I make a lot of judgements in my online business, judging the work of other people.  Every business person does that in one way or another.  Even in our roles as consumers of business products, we judge the copy of a sales letter or a video before we buy a course or a new piece of software.  In doing a competition analysis, we are always judging elements of our competitors’ [1] business website design or newsletters.  And some of us wear the critic’s hat when we outsource our own writing assignments or contract for a professional writing service.

I do all of my own writing for the Internet marketing niche, including the articles for content marketing.  However, I hire free-lance writers 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 having wasted money.  I now use a select stable of writers who make up my writing team and whom I have trained to do my paid writing.  However, of the unsolicited articles…I reject a substantial majority even though they come to me as free content.

My reasons for rejection are fairly consistent.  Here are the most frequent reasons for my rejections:

*  An astonishing number make absolutely no sense in English.  All verbal messages in any language get their meaning from vocabulary selection and the arrangement of those words (in other words, grammar).  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.   

*  A common, senseless mistake, is to have the article submitted to the wrong category (i.e., niche).    I have a business blog to which people submit suggested articles dealing with plasma televisions or planning your daughter’s wedding.  All the writers have to do is to put a business spin on their idea, somethat that could often be done with a little rewriting and an extra paragraph.  For example, one could write an article that I would accept about the best approaches to starting a wedding planning business.  A writer could produce an article about choosing the best plasma monitor for presentations at business conferences.  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 follow proper writing, submission and spinning standards yourself, or hire a [2] professional web article author who is well versed in Internet marketing.