Why Re Write Content

This article is an extract from PLR Pro, who are one of the premier PLR website's producing great ideas for making money... 

It's important that you rewrite the content, not because of any duplicate content penalty, there is enough evidence out there by Google itself, and other authorities that duplicate content on multiple sites isn't an issue, but rather, because again you want to tailor it to your own style.

So here is the rewriting process ;)

How to Effectively Rewrite Your PLR Articles Quickly

*Before we start this section, we’d like to thank Ahmed Bilal for writing the bulk of this section originally for our PLRPro.com members, he did a brilliant job, and rather than rewriting it, we decided (with his permission) to use his writing in this section.

Depending on where you get your PLR content from, you will be competing with anywhere from 200 (what we have at PLR Pro and 1500 other people (some of our competitors) for the use of the same content.

The reality is however that only 5-50% of the people will actually use the specific article that you will be using as some people either won’t have the time, the resources, or the interest to use that specific niche/article.

Before we work on rewriting articles, let’s look at a very important idea – ‘related content’.

Related Content

Related content is all material that is related to the topic of your website. If you have a content site, then ‘related content’ for you could be images, definitions on the subject, interesting facts / news (to be used as side-notes or as ‘notes’ within articles), etc.

For example, suppose that an article pack has the parent keyword “learn guitar”.

If you were asked to find three different things you can add to your site apart from articles on this niche, what would you add?

Here are a few ideas:

• Videos – people showing how to ‘handle’ a guitar, how to perform guitar maintenance, etc (www.youtube.com and video.google.com are great places to start looking for these)
• Music sheets or lyrics
• Images – not of you and your dog, but of guitars and famous guitar players (Things that are on topic and relevant).
• Guitar sites from around the web (so a resources list or links to relevant information)
• An online store – sure, you are probably signed up as an affiliate, but why not ‘sell’ the product on your own site (where you have control over the sales process) and send them over to the affiliate only for payment processing and beyond?
• Tips section
• Glossary of terms
• A guitar learning / playing FAQ
• Questions and Answers (answers.yahoo.com)
• Blog posts referencing the blogger

This way, not only will you be creating something that is link worthy in your niche, but you will also be helping yourself create internal sources of content that you can add and link to from your articles.

Where to get this content?

You don’t have to create it yourself. If you do have a background in the niche or can rely on someone else to do this for you cheaply, that’s excellent. If not, you will have to search the Internet for it and get it from somewhere else.

Should you copy other people’s material? Absolutely not. You should respect copyright laws, and in this case that means understanding what is ‘fair use’ and what requires permission. I’ll explain it a bit here, but please note that this does not construe as legal advice, so if you have any questions / before you take serious action please contact your lawyer or the person who owns the copyright to the content...

There are two things that you should be aware of: fair use and online copyright law.

Fair use is basically a principle under which you can, within reasonable limits, use snippets of content from other websites provided that you cite your sources. You have to denote that the selected content is from another site (one way of doing it is to put it inside double-quotes) and you absolutely must mention your sources.

When we say reasonable limits it means that you should not copy an article sentence by sentence. If you are using a small portion of an article (say, a few lines), that’s fine. Use it, and cite it, and you’ll be fine. This applies to definitions, FAQs (short answers), and small tips. In effect, as long as you are mentioning your sources properly (and denoting the cited content), you can pretty much build your VRE site without much trouble.

However, if you wish to use someone else’s content extensively or use images from other sites, you have to be aware of copyright law.

Some sites specifically display a Creative Commons license on their sites, which (depending on the type of license) usually allows you usage of that site’s material provided that you abide by their requirements. With these sites, it’s a matter of reading up on their copyright license and following instructions.

Tip: You can find content protected by a CC license using the following search tools:

Creative Commons Search

Let’s you search for websites that use the CC license and are related to your topic.

Flickr Creative Commons

Looking for royalty-free images? Try Flickr’s CC search.

If the site does not have a CC license then by the rules of the Berne convention you need to get written permission from the site owner in order to use the images / content on their site. As that is usually a bit ‘too much’ for VRE sites, you are better off with using CC licensed content and using snippets of information as related content in your VRE sites.

Related content is a must if you want your VRE website to be more than just a cookie-cutter site. You have to make sure that your VRE website becomes a magnet for your target market – it cannot be all things to all people, but it must be remarkable in a way that attracts attention immediately – and the best way to do that is to provide your visitors with amazing value.

Note that this approach will help in three ways:

• Get you more links (and make it easier to get links)
• Get you more sales (more people coming to your site = more sales)
• Get you more visitors from the search engines (We’ve already talked about using different language versions of the same article as alternate content, and using something like www.wptranslator.com – what about alternate mediums such as pictures and videos?

We added in a gallery feature specifically to capitalize on Google Images on one of our sites last month we had 5,000 uniques. You see search engines are going down the road of providing alternatives to their users, you might as well cash/capitalize on this now)

This has become even more apparent with the recent results in Google now using News sources and Youtube.com listings within their natural listing structure.

This is a cataclysmic move within the market and has and will affect webmaster’s worldwide.

As a consumer we want much more from the internet and search engines, which is why these massive changes are taking place.

Now that we’re a bit clear on related content (and how you can use it in your VRE sites), let’s look at two methods of rewriting – a quick ‘n dirty method for your regular site-bound articles and a ‘thorough’ rewriting process for your article submissions.

Quick Rewrites

A quick rewrite should not take you more than a couple of minutes. Here’s what you could do:

• Rewrite the headline.

• Add related content to your article – whether it’s an image, some extra information or links to useful, related sites.

• Rewrite the first paragraph.

• Rewrite the last paragraph.

Doing this should take you no more than a couple of minutes, especially if you have already done your ‘related content’ research and put together all the content that you want to add. I recommend ‘collecting’ all related content before you start working on your article pack.

10 Step Article Rewrite Walkthrough

For submissions to article directories you’ll have to do more than just switch the headline and rewrite a few lines. Ideally, you should be rewriting the whole article. The rewriting process takes about 10 minutes, but as you will be submitting a few articles (and not all 40), the time taken is usually acceptable.

Step 1: Read the Article

Go through the article once so you have an idea of what it is about – this will help in rewriting it later.

Step 2: Change the Headline

Keywords always come first, but can you change the headline to add something more creative at the end? A headline must also be short to work well, so you’ll have to balance that too. Your best bet is to add a related keyword to the headline – for example, if the article is on antioxidant supplements add the words healthy or health into the headline. And make sure that it makes sense and isn’t gibberish.

Step 3: Add a subheading

The subhead, despite its notoriety in sales letters is actually quite useful in providing focused, relevant information about the article to the reader. If you can write a 1-2 line keyword-rich summary of the article, put it here.

Step 4: Rewrite the introduction paragraph

With PLRPro’s articles just reword the intro paragraph and don’t worry about changing too much or too little. Think of a different way of putting across the same point, do it, then move on.

Step 5: Create headings in your articles

Slice and Dice – break up your article into 2-3 sections, give them headings and rewrite the first few lines that go after each heading.

Step 6: Create a list(s) in the middle

Slice and dice again – break up a paragraph or two and turn it into a list – whether it is of features, of symptoms, a checklist, etc.

Step 7: Rewrite the last paragraph

You’re almost done – go through the last paragraph (or the last two paragraphs if they are short) and rephrase them again. Follow the tips given in the previous section for what type of words to use, but basically as long as you stay on topic, use related keywords and paraphrase, that’s all there is to it.

Step 8: Create a call to action at the end of the article

For articles that are submitted to article directories, your intention is two-fold – you want to drive readers to your site, and you want the links from your submitted articles to help your site rank higher in the search engines. As such, it makes sense that the end of the article should contain some information about the site as well as a direct link back to it.

Step 9: Add links

Use keywords in your article to link to sections of your website – specific articles, categories, etc. Do this so that when the article is picked up by the search engines (in the article directory), they will count these links as backlinks to your internal pages and your search engine rankings will improve as a result.

Step 10: Review

Take a couple of seconds to go through your rewrite – is the headline ok, does the subhead make sense, does the new article have a conversational flow to it, things like that. Make sure you haven’t missed out on anything and that you’ve formatted things properly (links, images, lists, etc).

You now have a simple step by step process that you can take to either rewrite yourself, or to get someone else to rewrite the articles for you.

Each fully rewritten article shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes to do as you get better at doing it, and when you are doing a simple/quick rewrite, 5-10 minutes is plenty

And that, as they say... is that!

Take a look at PLR Pro HERE