attached. You don’t even have to signup for some email list to use it.

You do have to join my forum here, but you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.

I wanted to prevent people from running auto-scripts on this tool so it’s only accessible to registered members of the forum who are logged in.

The forum isn’t really full of lively discussions anyway, it’s just a good format for myself and a few other members of our group to share tools and information with others away from prying eyes (or bots), but there’s rarely much actual discussion going on there so it’s completely okay if you don’t want to participate on the boards. Just jump in to use the tool if it can help you.

I’ve also made a posting on the forum with a step by step method for using the article factory tool without spending a penny on domains or hosting or anything else that you can use to test niches for profitability and make some real money.

Again, this is with no strings, no fees, and you won’t be added to any lists.

If you’re a regular reader here then you probably know I’m not about exploiting people for my own gain, and despite having this blog about working and making money online I don’t really work in the “Make Money Online” market. My newsletter list readers know that my messages are always long and full of information, yet rarely contain any promotions at all.

The bottom line, whether you have faith in my sincerity or not, is that this is only about one thing to me and that’s giving a small gesture that I can to counter the malice of some others out there right now who will take advantage of these tough times.

I’m not promising riches and wealth… I’m not selling anything nor collecting leads.

I, and the group, am offering a useful tool along with a guide for 1 way that tool can be utilized to produce results. If you’re comfortable with using this kind of tool then bring a willingness to take action and give it a spin.

In these crappy times, that’s the best that I can do–but I hope it’s enough to help someone else along.

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Technorati Tags: article tool, content production, rewriting

One of our interns (we launched an Internship Program recently) raised a question this morning that I thought would make a great posting here.

She asked if there was a specific formula that we use with marketing articles to obtain high results.

Now, to be honest I wouldn’t actually consider our results to be high, only higher than the results or expectations from article writing and marketing that most people seem to tout on forums and blogs.

And there’s good reason for that, I and my partners have been utilizing articles to further our marketing and SEO campaigns for a lot of combined years. I personally began using articles way back in 1997 for buzz generation and branding. Add in the years my partners have invested as well and you’ve literally got decades of experience.

However, what we don’t really have is a formula, and here’s why; everything changes and every campaign is unique.

Lets say you sat down to create the perfect article writing formula for expanding your SEO campaigns, by the time you’d have the formula tweaked to perfection one or several of the major search engines would have altered their indexing and ranking systems, which would break your formula and force an ongoing cycle of tweaking and moderations that would eventually become an obstacle to the basic task of creating articles in the first place.

In a round-about way, the same holds true when using articles for pure marketing purposes. Every product or service you’re promoting is going to be unique from others, and the way you’ll want to showcase each is going to change accordingly.

So, on the question of having a formula for article writing, the answer is no.

What we do have in place however, is something that’s very effective and flexible to suit our needs and the online trends at any given time, and that is an article writing structure. I wrote about this recently on the Content Caboodle blog, so you can check that out for the outline we use.

Basically, the difference between calling it a formula and a structure/outline is that by definition a formula is hard coded and set in stone. For example, if 2+n=5 then n will always be equal to 3 because there is a specific formula that exists to generate the value for n in that problem, and by using the “set in stone” formula you will always arrive at the value of 3 for n. There’s no wiggle room.

But with a structure or outline, you have basic parameters in place, but can be free to alter or adjust them as needed to arrive at the desired outcome.

I’ve linked to my posting about the structure we’ve used above, and you’ll see there that I ended the post in jest by saying “That’s the force, Luke, use it wisely.”–I was having fun when I wrote that, but it’s also dead accurate in my mind when talking about article marketing. If there’s any single thing that I believe gives one article an edge over another, it’s in being structured just right to connect with readers and prompt them to take action.

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Technorati Tags: article writing, formula, structure