When anybody has a need, the market provides a solution. In this case, the market got a number of so called article spinners. The idea of an article spinner is simple: it goes through your article and replaces words with synonyms, which supposedly mean the same. Some advanced article spinners may also change a sentence structure here and there, again, assumingly, without impacting the meaning.

But do they work?

I did a simple experiment with one of my articles. Let me share just one example of the resulting monstrosity.

I had a sentence “Viral marketing is a craze, but will it work for you?” The article spinner, I used, replaced it with “Viral marketing is crazy, but that works for you?” Ouch… Here comes the first Achilles’ foot of the article spinners: synonyms are not arbitrarily replaceable. Each of them has a special meaning, that’s why they coexists in the language. As soon as your command of the language allows you to use these subtle differences, articles spinners won’t be able to handle your texts.

So, are classic article spinners any good? Can you use them for anything productive?

Ironically, I found that the answer is yes, although not what they are supposed to be used for. When you rewrite an article, your original text makes it real hard to deviate and produce a different content. After all, you really picked the words well when you wrote it in the first place. However, pass it through an article spinner, and it will damage it so much, that you’ll have no problem with the memories of the original article. Fixing a monstrosity is much easier that cannibalizing your own creation.

So, are article spinners any good? As a source of the content for submission, no, but they can provide a great inspiration to do their job by hand. Just don’t overpay for them.

Let’s consider article marketing. The idea is simple: you write an article; you submit it to an article directory; webmasters come and publish it on their sites; you get the links. Period.

Gurus on article marketing usually recommend to concentrate on the article directories with the top Alexa rank. By the way, here are the top 20 with Alexa rank, in case you are interested.

You see, there is more to say about an article directory than Alexa rank. For example, here, I picked up the proportion of the traffic coming from the United States as opposed to the traffic coming from India. So, if you want teh US traffic, gurus are right, the higher Alexa rank, the more traffic comes from the United States. Still, if you consider position 5, 6 and, 7, the seventh contender – Helium – would give you almost twice more US traffic than the 5th one – GoArticles.com. Interesting, isn’t it?

And if for some reason you want an Indian traffic, then you may want to consider a completely opposite approach, picking the bottom of this list. You may wonder, why would you want any Indian traffic in the first place?

First, there could be many reasons, especially, if Indian traffic comes much cheaper or with much less effort. I’ll discuss one idea later in a separate article, but consider two facts:

1. I published this article on ViralMarketingEtc.com, not on InternetMarketingPaterns.com. Why?
2. Check my article “What kind of viral network are you in?”
   Think, is the network of people, who’d buy your products, is the same as network of people, who would spread your viral report?

That’s just one idea how to use Indian Internet traffic. I’ll explain it in another article if you did not catch it. Anyway, there are more.