When posting an article to your blog or creating other content for your company’s Internet presence, it’s best to do your own writing.
But, if your writing skills aren’t the best, you can also rework articles that have already been published. When doing so, make every effort to avoid two things:
1) Plagiarism, which is unethical. It’s just plain wrong to use claim credit for someone else’s work. This includes the despicable act of anonymously posting articles–as if the pieces wrote themselves!
2) Duplicate content. Google and other search engines notice when you post duplicate content and will penalize you with lower search rankings.
Here are some guidelines for reworking articles written by others.
Be sure to change the other writer’s article at least 70%. You can do this by rearranging the paragraphs and sentences and changing the order of the bullet points. Delete some of the material and maybe add a bit of your own. You can also incorporate content from two or three sources.
Perhaps the best way to go about reworking an article is to put the words in your own voice. For example, don’t keep words you would never use in conversation.
A second way to rewrite is to simply delete awkward phrasing, sentence fragments, convoluted sentences, and other nonsense. Most people tend to overwrite, so it will be easier to make your revised article shorter, just by
taking out the weakest parts.
Speaking of length, you only need about 500 words for a substantial blog post. I recently rewrote a cool article I found online, by using all the above techniques and busting the article into four blog posts.
When finished, include your favorite keywords in three places: the title, first paragraph and last paragraph before posting.
Be sure to add your contact information and attribution for the writer–you, if you followed these directions and when rewriting content.
-Michael Angelo Caruso
P.S. Learn how a soccer Mom named, Paula Parisot, now gets paid for blogging. Michael interviews her on the CD, Blogging for Profit.
More great Internet marketing info (mostly original articles!) at http://www.michaelangelocaruso.com/michael-angelo-caruso-blog/
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