A GOOD article writing service is probably every busy blogger's dream. Much as most bloggers enjoy writing their own articles, every so often you come to publication date and there's nothing in your head, or your draft posts, that could be quickly turned into a decent blog post.
Sadly this has happened to me more often than not over the last few months while I have been moving from London to Norwich and I have been indebted to the services of many freelance writers who have gallantly plugged the gaps!
Dreaming Of An Article Writing Service
But for anyone not lucky enough to have regular guest contributors… wouldn't it be fantastic to have an article writing service on tap to flesh out your ideas and quickly generate some great content?
This has been the dream of certain website developers for years. So when I came across Articoolo, promising:
Our solution will provide you with absolutely unique textual content. No duplications or plagiarizing. Completely unique. You don’t have to worry about content rights anymore, because there is no possibility of plagiarizing. The content created by Articoolo is both accurate and articulate. It is a quick, coherent starting point for your articles. (Source Articoolo.com)
….. I was hooked on taking it for a spin.
You can take a free trial of the Articoolo article writing service here – affiliate link.
How The Article Writing Service Works
Let me say right away that the application is clearly marked “Beta”, so there is more work being done as users test the service and give feedback.
As to how it works, quoting from their website:
Articoolo's content creator works like the human brain when asked to write an article. First, it will analyze and understand the context of your topic… then it will find the best base resources, and extract sentiment and important keywords. Next the software finds related content based on sentiment and main keywords, reconstructing everything to one coherent piece of text. Finally it rewrites the text using the NLP engine for multi-level semantic identification and verifies its readability.
Artificial intelligence and the NLP engine are not yet at the stage to replace the human writer, and the Articoolo site states quite clearly that it generates a starting point for your articles, so don't expect a publication-ready article.
The price “less than $1” refers to the “Subscribe and Save” option, as you will see from the prices published below.
Using Articoolo Article Writing Service
The site is fast loading, easy to use, and it's obvious what to do.
- Select your language: English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French or German – an impressive range. Sadly “English” actually means “American”! Something of a gripe for this Brit, because we do have the Internet here. While most of MY readers are in the USA, if my target audience was in the UK, it would be irritating to have to amend everything, or risk annoying my readers by using “American” on a site for “British” readers 🙂
- Enter your chosen topic (2 to 5 words).
- Select a range of word count between 250 and 500 words – 500 is probably rather small for an article and I would turn my nose up if one of my authors delivered just 500 words, but I think it's not unreasonable to expect to “top and tail” any article with your own introduction, opinions and conclusions.
- Choose between better readability or enhanced uniqueness – you are warned that enhanced uniqueness may affect readability
- Decide if you prefer one of the suggested (and more targeted) topics
- Click the Create Pencil and off it goes!
Results Of Article Writing Service
My first attempt at choosing a topic (buy pre-written article) turned out to be something that Articoolo couldn't write about. Fair enough – I just selected a different topic and let the software have another go. With hindsight I should probably have taken this as a warning and chosen one of their alternative topics – but I didn't like them, so I pressed on with my own second topic choice (buy ready made article).
The “In the oven” image above suggested that the article writing service might take a long time, but the result came back very quickly (about a minute). And it generated a longer article than the 500 words – which in my opinion was good – but it depends on your own requirements.
It also offered up a range of related images to include; although I'm not sure what some of them had to do with my chosen topic! Nevertheless, a nice touch – and this one on the right is perfectly appropriate, although they are rather small for modern blogs.
Suggested Improvements
Sadly, the next step is where I became disappointed, because the “article” displayed was shown largely disguised, with just a few “taster” sentences revealed, until I clicked the “Buy” button.
- There are some spelling (tying) and grammatical mistakes – see the revealed sentences above.
- The first time using the software, I didn't spot these “reveals” before buying…. if I had, I would never have bought the article because I would probably have realised that the article wasn't actually about my chosen topic!
