The best way to write high-quality articles is to steal them. Agreed?
It’s a poor artist who borrows – a good artist steals
- Picasso
“Steal” in this context is really to research and feed from other people’s content. Granted, once in a blue moon you may come up with something totally original, but mostly anything you want to say have already been said before.
Now if you copy from one person word for word, that is piracy. But you copy many people and paraphrase them, it’s called research. In fact that’s how most authors and credible publications write their books, journals and white papers. They simply research existing material, paraphrase and quote, and add their own content to make it new or more applicable to the subject matter.
Why re-invent the wheel?
Writing original article may be easy for subject matters in which your experience level is high, but can you write a good article on a topic you just discovered yesterday?
Yes, you can. Here’s how you do it:
- Research - Type in a few keywords in Google.com and see what results come up. Chances are, the search results will display a few shopping sites, some unrelated spam sites, and some really good sites.
- Collect about 10-20 URLs of the articles that you want to use, and write it down / save it into notepad.
- These existing content is probably of high caliber, and for you it’s simple “off the shelf” research that someone else did on your behalf.
- Paraphrase Sentences – Take one line from the first article that you like, and paraphrase it. This means that you change the actual words without changing the meaning of the sentence.
- The easiest way to do this is to change a sentence from active to passive.
- For example, if the original sentence is “The symptoms of heart disease are high blood pressure, stress and reduced vision”, they your sentence can be “High blood pressure, stress and reduced vision are the symptoms of heart disease..”
- Divide Content – Divide your content into logical paragraphs. If possible, talk about one idea / point in one paragraph, and try not to have more than 3 (three) content paragraphs. Dividing your content logically will establish a flow of ideas that keep the visitor reading for more.
- Quote The Source – It’s not wrong for you to tell your readers that you got a piece of that article from another person. It’s called “quoting” someone, and by doing this you can legally include a verbatim (exact) sentence from heir article or web page. There are different ways to do this for regulated works like journals and theses, but for the sake of writing a web page or blog post, you can just put the curly quotes (“) around the quoted text and link back to the original web page.
- Write an Introduction – How you write introductions really depend on the article itself. It it a serious, factual article? Is it meant to entertain or invoke thoughts on a certain topic? You introduction will decide whether someone will continue to read your article, or switch on their TV. Did the introduction of this article make you read till this point? I bet it did
- Write a Conclusion - Now, the traditional way of doing this is to do a “re-cap” of all the previous paragraphs, to make the entire article “whole”. But as a business owner, you’d probably want to use this opportunity to create an “incomplete conclusion” that will lead people to check out your website link at the bottom of your article, or click on your affiliate links anywhere else on your site. In other words, give them enough but not everything.
Now, I used to use the exact process above for years. My only complain is that it is very time consuming, and tedious. I found that I need to dedicate an entire day to find and sort articles. The writing part then becomes easier.
When I had more capital I started outsourcing some of the writing, but on some blogs (like this one) I still write the content. Even though I am knowledgeable on the topic of making money online, you just can’t write certain types of articles without doing your research first. The last thing you’d want is to get a universally known fact completely wrong in your writing, and look stupid.
One of the tools I use now is Instant Article Wizard. This is a brilliant piece of software from Jonathan Leger that automates the entire article research process, and also helps you piece together a complete article from scratch.
It’s so easy that I can get an entire article done with just a few clicks.
You can click on the screenshot to get a better view of the interface.
You’ll notice a function on the top-left where you can enter your keyword, and search for relates articles.
For better results, enter your search terms like this:
- heart disease is
- heart disease is not
- heart disease definition
- says that heart disease
Then, Instant Article Wizard will display results of your search term, and the really cool part is that it also displays related search results. By clicking on each of those search terms, you can see the entire extracted sentence. You can mix and match, change words, and create your own sentences too.
Then, you can create your introduction and summary in Instant Article Wizard, and export your new article in text (.txt) format. Instant Article Wizard really helps me save time – loads of time – by automating my process for creating new articles. Plus, my articles are also more keyword-targeted so it stands a better chance to get good search engine rankings.
If you want to save time, I strongly recommend that you get your own copy of Instant Article Wizard. It will undoubtedly help you write better articles faster.
