Good content has a great creative spark behind it that can’t be replicated by any piece of software. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying to make software to make content creation easier! Does using software really help you create more and better content pieces? Obviously, we have a bias but read on for why we think it does help.
Bad Content Creation Software
Let’s dispel one notion right away. Article spinning software is bad software. If you’re unfamiliar with article spinning, it’s the act of taking one piece of content and changing a few words around to create a theoretically new piece of content based on the old material. It is essentially rewriting articles by computer. The problem with this is that you can almost always tell when an article has been spun. It’s incredibly stilted at best, or unreadable at worst.
Plus, Google hates spun content because the original purpose was to steal other people’s ideas and pass them off as your own without hitting Google’s duplicate content detectors. The best article spinners could use these programs to spin an article and then go through manually to make it more like a human wrote it. But it takes just as much effort to rewrite an article manually from scratch.
Good Content Creation Software
Content creation may bring to mind the image of someone hunched over a keyboard writing, but there’s actually a lot more to it than that. Content creation also involves a lot of research and refinement before it is ready for consumption. This is where content creation can shine.
Take the research phase, for instance. You need to find out what’s happening in your niche so you can get a topic to write about. You can use Concured to pull down what people in your niche are writing about to find out what’s on other people’s minds. A lazy article spinner would just take one of those articles, spin it, and not add anything to the conversation. But a good content creator would see these ideas as seeds that can grow in new ways. Perhaps they can add on the information in an article, or disagree with it, or get inspired in a completely different direction.
Polishing your thoughts can come via apps like Grammarly and HemingwayApp. Grammarly is a sophisticated grammar checker. HemingwayApp checks for confusing sentence structures and poor word choices. They make a powerful combination to tighten up your writing so it reads the best way that it can.
Good content creation software does not write the content for you. That’s the role of the person behind the keyboard. Instead, good content creation software supports the writer along the way to make tedious tasks faster and to point out mistakes that might have been missed. EverNote can save web snippets for later quoting or idea mining. Pixelmator can help you fix a problem with an image. And many other software packages let you embed custom forms of content like timelines, mind maps, or word clouds to bolster the basic ideas in your piece.
When content is used to support rather than replace the human writing the content, then software has an overall benefit. But if the software tries to replace the human, there is no benefit.
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