Good, Bad and Ugly: Keeping Rotten Articles From My Sites
I make a lot of judgement calls in my online business, judging the output of other people. We all do that, I guess, although perhaps in different ways. We critique a sales page, a video or a trial version whenever we are deciding whether to buy a new information product or software application. We assess what is good or ineffective when we do our competition analysis of the website design of others in our niche. We also critique the writing of our writing team or those to whom we outsource article marketing.
I write all of my articles about Internet marketing (including article marketing) myself. However, I hire free-lance authors for most of the other niches in which we compete. In addition, I average about two dozen unsolicited articles per day from other marketers who want me to publish them on my sites in some of those other niches.
I have learned from having wasted too much money. I now use a select stable of writers who make up my writing team and whom I have trained to do my paid writing. Of the unsolicited articles, I reject more than half.
I thought that it might benefit other marketing writers to know why I am more likely than not to refuse to publish the articles that they send me. Here are the most frequent reasons for my rejections:
* An astonishing number make absolutely no sense in English. Any language, of course, is composed of its vocabulary and its grammar, and it is difficult to master both by taking a few years of apparently inadequate instruction. It is certainly posssible that a writer may write brilliantly in her or his native language, but, without complete fluency in a second language, the writer will never be able to write effective marketing copy. A far better choice would be to hire a native speaking editor. After writing a first draft, have a writer who is truly fluent in your targeted language rewrite the copy.
* A common, senseless mistake, is to have the article submitted to the wrong category (i.e., niche). I have a business blog to which people submit suggested articles dealing with plasma televisions or planning your daughter’s wedding. All the writers have to do is to put a business spin on their idea, somethat that could often be done with a little rewriting and an extra paragraph. One could author an article about how to build a wedding planning business and cover many of the same topics as the article about planning a daughter’s wedding. A web author could switch the things to look for in a plasma TV to the best features in a plasma monitor to be used in business video presentations. Either of those, I might be happy to publish.
* The articles are not well spun. Since I spin articles, and have done so for years, I can easily spot an article that is not carefully or thoroughly spun. No website can get any benefit from a poorly spun article or from publishing duplicate content.
Those of you who understand these problems should quickly see the solutions. Either write well in your targeted language, submit your article to the correct niche and use strict spinning standards, or contract with a web article writer who is well versed in Internet marketing.



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