How to approach writing several similar articles?

[Antonia]

While writing, I often notice ways in which an article could be broken into shorter, more specific articles. My impulse is to strip out the sentence or paragraph which inspired the thought and use it as an intro to that offshoot article. But if I use the exact same wording in two or more articles, I can't sell any of them for full rights, yes?

Say I'm writing about medical practitioners in Haiti and then I realize I can take my "general" article and tweak it multiple times to become several articles about orthopedists, dermatologists, pediatricians in Haiti, etc...all with the basically same structure and some of the same wording.

Am I right in thinking that I would then only be able to sell the usage rights for those articles? And, I'm getting the impression that buyers tend to prefer full rights to usage, so would it hurt my sales to submit a lot of similar articles in that way? Or would it actually help, because buyers would have a greater chance of finding a niche article suited to their needs?

[Ed]

Buyers prefer original content because that's what search engines prefer. Using the same wording will not achieve this result. While the structure may be the same, the wording should be different for every article. Customers gravitate towards unique content because unique content has the potential to garner the most profit.

Think about it another way. The customer interested in one article may be interested in another. But this interest will wane if the articles are cookie cutter copies because that makes for boring reading and less web traffic.

Thanks,
Ed

[Lysis]

I've written on similar topics, but I don't like it because it gets boring and I think the writer starts to sound repetitive. Regardless, that's just me, and you may be able to do it. My suggestion is to not to take sentences from recent articles. If you want to write original content that is on a similar subject, write an article, wait a day, and write the new article without looking at the previous one. Also, try to think of different angles instead of following a specific format.

[Antonia]

Thanks Ed and Lysis! That all makes sense to me. I'll stick to keeping all my articles completely original even if the topics are similar, sounds like that's best all around.