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I’ve got an article writer, for my energy blog, that I found on Guru.com. I give them access to a Google spreadsheet where they can choose from a list of topics on Energy to write about. That way, they get to write about a topic they’re comfortable with and I get a good article.

They write them, send them through to me and I add them to the site, accompany them with an image and sometimes link to different articles. I’m a little lazy and probably should link to more authority sites, but overall, this yields good articles that are even informative. The related posts section at the bottom also act to provide content, linking and semantically similar words.

I’ve noted quite a few good tips from this article – thanks!

quick question: its still nog clear to me if you have written the articles from scratch or did you have some basic content at your disposal?

Furthermore I like the fact that you linked out “to local authority websites” very much!

I’ve had to employ the ‘mad lib‘ technique myself a time or two. For certain projects it can be pretty effective. Mad Libbing/Shingling/Shuffling, whatever you call it, is an especially quick & inexpensive way to provide unique titles & meta descriptions to a large section(s) of a site. Arguably not quite as effective as fully custom written content, but certainly quicker and by extension cheaper.

Thanks for sharing your own method!

After spending the last few years doing higher level strategic direction & corporate ‘deliverable’ based SEO I’m rediscovering my ‘roots’ as a jack-of-all-SEO-trades freelancer. As part of this rediscovery process I’m learning that unused skills, like neglected tools, get rusty.

Timing couldn’t have been better :) I’m glad I ran across this blog!

This whole ’shuffle’ thing is about saving time for me while still being absolutely sure that my criteria (the 10 rules ;)) are met.

I guess there are several ways to write texts, and mine (this) one you could call ‘deductive’: first fill in the general criteria, words, default sentences etc and then in the last phase do the actual writing. This structured way works best for me, because well, I’m quite disorganized myself by nature. I do know of people who can just start writing and deliver fast and good results too (Erik-Jan Bulthuis is quite good at that, for example).

I think if you just write 10 rules for yourself and hang it next to your monitor, you’re fine too. Then you can jsut write freely and look at your rules every now and then without creating templates with variables for yourself ;)