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.

Below are some articles Killer published this week that might be of use to KillFive readers:

Writing Titles for Your Articles
Dealing with Online Plagiarism
Use Slide.com to wow your visitors
Article ReWriting Do’s and Don’ts
Is Google Losing Its Luster?
How to Get the Most from Your Online Writing
How to Make Money During TV Ads
How to Turn Lurkers into Commenters

We hope you find this information useful!

Today Textbroker sent out an email notifying users that they will be offering special bonuses from 3/13 to 3/19 to help manage the 1,700 orders on the books. This is a first for Textbroker, a site than first launched in 2008. Textbroker is the only site of its kind, posting content requests that pay whoever completes the project first. Writers are rated based on the quality of their writing after each submission which effects how much they can earn on each assignment. While the pay is not stellar, it can help a lot when things are tight.

The bonus week runs 03/13 to 03/19/2009, with bonuses up to 45$, depending on your earnings during that week. The bonuses will apply to Open Orders released (completed) during the bonus week that are later accepted by the client (within 14 days after the bonus week). Direct orders will not count towards a bonus.

Per the Textbroker email,
“The 5 bonus income levels are structured as follows:
$10 income = $ 1 bonus
$30 income = $ 3 additional bonus, a total of $ 4 bonus
$60 income = $ 5 additional bonus, a total of $ 9 bonus
$120 income = $11 additional bonus, a total of $ 20 bonus
$250 income = $25 additional bonus, a total of $ 45 bonus

You will receive appropriate payment within 30 minutes after reaching each bonus level.”

Our resident writer was lucky enough to stumble upon a bulk writing order last week on Textbroker that netted about $90 in one day. Though a rare occurrence, how lovely it would be to find a similar order during the bonus week! While we strive to write at least one Textbroker piece per day to keep our skills sharp, we will be focusing on on earning that $45 bonus! To do that, however, it is likely we will have to write about 50 articles in that week.  If there are enough rewrites available, it is technically possible.

For more tips on how to make more money with Textbroker, read this.

We tried JetSpinner after reading a few forum posts that made it look encouraging. After joining, you simply fill out a quick page that allows the program to use a bot software to register you at hundreds of article directory sites. This allows you to spin articles and get them posted in hundreds of places, resulting in more backlinks for your site and higher search engine ranking.

Ease of Use

We loved the idea and gave it a try. The interface was a little confusing, but after watching the web tutorial, we were enlightened. Unfortunately, the link for this tutorial was only shown to us after filling out our information (which we of course had done incorrectly). So we went back and re-did the form.

Results

The day after signing up for JetSpinner, you will feel immensely popular. You will receive hundreds of emails from the sites that the software signed you up for. The problem is that you then have to go back and click the activation links for all of these accounts. While it is easier than doing all the work yourself, we found that many of the activation links did not work. After about 100 tries with the different emails, we decided it was not worth our effort. We are going to try another site.

The Final Word

We are not sure about JetSpinner. It did not work for us, but might work for you. We are going back to the drawing board on this one.