Rewrites are useful tools for squeezing a little extra income out of your work, but it is important to rewrite for 100% originality if you wish to find a market for the work. It takes less time and effort to rewrite than to pen an original piece and you can use rewritten original pieces as PLR articles or as revenue share pieces on sites like Helium or Associated Content.
Rewriting is also a useful technique for new writers who wish to understand copywriting and content writing. By reviewing and rewriting many pieces, new writers gain an understanding of style, structure and voice that would otherwise be difficult to develop on their own.
The Three-Word Rule
When performing rewrites, be sure you make the new piece 100% original by never keeping any string of three adjacent words intact. It is often easy to go through and replace every third word with a synonym, but this is not always workable. Rewriting only with synonyms creates a flaky piece at best. Such articles will not generate any additional revenue for you. Read the article carefully and rephrase whole sentences or paragraphs where needed so the piece is coherent and sensible.
Incorporating New Ideas
During a rewrite, it is likely you will come up with a thought that presents a new angle for the piece. Rather than reworking the entire article, write the idea down below the article and then fit it in wherever it fits best before your final proofread. This adds originality without taking too much of your time.
Dealing with Unalterable Text
You will sometimes come across a paragraph listing several items that you cannot alter because they are scientific terms, or titles of books. When you run across this, simply re-order the words or phrases and drop one or two if you can. You can also re-order the list and add one or two. Remember, the rule of thumb is never to leave a string of three words intact. Sometimes you have to bend the rule to say “three unchangeable phrases.”
Outsourcing Rewrites
I sometimes hire other writers to do rewrites for me when I am too busy with original work. I then sell the pieces when I can. If I pay someone to rewrite, I need to be sure I am getting $10 to $15 for the piece elsewhere; otherwise, it is not worth my investment. Because it does not pay much, I only seek revenue share from pieces I have rewritten myself.
This is really interesting. I haven’t done too much re-writing, but I may start! I have found too that if you have a general article that covers several topics, you can often break off and create new articles from those smaller pieces. I.e. I wrote an article on Halloween safety, and then wrote a separate article about Trunk or Treating (something I mentioned in the first article). No sense putting good ideas to waste!
I agree. And it’s faster to write when the idea’s fresh on your mind. Whenever I do copywriting work for a client that may be interesting for a general audience, I like to rewrite it to regular people (most of my work is B2B so it needs a different style).