Being An Article Monster

Have you ever heard of "article spinning"? Up until about a year ago it was all the rage with a lot of low-budget Internet marketers. Spinning was coined by the public relations industry many years ago. Whenever a story came out that was unfavorable to their clients they would "spin" the story so that their clients looked better. Maybe you were a manufacturer who was caught dumping industrial waste in your local community. Your PR ageny would start talking to the media about changes in management and policy and how your company was now environmentally conscious. This was big business in politics as well as industry.

Freelance writers picked up the idea and changed it into a marketing tactic. Instead of just retelling a story from a client's point of view the freelance writers would tweak popular articles and send them off to different magazines. You might see the same basic story in a PAINTER'S magazine, a HOMEOWNER'S magazine, a DO-IT-YOURSELF magazine, and so on. The freelancers might write with pen names or they might use their own. These hand-spun articles could provide income for years.

Some freelance writers specialized in selling investigative reports to small local or weekly newspapers. They might round up some experts on a subject, interview them, and then write several versions of the interview. Each version would appear in a different news market. Back in the day this was considered completely up-and-up because everyone was getting unique content and readers rarely came across the same article twice.

And then came the Internet. Worse, then came Google and blogging (at about the same time). When Web marketers learned that Google loved links they started buying links all over the Web. But the demand was so high they couldn't get enough links. And Google started banning sites that were selling links.

So one day some clever marketer wrote a program that would take a single article and change words scattered across it, replacing them with other words. This was called "spinning" because it worked just like the old freelance article spinning. Only, instead of spinning off a dozen copies by hand you could create thousands of variations of the same article.

The spinning industry didn't do much for a few years because there wasn't enough inventory to publish all the articles. So the spinning software gradually improved. Meanwhile, people started building rent-a-blog networks. You could sign up and publish articles on dozens of blogs. As more customers signed up more blogs were added to the networks. Soon you could publish articles on hundreds of blogs. And then eventually you could publish them on thousands of blogs.

At first a lot of the rent-a-bloggers wrote their own articles. Then they hired online freelancers to write their own articles. And then they started playing with the article spinning programs. The spinners were good enough to let a good writer create decent articles that, with some human editing, could be published across hundreds of blogs. Of course most of the people using the spinning software were awful writers hiring awful writers and they had no idea of how to edit the thousands of articles they were creating.

It only took a couple of years for all the rent-a-blog networks to become saturated with really bad content. At first a few of the networks published good-quality content but most of them went down the tubes very quickly. By 2012 it was impossible to find decent articles on any of these networks and Google finally stepped in and took action. They threw tens of thousands of rent-a-blogs out of their search engine.

No one knows for sure how many rent-a-blogs there are but they keep on coming. Maybe there are about a hundred thousand altogether. It's a good idea to avoid these networks.

But does that mean that article spinning is dead? Maybe. Maybe not. If you can control the quality of the spun articles you can still do what the old freelancers did: resel the same article in multiple markets. But I doubt many people have the skill or patience to do this right.

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