Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
When I first broke into the freelance writing business, four months ago -So, let me rephrase that: as I am currently breaking into the writing business, one of the first projects that I found was from a company who hired me to spin articles.
At the risk of sounding all "Yes I did, but I didn't inhale"; I want to state that although I took the job, I couldn't bring myself to actually spin the articles. I ended up using these articles for topic ideas and current jargon of these topics that I would write about: physical fitness, body building and steroids. Coupled with bona fide research; thank you Wikipedia, I was able to produce 50 original articles, in about 25 hours, and at $2.50 per article that totaled a whopping $5.00 per hour.
Because these articles were ghost written, meaning that I also gave up the copy rights to the work, $2.50 was all I was getting for these; no posting them anywhere else. But let's look at some of the pros to this really yucky deal: I now had the...Ahem, bragging rights to truthfully proclaim myself a professional freelance copywriter and content producer, bragging rights, $125.00, and lot's of practice writing 500 word articles. Next I wrote six more for another website, for a little bit more respectful pay of $75.00. Still very low, but more practice, more money...Yep, and more bragging rights.
There are programs to help you spin articles. Don't bother with them, they don't seem to work very well. If anyone has a differing opinion: That's what the comments are for, use 'em. But let me take it a step further: Don't spin articles. The only justified way to do this, and still respect yourself in the morning, would be in the case of doing it to some extent with your own articles. A fourth benefit to those $2.50 ghost written articles: No sin in spinning my own original articles. To do it ethically, and also get a little more practice and education out of it, take away some unnecessary words...You can always find some of those! Add a little info, improve the language a bit: Practice. Don't just try to squeak it through Copyscape: http://www.copyscape.com/
Now you have...What are we up to? A fifth benefit: I discovered the value of "re purposing" an article. As it stands now, it seems that there can be advantages to spreading your articles around. This will start to chill after a while, as the Google bots develop even more discerning tastes, replacing their huge appetites for large quantities of content and backlinks. Watch also for developments in Copyscape that will enable that crawler to sniff out articles that have that spin stank on 'em.
Like any good confession; the moral is usually -do as I say, not as I did. This is no different. Don't spin articles. There are plenty of good opportunities to do what I found to be an even better way to get practice and exposure: Do some pro bono work for websites just getting their start. If they look like they have talent and promise, it makes for an excellent collaboration and a great opportunity for a content producer. When they make it they won't forget you. Post articles on Factoidz.com too, you keep the rights, get some revenue, and exposure with the practice, and I think there is a lot more to come from sites like Factoidz.com.
Here are a couple of links to sites I'm helping out pro-bono wise, that would welcome some some help...
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