- Yes, worse than the spelling and grammatical mistakes, Articoolo had generated an article on a completely different topic (buy ready made website) to my selected topic (buy ready made article). Oops! And I had “bought” it – although in practice I had just used up my free trial so no dollars were harmed in the writing of this review.
Initially, as a “trial user”, I was rather irritated to receive the “wrong” article. But looking at this from the point of view of a subscriber, who needs a regular supply of articles, the unit price is so low that I would have happily written it off to experience and “made lemonade from lemons” by using the generated article as an idea for a different post.
After You Have Bought The Article
…. it is revealed and you can proofread and edit it, using the tabs shown below.
Here again I came across a few glitches – hopefully to be corrected in the final version of the article writing service.
- Some of the suggestions were helpful : change “all of the” to “all the”
- Some were not : change “turnkey” to “turkey”, but hey, it was only a suggestion and I can apply common sense
- More serious was the fact that each time I made changes and then selected a different tab, the original, un-amended article was displayed – even if I hit Save Changes in between tabs. I contacted the developer about this and they will be addressing it.
Obviously the simple solution is to grab the article into WordPress (or wherever) and implement the changes there, but it's a shame that this promising opportunity for you to improve the generated article doesn't work as expected (in the beta version).
Review Of Articoolo Article Writing Service
The concept fills a need for authors who need to generate articles regularly, probably for SEO purposes. Certainly the price is right, with a maximum of just $1.90 per article even for casual users.
If the developers can “tweak” the software so that you can “preview” the whole article before buying, a casual user would be able to make a better decision on whether to completely reject this article and try a different slant to the title. Maybe they could display it as an image or “copy-protected” so that a user could view it but it would need manual typing to use. I guess there will always be some saddo who would manually type it in rather than pay $1.90, but they're probably not long for the content marketing world anyway!
The bug on saving between proofreading (after purchase) also needs correcting.
If the developers can make these amendments, there's definitely a place for Articoolo in certain areas, where a blogger wants to generate content fairly quickly and understands that they need to polish it to be a finished product.
Make up your own mind if this fits your needs by generating a free article here (affiliate link).
Alternative Article Writing Services
You will find freelance writers at sites such as:
But I doubt that you will find any who will write your article for $1.90 – if you do…. run a mile!
I have only once paid for articles to be written, and I can't remember which site I used. The lady was just starting her freelance career and she was excellent! Sadly she soon realised how much she was really worth – and it was way above my budget.
A Competitor To Articoolo?
Tongue in cheek this paragraph…. I did a quick search for an article writing service and found this gem (on the right).
I won't name and shame – but the spelling and grammar mistakes on their website should be enough to warn any self-respecting blogger to stay well away from them.
Believe me – the image shown was only the tip of the iceberg if you read their website!
Other Ways To Generate New Articles
As John Chow wrote in 2009, you can use PLR articles (PLR stands for Private Label Rights) as a starter for your articles. One such service, which I have never used so cannot comment on, is BuyPLRToday.com
You could pick up free PLR articles, but I wouldn't recommend them! The one time I did that I spent longer turning them into English from gobble-de-gook than I would have spent writing an article from scratch. In fairness they were a source of topic ideas – just not viable articles without a lot of work.
Another service to avoid, in my opinion, is article spinning – where you feed an article into software and it generates several “new” articles on the same topic, by changing words and phrases round slightly. For instance an acceptable “spin” could be: “The blog contains many posts” could become “The website held several article”. Unfortunately article spinning isn't as easy as you might think. Yes, I bought one of the better ones and tried very hard to make it work, but usually it produced convoluted phrasing that you would never write, and no-one would want to read. If a badly spun article is MY first experience on a website I rapidly click away.
Conclusion On Articoolo Article Writing Service
Although I was possibly unlucky in my choice of topic, their target market and subscribers find that Articoolo generates perfectly adequate “starter” articles for them to work with. If you're reading this review “later” when the project is no longer “In Beta”, the glitches I have found could have been fixed.
Whatever the case…. I recommend that you take a free trial of the Articoolo article writing service here – affiliate link.
