I have been providing ghost writing services since 2000.

In my years in this industry, the greatest challenge I have always had is finding and keeping competent writers to provide writing services to me.

Back in 2004, there was a writer who had signed a contract with me, assuring that he would always sell me unique content that he had not sold to anyone else.

Imagine his surprise when I fired him, for posting on a mailing list that I owned that he “will always tell people what they want to hear, and that he will also always sell content to more than one person.”

There are a lot of dishonest people out there in the world, masquerading as committed writers.

I have learned that in order to guarantee that I am not buying stolen content from my writers, I have to take a few more minutes to do some homework.

Often these people will write a new opening and closing paragraph, but the body of the article is from someone’s website online.

To test the content, I pull 6-8 words from a sentence, put those words in quotes, and take the query to Google for a search. I have found that if I use 6-8 words in my search, I can generally eliminate false positives.

I have also learned that I want to check 2-3 sets of words for each article submitted to me.

Despite my assurances that I will NOT pay for stolen content, 40% of all writers I work with will submit stolen content anyway. Needless to say, I don’t pay them, and you shouldn’t either.

My name is Bill Platt.

If you would like to know more about making your Article Marketing Campaigns profitable, I encourage you to visit my blog and download my free Article Marketing Ebook, called “Article Marketing: Beyond the Basics“. My blog is located at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

To hear some online marketers tell the story, you would think that getting good search engine rankings is the ONLY purpose of Article Marketing.

But, I am going to tell you a story that not many people are telling.

There are actually three reasons why you would want to use Article Marketing to promote your online business – not just one reason.

1. Traffic from Newsletters
2. Traffic from Websites
3. Improving your website’s search rankings.

What are you going to do if your Article Marketing fails to put your website on page one of Google’s search results?

It is a fact that only 30% of search engine users look beyond page one of the search results.

Depending on how competitive your industry is, you might be competing with hundreds or thousands of websites, for those coveted top 10 search listings in Google and the other search engines!

Depending on how SEO-competent your competitors are, it may literally take you hundreds of articles, before you can break into Google’s top ten search results.

Can your business survive financially, until you have captured those coveted top 10 listings in Google?

If not, why don’t you take the time to learn how to maximize your Article Marketing, by doing what is necessary to achieve ALL of the benefits of Article Marketing?

My name is Bill Platt.

If you would like to know more about this strategy, I encourage you to visit my blog and download my free Article Marketing Ebook, called “Article Marketing: Beyond the Basics“. My blog is located at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

Even if you are rewriting PLR content, there should be some concern that search engines, article directories and Copyscape-type tools will interpret your article as being the same as another article.

With my experience hiring ghost writers, I have learned that I only need to test a string of 6-8 words, running them through Google within quotes, in order to find stolen content, without concern of detecting false positives.

If you ask a writer to “rewrite” your article, chances are good that your writer might get sloppy and miss cleaning a single sentence, which could very well trigger a duplicate content warning.

It is far better for you or your writer to read the article, and then tell the same story in your own words.

By retelling the story, you are ensuring that your content will not appear as if it were written by a child, and yet the story will remain interesting to the person reading it.

In the end, all article content must appeal to your reader or else your reputation as a personality capable of developing good content will be lost.

The bottom line is that if your content does not please the reader, you risk losing a potential customer of your products or services.

My name is Bill Platt.

You can read more of my article marketing tips at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/