Publishing Duplicate Content: Are You Decreasing Your Earning Potential?

If you make money writing online, you are aware there are a number of websites that will pay you through flat fees or residual income. There may be the temptation to publish the same article on multiple sites. After all it appears to be less work for you, saves time and appears to bring in more money…but is this really the best way to increase your earning potential?

When I was learning how to make money writing online, I saw numerous articles and comments saying how people “saved time” and “made more money” by creating one article and submitting it to multiple sites. I admit I even made this mistake myself…and publishing duplicate content is the most common mistake any new internet writer will make.

Here’s the reality. Publishing duplicate content will ultimately decrease your earning potential.

A “Search Bot” or “Spider” is sent by search engines to scan published content on the web at regular intervals to review existing content and locate new publications. When these “bots” or “spiders” find duplicate content – they make a note of it. As a result they invoke the duplicate content penalty.

Articles that are copied are ranked by the search engine as spam. And anything that is considered spam and automatically receives the lowest rank possible – even if the article you created is well written, quality content.

If you are lucky, the search engines will rank the first publication and not consider it spam…but do you really want to take that risk?

Even if your first written article earns a high rank in the search engine, what about all the work you did submitting your work to other sites?

Chances are these additional submissions will not make money because of their extremely low page rank. If you have low page ranking, you have decreased or no incoming traffic. And if that happens, you will not make any money writing on the Internet.

Also, many paid writing sites have rules about submitting duplicate content. If you break a sites TOS and publish a duplicate article you risk having the article removed - and even worse, you may be banned from the website.

So why waste all that time? And why take a risk?

You can make money writing through individual articles…but there is a way to turn that original article into a time saver. After all it is published, the research is done and the ideas are still fresh in your mind. Instead of starting the process all over again rewrite your publish content.

Now this does not mean you can switch a few words or paragraphs around and publish your content. The “bots” and “spiders” are tricky creatures and can spot minor changes – the will consider this spam and push your article to the bottom of the page ranking pile.

You have to do a major rewrite.

This may seem overwhelming at first, but consider this…you have already done all the major work, research and the ideas are still fresh in your mind. And it will take a bit of time. But it is a whole lot easier than starting over.

By following this method you can increase your earning potential because you are not spending time attempting to create new content on a regular basis. As a result each article you produce will have a higher page rank, increased visitors and eventually increased income.