How To Re-Work A Blog Post To Submit As An Article

When you’re writing articles it is not always necessary to start from scratch for each article–sometimes you have previously written pieces of content for your blog or even content on your traditional website that you can re-write and submit as an article.

That saves bunches of time–your previous piece of content serves as an outline and source of research for your article, so you don’t have to spend time thinking up a new topic and points to cover.

But how do you re-work a blog post or some other piece of content you have to create a unique article?

I bounce my articles off of my blog posts every month, so I’m happy to give you some pointers:

1) Don’t try to go line by line rephrasing things–that makes it too easy to duplicate the original content of yours.

2) Instead, read back over your blog post and jot down the main points. Don’t copy whole sentences or anything, just a quickly jot down the main points of the article.

3) Then, using the notes you’ve jotted, start fleshing out the article. Do not look back at the original piece–if you do it is too tempting to start copying parts.

4) Remember that you can take a different approach in your article –your blog post may be in essay form, but your article could be a Top 5 List or a Top 15 List.

5) Do not try to re-work a previously submitted article–this re-working process is for content of yours that is in different forms, like blog posts and content on your website. It is perfectly fine to get ideas from previously submitted articles and to write new articles that go deeper or take different approaches to the same topic, but you should not take an article that you’ve submitted and try to create a different variation of the same article. Each article you submit should be unique and fresh and should not re-use content from previously submitted articles.

Here are some examples from my own writing:

Example 1

Original blog post:

How To Get Out Of A Writing Slump

Article that was bounced off of the blog post:

5 Tips for Getting Out Of A Writing Slump

Example 2

Original blog post:

Do I Really Have To Think About Keywords?

Article that was bounced off of the blog post:

I’m A Newbie To Article Marketing: Do I Need To Do Keyword Research?

The idea is to get the most benefit from your previously created blog post without copying it–you want the content on your own site to be unique, but you can still use your blog posts as a starting point in creating new articles.

If you learn how to do this you can get a content creating system going that can save you bunches of time and help you submit articles consistently.

Photo by Kristina B

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