Let’s assume that you are temporarily down with writer’s block; your brain is saturated and there’s a “no entry” board in front of your creativity cells. Icing on the cake- A deadline is breathing down your neck, or even worse, your boss in his most annoying avatar is yapping at you to churn out something original! In this situation, all you can do is want to jump out of the window. But don’t worry, for such “once-in-a-blue-moon” days, when you just can’t contemplate anything new to write, here’s a way out. All you need is to go into your content archive or database, and select an article that you had written really long back.

1st minute: Change the title and Meta description of your article. Once again, do not rephrase but create a fresh title as your article needs to look brand new. For example, if your title is “Online Business Promotion: Boon or Bane?”, you can change it to a closely related topic such as “ The Pros and Cons of Online Marketing” or “What every Marketer needs to learn about Online Marketing” or “Are online promotions here to stay?” Write a new Meta description suited to the fresh title.

2nd minute: Change all the sub headings in your article and rearrange the paragraphs. Don’t do the rearrangement haphazardly; see how you can shift paragraphs or parts of paragraphs, while still retaining a meaningful article. For instance, under “Online Business Promotion: Boon or Bane”, supposing you have sub-headings namely “Introduction”, “The Bright Side”, “The Limitations” and “Conclusion” in your old article; now suppose you choose a new title-  “What every Marketer needs to learn about Online Marketing”, the sub-headings and arrangement of your articles can be changed as follows:

1st Para: “What B-School didn’t tell you about online marketing” – Use the content of the “Limitations” paragraph here.

2nd Para: “Cash in on the positives”- Use the content of “The Bright Side” here.

3rd Para: “Learning with experience”- Use the “Introduction” and “Conclusion” Para here.

This is just an example; you can make changes based on whatever you feel is most appropriate and meaningful.

3rd minute: Open your thesaurus and change any fifty words in your article at random. But ensure that these are not “stop” words, which are very common words like “and”, “that”, “who” etc that search engines ignore. A helpful tip would be to use the Ctrl + F function to find the words that are most frequently used in the article and change them by using the “replace all” option.

4th minute: Rephrase the sentences at the beginning and end of each paragraph. Also check if any sentence is inappropriate or ambiguous or a particular phrase or idiom needs to be replaced.

5th minute: Use a reliable online plagiarism checker like this http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ to scan your article and highlight any duplication. If the plagiarism check for your article generates an authenticity percentage of 85 percent or above, your job is done! However, if the percentage is below 85 percent, see which sentences or phrases are getting highlighted, and rephrase or change those sentences.

Use this method ONLY as the last resort

Before the Panda update, article spinning used to be a common practice for link building, with a large number of free article spinning tools available online; the method has been blacklisted by Google and definitely doesn’t work anymore. Moreover, the articles churned out from these free spinning tools are sub standard versions of the original article, and mostly don’t make sense. On the contrary, the above 5-minute method is a much better, quality-oriented way of coping with writer’s block, provided it is used sparingly and only in dire situations.