Article Rewriting - a Quick and Dirty Guide

For many people, writing new articles from scratch is a difficult thing to do, and often it's easier to rewrite an existing article instead. If you don't have any existing articles to hand, there are many places where you can get them, although the quality and price varies enormously. We'll be doing a review of the best content providers shortly.

There's a lot of concern about how much rewriting is necessary these days, mostly based on the assumption that search engines will somehow penalize websites that are publishing content which is the same or very similar to content found on another website. Whilst that is true to a certain extent, it's not something to worry too much about, and if you follow the steps in this guide, you'll stay well clear of trouble.

Anyway, even without so-called "duplicate content penalties" it's a fact that publishing unmodified articles on your website isn't likely to get you the best results, and even a small rewrite will increase their usefulness dramatically from every perspective. So, here's a quick and dirty guide to doing just that.

To make this as easy to follow as possible, I'm going to break it down into 5 steps;

Title
Opening paragraph
A few bits in the middle
Subtitles
Tidy up

Important: before you do any rewriting at all, scan quickly through the article and get an overall idea of what it's about or what it's trying to achieve. This will help a lot when you come to write. Don't miss this bit out.

Now, rewrite the title in your own language, being careful to keep the important words in there. For example, if we had an article entitled "Article Rewriting - a Quick and Dirty Guide" which was all about how to rewrite articles, we might change it to "5 Steps to Rewriting Articles", or perhaps "Article Rewriting the Easy Way". The important words in the title are "article rewriting" so we need to keep them, but we can let our imagination loose with the other words. OK, that's the title done, what next? We need a brief opening paragraph.

Here's the fool-proof method that I use to write an opening paragraph. I imagine I'm telling a friend about the article I've just read. I summarize it, mentioning why I think it was interesting, and why I think my imaginary friend would like it. So staying with our example, I might write…

This is about how to quickly rewrite an article so that it's different enough from the original version to avoid any duplicate content issues. Although it only takes a few minutes to run through the steps, the results far outweigh the effort involved — the search engines will see it as a different article and your visitors will appreciate your own perspective.

Next, work quickly through the article and re-phrase something in each paragraph, putting it into your own words. It doesn't matter what, just change something. If there is an obvious opportunity, add bullet points or make a list.

Once you've done that, you'll be in an excellent position to add a couple of subtitles to the article. If you can't think of a suitable subtitle, choose a paragraph from the middle of the article, take the most important phrase in it and use that as a subtitle at the beginning of the paragraph.

Lastly, to tidy things up we need to add a final paragraph to the article — a nice finishing touch. Here's a couple of suggestions for what you could do;

tell them who you are and why you wrote the article
tell them you hope the article was useful
show them where they can find related information
encourage them to read more articles on your website
ask them to sign up to your newsletter
ask them to buy something

And that's pretty much it. After you've done this a few times, it won't take you long at all to re-hash an existing article, but it will really pay off.

P.s. Please don't use this as a way to plagiarize other people's work — it is meant as a guide to re-purposing your own material, or material that you have rights to.