Ghostwriters: When To Use One
Content is the staple diet of SEO copywriters. As a publisher, I’ve often turned to article directories for content for my many websites. After all there are only so many topics I can pretend to be an expert on, right? 
One of my favourite article directories (for the quality of their articles and writers) is EzineArticles, run by Chris Knight. Last month they exceeded over 1 million unique visitors! I wonder what Chris’s Adsense check looks like.
I can personally vouch for the fact that expert authors who submit their articles to EzineArticles receive massive spikes in traffic to their website as their articles are picked up by niche ezine publishers looking for quality original content.
It helps that Chris also has some very strict guidelines for reprinting articles and accepting original content. In fact his editorial guidelines are first-rate and if you’re planning to write and submit articles, I recommend that you print them out and refer to them all the time.
A while ago, Chris stirred up a hornet’s nest by declaring his lack of confidence in ghostwritten articles and stating:
It’s not that I’m against the concept of ghostwriting at all, but that most authors who hire ghostwriters don’t quality control their people and they end up sending in crap that we then have to sift through to reject.
I’m thinking that we should start to label authors with the following grades:
A) Original written material
B) Ghostwritten material (this author may be fake)
C) Ghostwritten material with some original words.How in the world can a publisher come to our site to find articles that were really written by the authors who say they wrote them?
As a Platinum Author on EzineArticles, and as one whose articles have been ripped off once too often by shoddy ghostwriters, I am completely in support of Chris’s stand. I always write my own articles, give credit where due and follow copyright guidelines when reproducing content.
But as an SEO copywriter, I have to use my client’s content, in other words, play the role of a ghost writer, to help them get better search engine rankings. So how do I manage to juggle those roles?
Actually its not that difficult. For one, I don’t actually write the articles for my client. I only optimize their copy, edit and rewrite the content they provide into articles for syndication. One of the clauses in our client agreement is that they have sole copyright over all the content so that no copyright issues arise once we’ve syndicated it.
But if we do get ghostwriters to write articles for our clients, we plan to check every piece of copy for plagiarism. Copyright violations can cause you to lose your author rights and business reputation. In our opinion, shoddy ghostwriters are just not worth the risk.
