Why I Reject Content For My Websites
Part of my role as head of an Internet marketing company is to judge the work of others. 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. In doing a competition analysis, we are always judging elements of our competitors’ business website design or newsletters. We also critique the writing of our writing team or those to whom we outsource Article Marketing.
I do all of my own writing for the Internet marketing niche, including the articles for content marketing. However, I hire free-lance authors for most of the other niches in which we compete. Furthermore, each day, I receive approximately twenty unsolicited articles that other marketers ask me to publish on some of my sites, although I never accept unsolicited articles for my main marketing sites.
I have learned from some bad experiences with outsourced writers. 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 help 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:
* The articles don’t make 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 receive articles about subjects that simply make no sense for publication in a blog that has a theme such as the one to which the writer has submitted. I receive submissions for my business oriented blog that have to do with everything from planning a wedding to choosing a new plasma television. Of course, there are ways that a writer could target such content to a business owner, but these writers do not make the effort. 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. While I won’t guarantee that I would publish those articles, they would certainly make more sense than would the actual articles I received.
* The articles are not well spun. I have spun articles for many years, so I can usually recognize within a paragraph or two if an article has not been well prepared for spinning. It does me no good as a webmaster if I publish an article that may be published in fifteen other sites. Under the best scenario, my traffic is going to be reduced to about seven percent of what it might have been if I had published a genuinely unique article on the same subject.
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.
