In almost every area of life including internet marketing we always seem to be looking for shortcuts.

But are they really quicker?

Or do they just give the illusion of being a shortcut when they’re actually nothing of the sort?

Article spinning

The idea behind spinning articles is that you can take one “seed” article and spawn it into hundreds or even thousands of articles by using software and special spinning syntax – usually curly brackets to denote each section to be spun and a | character to separate each alternative.

There are several ways to spin an article:

• Use a piece of software that automates everything for you. The cheaper software usually substitutes on a word-by-word basis and uses a thesaurus of some sort to decide which substitutes to use. Which explains most of the poorly spun articles – picking on the word “decide” in the previous sentence, it would likely offer up words such as conclude, resolve, rule and vote as potential alternatives. None of which make much, if any, sense. The better spinning software works with groups of two or more words which helps a bit but not very much. If you do this properly you need to go through every single “spin” and adjust it, which takes quite a while and gets boring fast.
• Spin at a sentence level – this involves rewriting every single sentence in the article. Or sometimes sentence segments where there appears to be a logical break. This is better but can lead to complete paragraphs not making sense because although each individual sentence reads at least OK, combined together they’re just totally disjointed. And if you’ve ever tried to re-write a whole article at a sentence by sentence level, you’ll know that it is nowhere near as easy as it first sounds.
• Spin at a paragraph level – you rewrite the complete paragraph from scratch, making sure that it will work in context with the other paragraphs in the article.

Whichever method you choose, the logic is that you end up with an article that the search engines view as unique. Most software will claim that it creates articles that are upwards of 50% unique but I’d question that. And, more importantly, so would Google as it has very good detection for “nearly identical” articles.

Even if you could create spun articles that were unique enough to fool a search engine algorithm, you’ve still got to submit them somewhere. Whether that’s posting them on your own site, submitting them to an article directory or trying to get them approved as a guest post.

Which leads on to the next shortcut.

Automatic submission software

There are various pieces of software available that claim to be able to submit your spun content to hundreds or thousands of locations across the internet.

Some will also add in extra backlinks – usually in the form of blog comments and forum signups – to help promote the main content.

The simpler pieces of software such as mass article submitters have the snag that you have to create the accounts for the various locations you’re submitting the article to.

That can be automated but often involves solving Captchas that are designed to prevent automated signups, leaving you to either solve these as they get presented to you or pay for one of the services that solves them on your behalf.

Some software will attempt the Captcha decoding from within the software with varying degrees of success, maybe falling back to using a service or asking you to solve the more difficult ones.

Most software makes big claims on the sales page about how many thousand sites it will place your link on.

Which may be true in theory but isn’t true in practice.

When you think about it rationally, there are only a handful of sites that accept articles or videos or whatever that actually get any sign of traffic.

The rest are the internet equivalent of a ghost town.

Even if you manage to register, that doesn’t mean your article or whatever will be posted.

Some sites will have left the auto-approve option switched on. In which case your contribution will be alongside thousands of pages of gibberish, including some with curly brackets and | characters where the submitter got the spintax wrong (I had that with a spam blog comment recently).

Other sites will leave your contribution in a queue where it may or may not ever get accepted.

Others will accept it and then have a clear out once an administrator realises what’s happened.

Or they will just accept the fact that they’re not making any money and let the domain expire.

None of these signals are good for search engine ranking and some may positively harm any chance your site would otherwise have.

And even if your submissions get published, Google may or may not crawl round the site and may or may not index the pages it finds. There are so many junk pages that it is a waste of their resources to crawl round the worst offenders.

Some software tries to counteract that by offering ways to increase the chance of the link getting indexed but that has varying degrees of success.

Most of the time, automatic submission software is either expensive or ineffective or both.

Semi-automatic software such as IFTTT isn’t necessarily much better.

These are usually web based and you create a series of events that are triggered by an initial thing happening. So, for instance, when you put a video on YouTube you could ask IFTTT to send it to Tumblr which then triggers a Tweet which then causes something else to happen.

This is only limited by the accounts you can create and the instructions you can give the site about how it should handle those events.

The biggest problem with any automation shortcut is the amount of time you have to invest before you find out whether or not the product lives up to its sales pitch.

Often there’s quite a learning curve with the software and you can easily spend several hours either trying to figure out how it works or creating accounts for it to use.

Then – assuming it works as claimed – there’s the waiting game to find out whether it makes a difference to your site or not.

During that time, you have the option of believing that will be the case and investing more time (and money if there’s a monthly subscription for the software or proxies or whatever else) in the hope that it will work.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing parts of your internet marketing can be really helpful.

It’s the only shortcut I use but you still need to exercise caution.

For instance, a lot of people look towards sites like Fiverr to automate things. And for certain items it can be a good choice.

But you need to be selective as a lot of Fiverr vendors automate the way they create and deliver the gigs you buy so you may just be swapping one automation method for a different one without knowing it.

The research time involved can outweigh the time you thought you were saving in the first place. Unless you’re likely to be using a particular type of gig regularly then I don’t think it’s worth spending more than a few minutes researching on Fiverr.

Other freelance sites can be worth spending the time on.

I regularly outsource article writing on iWriter.

With a good set of instructions – and so long as you don’t choose really short article lengths – they can be a good source of written content that you can either use “as is” on sites or spend a short amount of time tweaking it to meet your standards.

More complicated items can be outsourced using sites like Freelancer.

You can outsource almost everything there and I’ve had graphics and even complete websites created.

Sometimes it’s a time saver, other times it’s a time sink.

Much depends on the skill level of the person you’ve chosen to do the work, how complicated the work is and how good you are at communicating what you want to someone who’s somewhere else on the planet and doesn’t necessarily have the same command of English as you do.

Then you need to be able to explain things unambiguously.

It pays to practice those skills with someone in the same room as you or via Skype.

You’ll be amazed how much things can be open to different interpretations when you do that.

But, done properly, it can be a worthwhile shortcut and is really useful for those tasks that you need to do but aren’t especially good at.

Which is why I outsource graphics most of the time – they’re not something I enjoy doing.

You also need to choose the appropriate skill level.

For instance, when I finally get round to creating an infographic, I’ll almost certainly choose someone on a freelance site rather than someone on Fiverr. There’s a level of proficiency that I think is needed that, even with gig extras, I personally don’t think is likely to be achieved on Fiverr.

I could be wrong but, for me, it would take too much research time to find someone there who could deliver the quality and complexity it’s likely to need.

I’ve not outsourced one on a freelance site yet as I’m not convinced I could specify it well enough to get good results.

Which leads on to one shortcut that really works: don’t do it if you don’t need to!

So much of what we do in internet marketing and elsewhere is done from habit.

If you’ve not evaluated whether something you’re currently doing is working or not, that could be the biggest time saver you ever use.

Feel free to add your comments about internet marketing shortcuts in the box below – I’d love to hear your thoughts.