Plagiarizing Yourself For Content
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For those of us marketers who DON’T outsource every written word we create I’m curious if any have ever run into this situation. Some niches has finite space. There’s only so much material out there you can write on, and only so many different ways you can spin it(and I don’t mean the software way) before it feels like you’ve emptied the barrel on words possible or content possible. So what do you do?
Here’s what I just did. I went to my EzineArticles account, looked at one of my old articles I did that was in the format I wanted to do, and wrote it again. It has the same information, the numbered items are probably in a different order, the story and lead-in I know are different, but it actually isn’t new content at all. Websites need information though and they need to be updated. The site can’t sit idly yet as I’m still building the content and I NEED to post something today so it will show up tomorrow.
This must be what it feels like to go full circle. At the start I knew nothing of this niche, so re-wrote other’s articles as I learned, and used those to promote my stuff to test the market. It proved worth it to continue so I kept re-writing and learning. Now, I don’t need any source material to pull an article, and an informative one, out of thin air on the fly, just motivation. Yet, today I went to my old material to find NEW material to post. Rewriting it.
I’m not saying you should do this too, but as a learning tool it’s been invaluable in teaching me a niche I knew nothing about. I think this also proves the lack of content on the internet as well as the overwhelming need for more at the same time. If the material base is finite(especially if you’re trying to sell an affiliate product or something) then there’s only so much writing space. Only so many ways to construct and craft words until everything you do is repeating everything else you’ve done, or resembles what someone else has done so closely, it looks like you copied.
Maybe we should look at this from a different angle. I tried that too. I’ve got a handful of articles in the same niche from a slightly different perspective, which was quite the discovery when I found it, since it meant I could now expand that into many articles. The well has water as long as the source doesn’t run dry. Getting the water out with a bucket or with a bowl can change the approach and result, but ultimately, what you get is still the same water.
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