Five Ways to Ruin Your Articles — or How to Create Powerful Unique Content

You're perhaps saying, why go to the bother of creating unique content?There's plenty of content available throughout the Internet.

1. 'Borrow' content

Well, if you want to get both human readers and Google to like your site and value it as a good source of information, your articles are going to have to be both great quality and be well-written. Google is great at identifying content that has been 'borrowed' from another site.

Borrowing can lead you into all sorts of problems.Google will not list your pages if they substantially duplicate any of the other content it has already indexed. If the copyright holder — the original writer/publisher sees your content, they could start legal action. While your readers may have read the original article and decide that your site is full of second-hand information.

What's more, if you're using your articles for article marketing, the content hubs such as ezinearticles.com may refuse to publish an article that is substantially the same as something that's been published previously.

2.Write without research

Unless you're already an expert in the area, you shouldn't just start writing. Your lack of knowledge will be cruelly exposed to anyone who has done even a little serious reading on the subject, and your credibility will be shot.

The only other sort of article that you may be able to get away without proper research is an opinion piece, where you just let rip.Even then, you should be aware that your audience may know more about the subject than you do, and may just reject your point of view.

3. Use sub-standard research material

No matter how much Google and the other search engines refine their algorithms, any Internet search brings the usual flow of poor quality content.You know it's trash, even before you've finished the first paragraph, and if you're sensible, you'll just move on in search of some content that's worthy of your time.

Lack of something substantial to say leads to rambling, badly put together articles.So find some substantial source material. Get to know the authority sites in your area — they're the large, professional-looking sites that consistently appear towards the top of Google searches.

Read relevant Wikipedia entries — but, beware that anyone can write a Wikipedia entry.That person may not be an expert. Thankfully, many of the more questionable articles on Wikipedia are flagged as needing more work, but be careful anyway.

If your topic has a scientific basis, you may even find yourself looking into academic papers, but while these can provide great quality, they may be hard work to turn into something for a more general readership.

4.Use just one source

This is just being lazy. You're relying 100% on that article being one of the best available, and with just one source, you may well end up writing something perilously close to the original (see point 1 in this article).

A little more searching will give you as many quality articles as you need to base your own writing on.

5.Write badly

This is a hard one. While you don't have to be Ernest Hemingway or your favorite newspaper columnist or blogger, you do need to be able to write in a readable way, grammatically and with good spelling. Make sure you spell check any article before you post it on the Internet.And, if your word processor offers grammatical tips, then try to follow them, unless they sound really wrong to you.

The bad news is it's very easy to mess up your Curious Articles and waste your time, but the good news is it's almost as easy to do the job properly by following these five simple guidelines.