If you're familiar with Article Marketing as a way of promoting your websites, then you'll know that the key to success is to create great content, and distribute it widely across the web.

The drawback of article marketing is that creating great content either takes a lot of time, or can cost a lot of money. Researching and writing a couple of original articles (like this one) for places like Hubpages or Squidoo takes quite a while, but it's worth the effort.

Writing individual articles for the hundreds of article sites would take FOREVER - for not a huge amount of benefit, because (with the exception of a few high quality sites like EZineArticles.com, most article directories don't get a lot of traffic, and don't have much Google link juice either.

Many webmasters simply write a single article, and post hundreds of copies out to all the "second tier" article directories, using either an article submission service, or one of the many article submission tools now on the market.

Some report that this is quite successful - the backlinks still count for something, even though the content itself may not get returned in search results, as Google filters out duplicate content.

Others feel that it's best to avoid duplicate content altogether, because they fear that Google may devalue backlinks from duplicate content in the future, even if they are not doing so already.

One solution is to use article spinning software. This is software which helps you re-write an article many times, with each version being different to the others.

Sounds great doesn't it? But wait - article spinning software is not the panacea that you might imagine - there are problems with this approach, and they have often given spinning software a bad name.

First of all, people have tried to produce fully automated article spinners - you enter an article, and press a button, and the software spits out a re-written version by substituting words which are synonyms within the text.

Although fast and easy to use, the drawback with this approach is that it usually produces articles which are complete nonsense! The problem is that words which seem to be synonymous in one context, often don't work in another.

For example, take this simple sentence:

It was a nice day, so we went shopping.

An automatic article spinner might turn this into:

It was a attractive daylight, so we went purchasing.

Imagine an entire article written like that! Publishing that sort of stuff is not making the web a better place!

Automated article spinning has improved, and there are now a couple of products which claim to use neural networks and advanced translation technology to achieve significantly better results. At the time of writing, I haven't tried these, so I can't tell you to what extent they succeed - but it's a genre of products that I'm pretty sceptical about.

Fortunately, there IS a better way: There are now several article spinners available that aim to help you re-write the article, rather than trying to do it themselves. Broadly, you choose alternative words, and sentences that work in the context of your article, and the software simply gives you suggestions for words that may fit, and deals with swapping the words in to produce unique articles.

This is a much more successful approach - but even this has its down-sides. The quality of the output is entirely dependant on the skill of the person operating the program. It's a lot harder than it sounds - and you need to have an excellent command of the English language to be able to say the same thing, in different words, several times, so that all versions fit together and sound natural in any combination! After all, a lot of people can't write one version that sounds good - so they don't stand much chance with an article spinner!

Excellent results, (indistinguishable from hand-written articles) are possible - but you need to be able to write well, and to spend lots of time on setting up the spinner. This only makes sense if you're going to want more than a few copies - otherwise, you'd be quicker just re-writing it two or three times by hand. But if you want (say) 30 or 100 articles on the same subject - then a few hours setting up an article in the spinning software can be time well spent.

To produce articles that are substantially different from one-another, you need to do more than replace a few synonyms here and there - here's a technique I use that works well:

1. Start by researching and writing a quality article. You can publish this original article in the place that quality matters most.
2. Load it into your favourite article spinner.
3. For each sentence, or paragraph, write a completely new version that imparts broadly the same information, but in different words.
4. Go back and create alternatives for some of the phrases, or individual words within each version of your sentences.
5. Spin this article a few times, and read through - checking for combinations that don't read well, or don't work together, and correct those.
6. Now spin the article to create as many versions as you require.

Perhaps an example might make this clear - lets spin the opening paragraph of this very article:

If you're familiar with Article Marketing as a way of promoting your
websites, then you'll know that the key to success is to create great
content, and distribute it widely across the web.

First, let's write another introductory sentence that fits into the same place in the article:

You may have heard that Article Marketing is a successful method of promoting
websites, and you may also know that the most important thing is to write
good articles, and make sure that lots of people get to read them.

Now, within each of those, you create alternatives for words and phrases. Like this:

"If you're familiar with" could be "If you know about"

"promoting" could be "marketing" or "driving traffic to" or "getting the word out about"

"you'll know" could be "you'll understand" or "you'll agree"

and so on. Soon, you have thousands of different alternative versions of your article - each one different, but (if you've spun your article well) each one making sense and reading well.

Different article spinners use different syntax - but one quite common standard works like this:

You enclose the text to be spun in curly brackets { } with alternatives separated by pipe characters |

That's perfectly simple when you're only {changing|altering} the {odd|occasional} word - but a multi-level spin in which alternatives are nested within other alternatives can be tricky to manage - especially if you make a mistake somewhere.

Take a look at this simple two-level spin of a single sentence:

{If you're {familiar with|aware of} Article Marketing as a 
{way|method|means|technique|system} of {promoting|marketing|driving traffic to}
 your {websites|sites}, then you'll {know|already know|understand} that the 
{key|secret} to success is to {create|write|produce} great content, and 
{distribute|disseminate|circulate} it widely {across|around} the 
{web|Internet}.|You may {have heard|know|already know} that Article Marketing
 is a {successful|great} method of {promoting|driving traffic to} websites, 
and you {may|might} also {know|understand} that the most 
{important|significant|vital|critical} thing is to {write|create|produce} 
{good|first-class|first-rate|excellent|good quality} articles, and 
{make sure|ensure} that {lots|plenty} of people get to {read|see} them.}

Imagine what a whole article would look like - especially if you nested a third level of alternatives!

Fortunately, there is software available that will help you to manage this syntax, to suggest alternative words, and finally to create unique versions of your articles when you're done.  Here are some links to some of the best and most interesting Article Spinning software currently available: